We investigate the family of concepts that an agent comes to know through a set of defining features, and examine the role played by these features in the process of categorization. In a qualitative framework, categorial membership is evaluated through an order relation among the objects at hand, which translates the fact that an object may fall more than another under a given concept. For concepts defined by their features, this global membership order depends on the degree with (...) which each feature applies to the objects of the universe. The passage from these individual membership degrees to a global membership order poses a problem analogous to vote aggregation in social choice theory. This similarity leads to an original solution that is particularly well-adapted to the framework of cognitive psychology. The resulting membership order extends to compound concepts, and provides a good description of the guppy paradox and the conjunction effect. (shrink)

Even though hesitations (e.g., um/uh) were historically perceived as involuntary non-linguistic items (e.g., Maclay & Osgood 1959), more recently, a number of scholars have suggested that hesitations can behave like (a) lexical items (e.g., Clark & Fox Tree 2002), and (b) at least in some contexts and with some functions as grammatical items like suffixes/clitics (Kirjavainen, Crible & Beeching 2022; Tottie 2017). The current study contributes to this body of work and presents two spoken language corpus analyses (frequency analysis; network (...) analysis) investigating the nature of the Finnish planning particle tota. Our results suggest that tota is more similar to grammatical items than lexical items. (shrink)

This paper serves three specific goals. First, it reports the development of an Indian Asian face set, to serve as a free resource for psychological research. Second, it examines whether the use of pre-tested U.S.-specific norms for stimulus selection or weighting may introduce experimental confounds in studies involving non-U.S. face stimuli and/or non-U.S. participants. Specifically, it examines whether subjective impressions of the face stimuli are culturally dependent, and the extent to which these impressions reflect social stereotypes and ingroup favoritism. Third, (...) the paper investigates whether differences in face familiarity impact accuracy in identifying face ethnicity. To this end, face images drawn from volunteers in India as well as a subset of Caucasian face images from the Chicago Face Database were presented to Indian and U.S. participants, and rated on a range of measures, such as perceived attractiveness, warmth, and social status. Results show significant differences in the overall valence of ratings of ingroup and outgroup faces. In addition, the impression ratings show minor differentiation along two basic stereotype dimensions, competence and trustworthiness, but not warmth. We also find participants to show significantly greater accuracy in correctly identifying the ethnicity of ingroup faces, relative to outgroup faces. This effect is found to be mediated by ingroup-outgroup differences in perceived group typicality of the target faces. Implications for research on intergroup relations in a cross-cultural context are discussed. (shrink)

The article begins with an effort to clarify and differentiate a variety of terms used by analysts in dealing with mentions of persons in conversation and other forms of talk-in-interaction — such terms as person-reference, identifying, describing, categorizing, and the like. This effort leads to the observation that `reference to persons' and `membership categorization' are quite distinct sets of practices, with most reference to persons not being done by membership categories, and most uses of membership categorization devices (...) being in the service of actions other than referring. Two interactional sequences whose analysis turns on a connection to talk earlier in the occasion are then examined; first, to establish what is going on interactionally without respect to the mentioning of persons, and then as exercises in examining the various ways person-reference and membership categorization can figure in a stretch of interaction. (shrink)

In this study caring is shown to be a membershipbound activity to kin and gender categories with strong moral connotations. Being a daughter or being a son are good enough reasons for becoming a caregiver, more so for women than for men. Caregivers were interviewed within the research project The role of women in family care of disabled elderly conducted by the Social and Economic Research Department of INRCA, Ancona, Italy. Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed through a detailed discourse (...) analysis within an ethnomethodological framework. Interview data are treated as interactional encounters that occasion members to display relevant aspects of their identities and morally adequate images of being a caregiver. In the interview interaction, interlocutors display an orientation towards the production of a moral order in which duty and responsibilities are allocated on the basis of gender distinction. Males are generally described as not being responsible for caring tasks, except for situations in which females are absent or sick, that is, for serious reasons. Caregivers'' perception of time dedicated to caring is pervasive. Most caregivers said it occupied all their time, but gender differences were noticeable. Caring tasks are recognized as gender specific practices, thus failing to carry out these tasks is morally sanctionable when women are involved, but not so for men. Many caregivers described caring for older relatives as an intense source of stress, involving serious physical and psychological problems. The study on moral and identity issues related to caregiving highlights endangering constructions of caring. (shrink)

In this paper we show that the membership problem for second order non-linear Abstract Categorial Grammars is decidable. A consequence of that result is that Montague-like semantics yield to a decidable text generation problem. Furthermore the proof we propose is based on a new tool, Higher Order Intersection Signatures, which grasps statically dynamic properties of λ-terms and presents an interest in its own.

This paper demonstrates an empirical analysis of the visual order of membership categories in a way consistent with both an early ethnomethodological research interest and recent arguments in membership categorization analysis. Early ethnomethodological studies have highlighted that we can infer and understand the membership categories of observed people about whom we have no information in advance, even without talking to them. Recent membership categorization analysts have argued the methodological importance of using video data. Given this, fictional (...) films serve as video data to advance the investigation into the visual order of membership categories since audiences do not know the fictional characters’ information in advance and cannot talk to them. We analyze how potential audiences understand fictional characters’ membership categories and how production crew members organize the visual and conversational order of membership categories. The analysis illustrates that our practical inferences of fictional characters’ membership categories are based on conversations among characters and visually available information. Such visually available information includes environments and lighting, as well as characters’ clothes, body orientations, facial expressions, and physical distance from each other. In other words, production crew members of fictional films design the visual and conversational order for remote audiences by arranging visually available information and fictional characters’ conversations. The findings provide insights into the “possible correctness” and “defeasibility” of membership categorization practices. Particularly regarding fictional characters’ membership categories, production crew members can employ the “possible correctness” and “defeasibility” of categorization practices to mislead audiences. (shrink)

This paper investigates how the reader of prose fiction fills in the blanks regarding a fictional character’s membership category, action, and reason for the action. Aligning with an ethnomethodological approach to texts and appropriating membership categorization analysis (MCA), we analyze how the readers of J. D. Salinger, an author whose works are well known for their ambiguity and ambivalence, would grasp the unwritten identities of characters and the meanings of their actions. Our analysis specifies two types of (...) methods deployed for the reader to understand the fictional texts. First, in an at-a-glance way, the reader can supply the missing categories and sequence of actions by turning to the commonsense knowledge and social norms regarding the association between the category and the activity. Second, the reader can construct various interpretations regarding the recognizably ambiguous scenes of the text by turning to the conceptual knowledge of the relevant social phenomena, the maxims specific to the act of storytelling, and the writer’s techniques peculiar to the fictional texts. The findings demonstrate the vast applicability of an MCA approach to the analysis of the work of reading prose fiction and shed light on the detailed operations of the author’s maxims and techniques in the textual configuration of prose fiction, thereby indicating the possibility of ethnomethodological analysis including the interwoven consideration of the reader’s activity and the textual organization. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with a version of Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership that relies on the conceptual spaces framework. Three studies are reported, one to construct a particular shape space, one to detect which shapes representable in that space are typical for certain sorts of objects, and one to elicit degrees of category membership for the various shapes from which the shape space was constructed. Taking Kamp and Partee's proposal as given, the first two (...) studies allowed us to predict the degrees to which people would judge shapes representable in the space to be members of certain categories. These predictions were compared with the degrees that were measured in the third study. The comparison yielded a test of the account of graded membership at issue. The outcome of this test was found to support the conceptual spaces version of Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership. (shrink)

This paper addresses theoretical problems arising from the vagueness of language terms, and intuitions of the vagueness of the concepts to which they refer. It is argued that the central intuitions of prototype theory are sufficient to account for both typicality phenomena and psychological intuitions about degrees of membership in vaguely defined classes. The first section explains the importance of the relation between degrees of membership and typicality (or goodness of example) in conceptual categorization. The second and third (...) section address arguments advanced by Osherson and Smith (1997), and Kamp and Partee (1995), that the two notions of degree of membership and typicality must relate to fundamentally different aspects of conceptual representations. A version of prototype theory—the Threshold Model—is proposed to counter these arguments and three possible solutions to the problems of logical selfcontradiction and tautology for vague categorizations are outlined. In the final section graded membership is related to the social construction of conceptual boundaries maintained through language use. (shrink)

The recent resurgence of Sacks’ work on membership categorization has highlighted the growing analytic interest in how members’ social category orientations operate at multiple levels of interactional work. One of the outcomes of this, highlighted in Stokoe’s discussion, is the re-emergence of the question of whether membership categorization analysis has been, is, or can be an approach in its own right. In this brief discussion I consider the emergence of ‘MCA’ as an approach to the study of (...) social-knowledge-in-action, the relationship between MCA and contemporary directions in conversation analysis, and finally the future of MCA as it continues to develop. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a solution to an almost ignored problem in metaphysics and metametaphysics: what is categorial fundamentality and non-fundamentality? My proposal builds on E. J. Lowe’s view on the issue. By means of the newcomer notion of generic identity, I can give an account of something that Lowe did not explicate: the constitution of formal ontolog- ical relations. Formal ontological relations (e.g. instantiation) are internal relations that deter- mine ontological form and category-membership. I argue that (...) categorial fundamentality is hav- ing membership fully determined by a simple formal ontological relation or relations jointly in an order and categorial non-fundamentality is having membership at least partly determined by a derived formal ontological relation in an order. In contrast to Lowe, my proposal does not pre- suppose non-modal essentialism. (Please, ask for the penultimate draft.). (shrink)

The social categories to which we belong—Latino, disabled, American, woman— causally influence our lives in deep and unavoidable ways. One might be pulled over by police because one is Latino, or one might receive a COVID vaccine sooner because one is American. Membership in these social categories most often falls outside of our control. This paper argues that membership in social categories constitutes a restriction on human agency, creating a situation of non-ideal agency for many human individuals. -/- (...) However, there are ways to resist the causal influence of social categories, and certain socially marginalized groups can be understood as attempting to do just this. I discuss two instances of social category resistance: gender pronouns and the rights of trans individuals. I suggest that the intentional declaration of gender pronouns (“she/her” or “they/them”) can be understood as an attempt to resist the causal powers of nonconsensual social categorization. Similarly, one among many reasons to support the rights of trans individuals is that their self-declarations of gender identity can be viewed as a reclamation of agency in the face of causal constraints imposed by socially defined and imposed gender categories. This lesson can be generalized to people belonging to a broad range of marginalized groups. (shrink)

During the course of this article, we examine the use of membership categorisation practices by a high-profile celebrity public social media account that has been understood to generate interest, attention and controversy across the UK media ecology. We utilise a data set of harvested tweets gathered from a high-profile public ‘celebrity antagonist’ in order to systematically identify types of antagonistic formulation that have generated different levels of interest within the social media community and beyond. Drawing from classic ethnomethodological studies (...) of banner headlines and other means of generating public interest and ‘making sense’, we respecify high-profile antagonistic tweets as category formulations that exhibit particular and regular membership category features that are reflexively bound to potential antagonistic readings, interest and controversy. In conclusion, we consider how such formulations may be understood to represent resources that constitute ignition points within antagonistic flows of communication and information that can be metaphorically understood as ‘digital wildfires’. (shrink)

Seminal work by Knobe, Prasada, and Newman (2013) distinguished a set of concepts, which they named “dual‐character concepts.” Unlike traditional concepts, they require two distinct criteria for determining category membership. For example, the prototypical dual‐character concept “artist” has both a concrete dimension of artistic skills, and an abstract dimension of aesthetic sensibility and values. Therefore, someone can be a good artist on the concrete dimension but not truly an artist on the abstract dimension. Does this analysis capture people's (...) understanding of cornerstone social categories, such as gender, around which society and everyday life have traditionally been organized? Gender, too, may be conceived as having not only a concrete dimension but also a distinct dimension of abstract norms and values. As with dual‐character concepts, violations of abstract norms and values may result in someone being judged as not truly a man/woman. Here, we provide the first empirical assessment of applying the dual‐character framework to people's conception of gender. We found that, on some measures that primarily relied on metalinguistic cues, gender concepts did indeed resemble dual‐character concepts. However, on other measures that depicted transgressions of traditional gender norms, neither “man” nor “woman” appeared dual‐character‐like, in that participants did not disqualify people from being truly a man or truly a woman. In a series of follow‐up studies, we examined whether moral norms have come to replace gender role norms for the abstract dimension. Implications for the evolution of concepts and categories are explored. (shrink)

This study, based on three years of research and over 40 hours of videotaped interaction in psychiatry, investigates the issue of insanity ascription/exoneration in psychiatric interviews. Following Sacks's model of membership categorization analysis, this article analyzes the discursive resources that psychiatrists may draw on to achieve some conclusion regarding their patients' psychopathological status. As it turns out, psychiatrists' invocation of patients' putative membership categories plays a crucial role in the achievement of such a conclusion. I examine some fragments (...) of psychiatric intake interviews and subsequent psychiatric interviews. The analysis shows that the process that may lead to insanity ascription/exoneration in psychiatric interviews basically involves the use of mundane, commonsense reasoning. (shrink)

This article shows how journalists deploy membership categorization in managing conversational drama among ordinary individuals in live television discussion. The scripted agenda for the discussion is analyzed as an interactional project, being prosecuted by the hosting journalists. The case in focus is a Finnish discussion program broadcast six days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA in 2001. Five guests are invited to the studio and introduced to the audience. The membership categories that are activated at the (...) beginning of each entrance are consequential to the way the interactional activities unfold in the rest of the discussion, leading from experiential entitlement to accountability and accusation. Introductory identifications are utilized in the question formulation to push moral accounts from the category members and to build an institutionally proper identity for the journalists. The collaboration in realizing the moral casting vividly illustrates the cultural power of the categorization device in action. (shrink)

This article has four aims. First, it will consider explicitly, and polemically, the hierarchical relationship between conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis. Whilst the CA ‘juggernaut’ flourishes, the MCA ‘milk float’ is in danger of being run off the road. For MCA to survive either as a separate discipline, or within CA as a focus equivalent to other ‘generic orders of conversation’, I suggest it must generate new types of systematic studies and reveal fundamental categorial practices. With such a (...) goal in mind, the second aim of the article is to provide a set of clear analytic steps and procedures for conducting MCA, which are grounded in basic categorial and sequential concerns. Third, the article aims to demonstrate how order can be found in the intuitively ‘messy’ discourse phenomenon of membership categories, and how to approach their analysis systematically as a robust feature of particular action-oriented environments. Through the exemplar analyses, the final aim of the article is to promote MCA as a method for interrogating culture, reality and society, without recourse to its reputed ‘wild and promiscuous’ analytic approach. (shrink)

Three issues are raised in this commentary. First, the mapping of semantic information into the different layers could be done in a more realistic way by using the Context layer to represent situational contexts. Second, a way to differentiate category membership information from other property information needs to be considered. Finally, the issue of modal knowledge is raised.

Our focus in this article is on some uses of categorial transformations. The discussion is divided into two main parts. In the first part, we begin by outlining our approach, namely membership categorization analysis (MCA), indicating the origins of the term and elaborating the conception of MCA as an ‘occasioned’ members’ apparatus. We then explain what we mean by the concept of categorial transformation, review some of the very few previous studies which have investigated this phenomenon and which are (...) pertinent to its further study, and indicate how categorial transformation serves to embody and illustrate the occasionality of MCA. In the second part of the article, we present an analysis of two extracts from a transcript of the naturally occurring talk-in-interaction which occurred in a particular family meal, involving two children and their parents. A variety of categorial transformation practices in this data are identified and their particular local usages described. In the concluding discussion we consider our argument and our analysis in light of previous discussions of the trajectory of Sacks’ work. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have long used distributional semantic representations of categories. The predominant approach uses distributional representations of category‐denoting nouns, such as “city” for the category city. We propose a novel scheme that represents categories as prototypes over representations of names of its members, such as “Barcelona,” “Mumbai,” and “Wuhan” for the category city. This name‐based representation empirically outperforms the noun‐based representation on two experiments (modeling human judgments of category relatedness and predicting category membership) with (...) particular improvements for ambiguous nouns. We discuss the model complexity of both classes of models and argue that the name‐based model has superior explanatory potential with regard to concept acquisition. (shrink)

Drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis, we aim to tease out how narrators talk into being the social group constellations in their storyworlds and how these – potentially shifting – constellations can be related to the narrator’s identity constructions. We investigate two World War II-testimonies narrated by Belgian concentration camp survivors and scrutinize whether the expected Standardized Relational Pair of victim-perpetrator – viz. the camp prisoners versus the Nazis – is in operation, how these two categories are talked into being, (...) whether other social groups are mentioned and how all these processes affect the narrators’ identity work. It proved to be the case that, even though the victim-perpetrator Standardized Relational Pair is indeed present in both testimonies, it functions very differently in both stories, resulting in almost opposing identity work by the two narrators. (shrink)

From infancy, we recognize that labels denote category membership and help us to identify the critical features that objects within a category share. Labels not only reflect how we categorize, but also allow us to communicate and share categories with others. Given the special status of labels as markers of category membership, do novel labels (i.e., non‐words) affect the way in which adults select dimensions for categorization in unsupervised settings? Additionally, is the purpose of this (...) effect primarily coordinative (i.e., do labels promote shared understanding of how we categorize objects)? To address this, we conducted two experiments in which participants individually categorized images of mountains with or without novel labels, and with or without a goal of coordination, within a non‐communicative paradigm. People who sorted items with novel labels had more similar categories than people who sorted without labels only when they were told that their categories should make sense to other people, and not otherwise. We argue that sorters' goals determine whether novel labels promote the development of socially coherent categories. (shrink)

Research in education and cognitive development suggests that explaining plays a key role in learning and generalization: When learners provide explanations—even to themselves—they learn more effectively and generalize more readily to novel situations. This paper proposes and tests a subsumptive constraints account of this effect. Motivated by philosophical theories of explanation, this account predicts that explaining guides learners to interpret what they are learning in terms of unifying patterns or regularities, which promotes the discovery of broad generalizations. Three experiments provide (...) evidence for the subsumptive constraints account: prompting participants to explain while learning artificial categories promotes the induction of a broad generalization underlying category membership, relative to describing items (Exp. 1), thinking aloud (Exp. 2), or free study (Exp. 3). Although explaining facilitates discovery, Experiment 1 finds that description is more beneficial for learning item details. Experiment 2 additionally suggests that explaining anomalous observations may play a special role in belief revision. The findings provide insight into explanation’s role in discovery and generalization. (shrink)

In this response article, I focus on two issues. First, I discuss the problem, raised by the commentators, of ‘categorial ambiguity’ in membership categorization analysis, and make suggestions about how to approach it. Second, I argue that, as conversation analysts have demonstrated the ‘systematics’ of interactional practices, membership categorization analysis should also begin to build a robust corpus of studies of ‘categorial systematics’.

This paper provides evidence for a contrastive account of explanation that is motivated by pragmatic theories that recognize the contribution that context makes to the interpretation of a prompt for explanation. This study replicates the primary findings of previous work in explanation-based category learning, extending that work by illustrating the critical role of the context in this type of learning. Participants interacted with items from two categories either by describing the items or explaining their category membership. We (...) manipulated the feature overlap between the categories and examined both the explanations generated and acquired knowledge of the categories. Explanations for membership in a given category were influenced by the unprompted contrast category, indicating an important role for contrastive processing in the generation of explanations. The influence of the contrast category was similarly seen in the transfer performance of the participants. (shrink)

As a concept of international society, the category ‘rogue’ can best be understood in relation to the more basic category of the person. Personhood signifies membership, and it is performed in collective, ritual, bodily practices. Modern personhood becomes individuated, and it values mind more than body. However, because it was soon realized that the modern person cannot ultimately sustain modern society, a new notion of personhood was introduced, which articulates a modern concept of virtue in terms of (...) manners. Interestingly, this concept of personhood reintroduces the body in that it values bodily restraint as a sign of ethical worth. The good person is no virile warrior but a tactful diplomat. Diplomacy becomes modernity’s being-in-the-world. Rogue states, it appears, do not sign up. This we take offense with. (shrink)

Reasoning about social groups and their associated markers was investigated as a particular case of human reasoning about cue-category relationships. Assertions that reasoning involving cues and associated categories elicits specific probabilistic assumptions are supported by the results of three experiments. This phenomenon remains intact across the use of categorical syllogisms, conditional syllogisms, and the use of social groups that vary in their perceived cohesiveness, or entitativity. Implications are discussed for various theories of reasoning, and additional aspects of social group/coalitional (...) reasoning are also discussed. (shrink)

Two experiments were conducted to examine adult learners' ability to extract multiple statistics in simultaneously presented visual and auditory input. Experiment 1 used a cross‐situational learning paradigm to test whether English speakers were able to use co‐occurrences to learn word‐to‐object mappings and concurrently form object categories based on the commonalities across training stimuli. Experiment 2 replicated the first experiment and further examined whether speakers of Mandarin, a language in which final syllables of object names are more predictive of category (...) membership than English, were able to learn words and form object categories when trained with the same type of structures. The results indicate that both groups of learners successfully extracted multiple levels of co‐occurrence and used them to learn words and object categories simultaneously. However, marked individual differences in performance were also found, suggesting possible interference and competition in processing the two concurrent streams of regularities. (shrink)

Categories intentionally create discontinuities. By breaking the world up into cognizable chunks, they simplify the information environment. But the signals they provide may be inaccurate or scrambled by strategic behavior. This Article considers how law might approach the problem of optimal categorization, given the role of categories in managing and transmitting information. It proceeds from the observation that high categorization costs can be addressed through two opposite strategies—making classifications more fine-grained (splitting), and making classifications more encompassing (lumping). Although continuizing and (...) other forms of splitting offer intuitive answers to inaccurate classification and gaming along category lines, lumping is sometimes a better solution. If category membership carries multiple and offsetting implications, the incentive to manipulate the classification system is dampened. To take a simple example, insurance that covers only one risk is more vulnerable to adverse selection than is an insurance arrangement that covers two inversely correlated risks. Making categories larger, more durable, and more heterogeneous can produce such offsets. These and other forms of bundling can arrest damaging instabilities in categorization. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that categories play significant roles in the appreciation of artworks. This paper argues that the correct categories of artworks are institutionally established through social processes. Section 1 examines the candidates for determining correct categories and proposes that this question should shift the focus from category membership to appreciative behaviour associated with categories. Section 2 draws on Francesco Guala’s theory of institutions to show that categories of artworks are established as rules-in-equilibrium. Section 3 reviews the (...) explanatory benefits of this institutional theory of the correct category. [Winner of the 2022 Debates in Aesthetics Essay Prize]. (shrink)

The study of social inequality and stratification has long been at the core of sociology and the social sciences. In this article, I argue that certain tendencies have become entrenched in our dominant paradigm that leave many researchers pursuing coarse-grained analyses of how difference relates to inequality. Centrally, despite the importance of categories and categorization for how researchers study social inequality, contemporary theories of categories are poorly integrated into conventional research. I contend that the widespread and often unquestioned use of (...) state categories as categories of analysis reinforces these tendencies. Using research on colorism as an inspiration, I highlight several components of what I call the infracategorical model of inequality, which urges researchers to disaggregate difference by shifting our focus from membership in categories to the cues of categories, membership in subcategories, and perceived typicality. (shrink)

This article examines the common-sense and methodical ways in which “the citizen” is produced and enrolled as an active participant in “sustainable” regional planning. Using Membership Categorization Analysis, we explicate how the categorization procedures in the Foreword of a draft regional planning policy interactionally produce the identity of “the citizen” and “civic values and obligations” in relation to geographic place and institutional categories. Furthermore, we show how positioning practices establish a relationship between authors (government) and readers (citizens) where both (...) are ascribed with the same moral values and obligations toward the region. Hence, “the citizen” as an active participant in “sustainable” regional planning is viewed as a practical accomplishment that is underpinned by a normative morality associated with the task of producing orderliness in “text-in-interaction.”. (shrink)

The precondition of any feminist politics – a usable category of ‘woman’ – has proved to be difficult to construct, even proposed to be impossible, given the ‘problem of exclusion’. This is the inevitable exclusion of at least some women, as their lives or experiences do not fit into the necessary and sufficient condition(s) that denotes group membership. In this paper, I propose that the problem of exclusion arises not because of inappropriate category membership criteria, but (...) because of the presumption that categories can only be organised by identity relations or shared properties among their members. This criterion of sameness as well as the characterisation of this exclusion as essentialism attests to a metaphysics that is not conducive to resistance and liberatory projects. Following a strain of hybrid thinking in feminist and post-colonial theory, I outline an alternative pluralist logic that confronts oppressive binaries that impede theory work in gender, sexuality, and race theory, and limit political action and resistance. The problem of exclusion is neither irresolvable nor is it essentialism. Instead it is a denial of subjectivity due to pseudodualistic self/Other dichotomies that can be resisted by adopting a new categorial logic. While this paper focuses on the specific problem of formulating a category of ‘woman’, it has implications for other areas of gender, critical race, and postcolonial theory. Rather than working toward an inclusive category founded on sameness, theorists need to develop independent and positive categories grounded in difference. Our current categorial logic does not permit such a project, and therefore a new metaphysics must be adopted. (shrink)

This conversation analytic paper investigates how speakers self-position or are other-positioned as members of a certain social group through other-initiated repair. Findings illustrate the complexity of linguistic membership categories by demonstrating that they continually shift depending on local interactional goals and documenting how shifts are accomplished. The different levels and types of linguistic and cultural knowledge that are invoked in instances of repair on specific lexical items demonstrate the complexity of linguistic membership categorization, and this indicates a need (...) to problematize the use of a priori and overly-vague labels like ‘non-native speaker’. Findings contribute to our understanding of the functions of other-initiated repair and the mechanisms of co-constructing membership and thus social identity in interaction. They also raise questions about the relationship between amounts and types of knowledge and further our understanding of the construction of expert/novice categories via knowledge displays and negotiation. (shrink)

A fundamental question in the study of human cognition is how people learn to predict the category membership of an example from its properties. Leading approaches account for a wide range of data in terms of comparison to stored examples, abstractions capturing statistical regularities, or logical rules. Across three experiments, participants learned a category structure in a low‐dimension, continuous‐valued space consisting of regularly alternating regions of class membership (A B A B). The dependent measure was generalization (...) performance for novel items outside the range of the training space. Human learners often extended the alternation pattern––a finding of critical interest given that leading theories of categorization based on similarity or dimensional rules fail to predict this behavior. In addition, we provide novel theoretical interpretations of the observed phenomenon. (shrink)