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Principles of Categorization

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by Eleanor Rosch, University of California, Berkeley, 1978

Readings in Cognitive Science, a Perspective from Psychology and Artificial Intelligence, Allan Collins & Edward E. Smith, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Mateo, California, 1988, pp 312-322.

The following is a taxonomy of the animal kingdom. It has been attributed to an ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge:

On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance (Borges, 1966, p. 108).

Conceptually, the most interesting aspect of this classification system is that it does not exist. Certain types of categorizations may appear in the imagination of poets, but they are never found in the practical or linguistic classes of organisms or of man-made objects used by any of the cultures of the world. For some years, I have argued that human categorization should not be considered the arbitrary product of historical accident or of whim but rather the result of psychological principles of categorization, which are subject to investigation. This chapter is a summary and discussion of those principles.

The chapter is divided into five parts.

The first part presents the two general principles that are proposed to underlie categorization systems.

The second part shows the way in which these principles appear to result in a basic and primary level of categorization in the levels of abstraction in a taxonomy: It is essentially a summary of the research already reported on basic level objects (Rosch et al., 1976). Thus the second section may be omitted by the reader already sufficiently familiar with that material.

The third part relates the principles of categorization to the formation of prototypes in those categories that are at the same level of abstraction in a taxonomy. In particular, this section attempts to clarify the operational concept of prototypicality and to separate that concept from claims concerning the role of prototypes in cognitive processing, representation, and learning for which there is little evidence.

The fourth part presents two issues that are problematical for the abstract principles of categorization stated in Part 1: (1) the relation of context to basic level objects and prototypes; and (2) assumptions about the nature of the attributes of real-world objects that underlie the claim that there is structure in the world.

The fifth part is a report of initial attempts to base an analysis of the attributes, functions, and contexts of objects on a consideration of objects as props in culturally defined events.

It should be noted that the issues in categorization with which we are primarily concerned have to do with explaining the categories found in a culture and coded by the language of that culture at a particular point in time. en we speak of the formation of categories, we mean their formation in the culture. This point is often misunderstood. The principles of categorization proposed are not as such intended to constitute a theory of the development of categories in children born into a culture nor to constitute a model of how categories are processed (how categorizations are made) in the minds of adult speakers of a language.

THE PRINCIPLES

Two general and basic principles are proposed for the formation of categories:

The first has to do with the function of category systems and asserts that the task of category systems is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort.

The second principle has to do with the structure of the information so provided and asserts that the perceived world comes as structured information rather than as arbitrary or unpredictable attributes. Thus maximum information with least cognitive effort is achieved if categories map the perceived world structure as closely as possible. This condition can be achieved either by the mapping of categories to given attribute structures or by the definition or redefinition of attributes to render a given set of categories appropriately structured.

These principles are elaborated in the following.

Cognitive Economy.

The first principle contains the almost common-sense notion that, as an organism, what one wishes to gain from one’s categories is a great deal of information about the environment while conserving finite resources as much as possible. To categorize a stimulus means to consider it, for purposes

Purposes of that categorization, not only equivalent to other stimuli in the same category but, also different from stimuli not in that category, On the one hand, it would appear to the organism’s advantage to have as many properties as possible predictable from Knowing any one property, a principle that would lead to formation of large numbers of categories with as fine discriminations between categories as possible. On the other hand , one purpose of categorization is to reduce the infinite differences among stimuli to behaviorally and cognitively usable proportions. It is to the organism’s advantage not to differentiate one stimulus from others when that differentiation is irrelevant to the purposes at hand.

Perceived World Structure.

The second principle of categorization asserts that unlike the sets of stimuli used in traditional laboratory concept attainment tasks, the perceived world is not an unstructured total set of equiprobable co-occurring attributes Rather, the material objects of the world are perceive to possess (in Garner’s, 1974, sense) high correlational structure. That is, given a knower who perceives the complex attributes of feathers fur and wings, it is an empirical fact provided by the perceived world that wings co-occur with feathers more than with fur. And given an actor with the motor programs for sitting, it is a fact of the perceived world that objects with the perceptual attributes of chairs are more likely to have functional sit-on-able-ness than objects with the appearance of cats. In short, combinations of what we perceive as the attributes of real objects do not occur uniformly. Some pairs, triples, etc., are quite probable, appearing in combination sometimes with one, sometimes another attribute; others are rare; others logically cannot or empirically do not occur.

It should be emphasized that we are talking about the perceived world and not a metaphysical world without a knower. What kinds of attributes can be perceived are, of course, species-specific. A dog’s sense of smell is more highly differentiated than a human’s, and the structure of the world for a dog must surely include attributes of smell that we, as a species, are incapable of perceiving. Furthermore, because a dog’s body is constructed differently from a human’s, its motor interactions with objects are necessarily differently structured. The “out there” of a bat, a frog, or a bee is surely more different still from that of a human. What attributes will be perceived given the ability to perceive them is undoubtedly determined by many factors having to do with the functional needs of the knower interacting with the physical and social environment. One influence on how attributes will be defined by humans is clearly the category system already existent in the culture at a given time. Thus, our segmentation of a bird’s body such that there is an attribute called “wings” may be influenced not only by perceptual factors such as the gestalt laws of form that would lead us to consider the wings as a separate part (Palmer, in press) but also by the fact that at present we already have a cultural and linguistic category called “birds.” Viewing attributes as, at least in part, constructs of the perceiver does not negate the higher-order structural fact about attributes at issue, namely that the attributes of wings and that of feathers do co-occur in the perceived world.

These two basic principles of categorization, a drive toward cognitive economy combined with structure in the perceived world, have implications both for the level of abstraction of categories formed in a culture and for the, internal structure of those categories once formed.

For purposes of explication, we may conceive of category systems as having both a verbal and horizontal dimension. The vertical dimension concerns the level of inclusiveness of the category – the dimension along which the terms collie, dog, mammal, animal, and living thing vary. The horizontal dimension concerns the segmentation of categories at the same level of inclusiveness – the dimension on which dog, cat car, bus chair, and sofa vary. The implication of the two principles of categorization for the vertical dimension is that not all possible levels of categorization are equally good or useful; rather, the most basic level of categorization will be the most inclusive (abstract) level at which the categories can mirror the structure of attributes perceived in the world. The implication of the principles of categorization for the horizontal dimension is that to increase the distinctiveness and flexibility of categories, categories tend to become defined in terms of prototypes or prototypical instances that contain the attributes most representative of items inside and least representative of items outside the category.

THE VERTICAL DIMENSION OF CATEGORIES: BASIC-LEVEL OBJECTS

In a programmatic series of experiments, we have attempted to argue that categories within taxonomies of concrete objects are structured such that there is generally one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts can be made (Rosch et al., 1976a). By category is meant a number objects that are considered equivalent. Categories are generally designated by names (e.g., dog, animal) A taxonomy is a system by which categories are related to one another by means of class inclusion, The greater the inclusiveness of a category within a taxonomy, the higher the level of abstraction., Each category within a taxonomy is entirely included within one other category (unless it is the highest level category) but is not exhaustive of that more inclusive category (see Kay, 1971). Thus the term level of abstraction within a taxonomy refers to a particular level of inclusiveness. A familiar taxonomy is the Linnean system for the classification of animals.

Our claims concerning a basic level of abstraction can be formalized in terms of cue validity (Rosch et al., 1976a) or in terms of the set theoretic representation of similarity provided by Tversky (1977, and Chapter 4 in this volume). Cue validity is a probabilistic concept; the validity of a given cue x as a predictor of a given category y (the conditional probability of y/x) increases as the frequency with which cue x is associated with category y increases and decreases as the frequency with which cue x is associated with categories other than y increases (Beach, 1964a, 1964b; Reed, 1972). The cue validity of an entire category may be defined as the summation of the cue validities for that category of each of the attributes of the category. A category with high cue validity is, by definition, more differentiated from other categories than one of lower cue validity. The elegant formulization that Tversky provides in Chapter 4 is in terms of the variable “category resemblance,” which is defined as the weighted sum of the measures of all of the common features within a category minus the sum of .the measures of all of the distinctive features., Distinctive features include those that belong to only some members of a given category as well as those belonging to contrasting categories. Thus Tversky’s formalization does not weight the effect of contrast categories as much as does the cue validity formulation. Tversky suggests that two disjoint classes tend to be combined whenever the weight of the added common features exceeds the weight of the distinctive features.

A working assumption of the research on basic objects that (1) in the perceived world, information-rich bundles of perceptual and functional attributes occur that form natural discontinuities, and that (2),basic cuts in categorization are made at these discontinuities. Suppose that basic objects, (e.g., chair, car), are at the most inclusive level at which there are attributes common to all or most members of the category. Then both total cue validities and category resemblance are maximized at that level of abstraction at which basic objects are categorized. This is, categories one level more abstract will be superordinate categories (e.g., furniture, vehicle) whose members share only a few attributes among each other. Categories below the basic level will be bundles of common and, thus, predictable attributes and functions but contain many attributes that overlap with other categories (for example, kitchen chair shares most of its attributes with other kinds of chairs).

Superordinate categories have lower total cue validity and lower category resemblance than do basic-level categories, because they have fewer common attributes; in fact, the category resemblance measure of items within the superordinate can even be negative due to the high ratio of distinctive to common features. Subordinate categories have lower total cue validity than do basic categories, because they also share most attributes with contrasting subordinate categories; in Tversky’s terms, they tend to be combined because the weight of the added common features tend to exceed the weight of the distinctive features, That basic objects are categories at the level of abstraction that maximizes cue validity and maximizes category resemblance is another way of asserting that basic objects are the categories that best mirror the correlational structure of the environment.

We chose to look at concrete objects because they appeared to be a domain that was at once an indisputable aspect of complex natural language classifications yet at the same time were amenable to methods of empirical analysis. In our investigations of basic categories, the correlational structure of concrete objects was considered to consist of a number of inseparable aspects of form and

function, any one of which could serve as the starting point for analysis. Four investigations provided converging operational definitions of the basic level of abstraction: attributes in common, motor movements in common, objective similarity in shape, and identifiability of averaged shapes.

Common Attributes.

Ethnobiologists had suggested on the basis of linguistic criteria and field observation that the fobs was the level of classification at which organisms had bundles of attributes in common and maximum discontinuity between classes (see Chapter 1). The purpose of our research was to provide a systematic empirical study of the co-occurrence of attributes in the most common taxonomies of biological and man-made objects in our own culture.

The hypothesis that basic level objects are the most inclusive level of classification at which objects have numbers of attributes in common was tested for categories at three levels of abstraction for nine taxonomies: tree, fish, fruit, musical instruments, tool, clothing furniture and vehicle. Examples of the three levels for one biological and one nonbiological taxonomy are shown in Table 2.1. Criteria for choice of these specific items were that the taxonomies contain the most common (defined by word frequency) categories of concrete nouns in English, that the levels of abstraction bear simple class-inclusion relations to each other, and that those class-inclusion relations be generally known to our subjects (be agreed upon by a sample of native English speakers) The middle level of abstraction was the hypothesized basic level: For nonbiological taxonomies, this corresponded to the intuition of the experimenters (which also turned out to be consistent with Berlin’s linguistic criteria); for biological categories, we assumed that the basic level would be the level of the folk generic.

Subjects received sets of words taken from these nine taxonomies; the subject’s task was to list all of the attributes he could think of that were true of the items included in the class of things designated by each object name. Thus, for purposes of this study, attributes were defined operationally as whatever subjects agreed them to be with no implications for whether such analysis of an object could or could not be perceptually considered prior to knowledge of the object itself. Results of the study were as predicted: Very few attributes were listed for the superordinate categories, a significantly greater number listed for the supposed basic-level objects, and not significantly more attributes listed for subordinate level objects than for basic-level. An additional study showed essentially the same attributes listed for visually present objects as for the object names. The angle unpredicted result was that for the three biological taxonomies, the basic level, as defined by numbers of attributes in common, did not occur at the level of the folk generic but appeared at the level we had originally expected to be superordinate (e.g., tree rather than oak).

TABLE 2.1 Examples of Taxonomies Used in Basic Object Research

Superordinate	Basic Level	Subordinate
Furniture	Chair	Kitchen chair
		Living-room chair
	Table	Kitchen table
		Dining-room table
	Lamp	Floor lamp
		Desk lamp
Tree	Oak	White oak
		Red oak
	Maple	Silver maple
		Sugar maple
	Birch	River birch
		White birch

Motor Movements.

Inseparable from the perceived attributes of objects are the ways in which humans habitually use or interact with those objects. For concrete objects, such interactions take the form of motor movements. For example, when performing the action of sitting down on a chair, a sequence of body and muscle movements are typically made that are inseparable from the nature of the attributes of chairs – legs, seat, back, etc. This aspect of objects is particularly important in light of the role that sensory-motor interaction with the world appears to play in the development of thought (Brunei, Olver, & Greenfield, I966; Nelson, I974; Piaget, I952).

In our study of motor movements, each of the sets of words used in the previous experiment was administered to new subjects. A subject was asked to describe, in as much finely analyzed detail as possible, the sequences of motor movements he made when using or interacting with the object. Tallies of agreed upon listings of the same movements of the same body part in the same part of the movement sequence formed the unit of analysis. Results were identical to those of the attribute listings; basic objects were the most general classes to have motor sequences in common. For example, there are few motor programs we irry out to items of furniture in general and several specific motor programs +cried out in regard to sitting down on chairs, but we sit on kitchen and livingroom chairs using essentially the same motor programs.

Similarity in Shapes.

Another aspect of the meaning of a class of objects is the appearance of the objects in the class. In order to be able to analyze correlational structures by different but converging methods, it was necessary to find a method of analyzing similarity in the visual aspects of the objects that was not dependent on subjects’ descriptions, that was free from effects of the object’s name (which would not have been the case for subjects’ ratings of similarity), and that went beyond similarity of _analyzable, listable attributes that had already been used in the first study described. For this purpose, outlines of the shape of two-dimensional representations of objects were used, an integral aspect of natural forms. Similarity in shape was measured by the amount of overlap of the two outlines when the outlines (normalized for size and orientation) were juxtaposed.

Results showed that the ratio of overlapped to nonoverlapped area when two objects from the same basic-level category (e.g., two cars) were superimposed was far greater than when two objects from the same superordinate category

were superimposed (e-g., a car and a motorcycle). Although some gain in ratio of overlap to nonoverlap also occurred for subordinate category objects (e.g., two sports cars), the gain obtained by shifting from basic-level to subordinate objects was significantly less than the gain obtained by shifting from superordinate to basic-level objects.

Identifiability of Averaged Shapes.

If the basic level is the most inclusive level at which shapes of objects of a class are similar, a possible result of such similarity may be that the basic level is also the most inclusive level at which an averaged shape of an object can be recognized. To test this hypothesis, the same normalized superimposed shapes used in the previous experiment were used to draw an average outline of the overlapped figures. Subjects were then asked to identify both the superordinate category and the specific object depicted. Results showed that basic objects were the most general and inclusive categories at which the objects depicted could be identified. Furthermore, overlaps of subordinate objects were no more identifiable than objects at the basic level.

In summary, our four converging operational definitions of basic objects all indicated the same level of abstraction to be basic in our taxonomies. Admittedly, the basic level for biological objects was not that predicted by the folk genus; however, this fact appeared to be simply accounted for by our subjects’ lack of knowledge of the additional depth of real-world attribute structure available at the level of the folk generic (see Rosch et al., 1976a).

Implications for Other Fields

The foregoing theory of categorization and basic objects has implications for several traditional areas of study in psychology; some of these have been tested.

Imagery.

The fact that basic-level objects were the most inclusive categories which an averaged member of the category could be identified suggested at basic objects might be the most inclusive categories for which it was possible form a mental image isomorphic to the appearance of members of the class as whole. Experiments using a signal-detection paradigm and a priming paradigm, both of which have been previously argued to be measures of imagery (Peterson Graham, I974; Rosch, 1975c), verified that, in so far as it was meaningful to e the term imagery, basic objects appeared to-be the most abstract categories for which an image could be reasonably representative of the class as a whole.

Perception.

From all that has been said of the nature of basic classifications, would hardly be reasonable to suppose that in perception of the world, objects were first categorized either at the most abstract or at the most concrete level possible Two separate studies of picture verification (Rosch et al., 1976a; Smith, Balzano, & Walker, I978) indicate that, in fact, objects may be first :en or recognized as members of their basic category, and that only with the ad of additional processing can they be identified as members of their superordinate or subordinate category.

Development.

We have argued that classification into categories at the basic level is overdetermined because perception, motor movements, functions, and iconic images would all lead to the same level of categorization. Thus basic objects should be the first categorizations of concrete objects made by children. In fact, for our nine taxonomies, the basic level was the first named. And even when naming was controlled, pictures of several basic-level objects were sorted into groups “because they were the same type of thing” long before such a technique of sorting has become general in children.

Language.

From all that has been said, we would expect the most useful and, thus, most used name for an item to be the basic-level name. In fact, we found that adults almost invariably named pictures of the subordinate items of the nine taxonomies at the basic level, although they knew the correct superordinate and subordinate names for the objects. On a more speculative level, in the evolution of languages, one would expect names to evolve first for basic level objects, spreading both upward and downward as taxonomies increased in depth. Of great relevance for this hypothesis are Berlin’s (1972) claims for such a pattern for the evolution of plant names, and our own (Rosch et al., 1976a) and Newport and Bellugi’s (Chapter 3, this volume) finding for American Sign Language of the Deaf, that it was the basic-level categories that were most often coded by single signs and super- and subordinate categories that were likely to be missing. Thus a wide range of converging operations verify as basic the same levels of abstraction.

THE HORIZONTAL DIMENSION: INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF CATEGORIES: PROTOTYPES

Most, if not all, categories do not have clear-cut boundaries. To argue that basic object categories follow clusters of perceived attributes is not to say that such attribute clusters are necessarily discontinuous.

In terms of the principles of categorization proposed earlier, cognitive economy dictates that categories tend to be viewed as being as separate from each other and as clear-cut as possible. One way to achieve this is by means of formal, necessary and sufficient criteria for category membership. The attempt to impose such-criteria on categories marks virtual definitions in the tradition of Western reason. The psychological treatment of categories in the standard concept-identification paradigm lies within this tradition. Another way to achieve separateness and clarity of actually continuous categories is by conceiving of each category in terms of its clear cases rather than its boundaries. As Wittgenstein (1953) has pointed out, categorical judgments become a problem only if one is concerned with boundaries – in the normal course of life, two neighbors know on whose property they are standing without exact demarcation of the boundary line. Categories can be viewed in terms of their clear cases if the perceiver places emphasis on the correlational structure of perceived attributes such that the categories are represented by their most structured portions.

By prototypes of categories we have generally meant the clearest cases of pry membership defined operationally by people’s judgments of goodness of membership in the category. A great deal of confusion in the discussion of prototypes has arisen from two sources. First, the notion of prototypes has tended to become reified as though it meant a specific category member or mental structure. Questions are then asked in an either-or fashion about whether something is or is not the prototype or part of the prototype in exactly the same way in which the question would previously have been asked about the category boundary. Such thinking precisely violates the Wittgensteinian insight that we can judge how clear a case something is and deal with categories on the basis of clear cases in the total absence of information about boundaries. Second, the empirical findings about prototypicality have been confused with theories of processing – that is, there has been a failure to distinguish the structure of categories from theories concerning the use of that structure in processing. Therefore, let us first attempt to look at prototypes in as purely structural a fashion as possible. We will focus on what may be said about prototypes based on operational definitions and empirical findings alone without the addition of processing assumptions.

Perception of typicality differences is, in the first place, an empirical fact of people’s judgments about category membership. It is by now a well-documented finding that subjects overwhelmingly agree in their judgments of how good an example or clear a case members are of a category, even for categories about whose boundaries they disagree (Rosch, 1974, 1975b). Such judgments are reliable even under changes of instructions and items (Rips, Shoben, & Smith, 1973; Rosch, 1975b, 1975c; Rosch & Mervis, 1975). Were such agreement and reliability in judgment not to have been obtained, there would be no further point in discussion or investigation of the issue. However, given the empirical verification of degree of prototypicality, we can proceed to ask what principles determine which items will be judged the more prototypical and what other variables might be affected by prototypicality.

In terms of the basic principles of category formation, the formation of category prototypes should, like basic levels of abstraction, be determinate and be closely related to the initial formation of categories. For categories of concrete objects (which do not have a physiological basis, as categories such as colors and forms apparently do – Rosch, 1974), a reasonable hypothesis is that prototypes develop through the same principles such as maximization of cue validity and maximization of category resemblance as those principles governing the formation of the categories themselves.

In support of such a hypothesis, Rosch and Mervis (1975) have shown that the more prototypical of a category a member is rated, the more attributes it .has in common with other members of the category and the fewer attributes in common with members of the contrasting categories. This finding was demonstrated for natural language superordinate categories, for natural language basic level categories, and for artificial categories in which the definition of attributes and the amount of experience with items was completely specified and controlled. The same basic principles can be represented in ways other than through attributes in common. Because the present theory is a structural theory, one aspect of it is that centrality shares the mathematical notions inherent in measures like the mean and mode. Prototypical category members have been found to represent the means of attributes that have a metric, such as size (Reed, 1972; Rosch, Simpson, & Miller, 1976).

In short, prototypes appear to be just those members of a category that most reflect the redundancy structure of the category as a whole. That is, if categories form to maximize the information-rich cluster of attributes in the environment and, thus, the cue validity or category resemblance of the attributes of categories, prototypes of categories appear to form in such a manner as to maximize such dusters and such cue validity still further within categories.

It is important to note that for natural language categories both at the superordinate and basic levels the extent to which items have attributes common to the category was highly negatively correlated with the extent to which they have attributes belonging to members of contrast categories. This appears to be part of the structure of real-world categories It may be that such structure is given by the correlated clusters of attributes of the real world. Or such structure, may be a result of the human tendency once a contrast exists to define attributes for contrasting categories so that the categories will be maximally distinctive. In either case, it is a fact that both representativeness within a category and distinctiveness from contrast categories are correlated with prototypicality in real categories. For artificial categories, either principle alone will produce prototype effects (Rosch et al., 1976b; Smith & Balzano, personal communication) depending on the structure of the stimulus set. Thus to perform experiments to try to distinguish which principle is the one that determines prototype formation and category processing appears to be an artificial exercise.

Tversky formalizes prototypicality as the member or members of the category with the highest summed similarity to all members of the category. This measure, although formally more tractable than that of cue validity, does not take account, as cue validity does, of an item’s dissimilarity to contrast categories. This issue is discussed further later.

Effects of Prototypicality on Psychological Dependent Variables

The fact that prototypicality is reliably rated and is correlated with category structure does not have clear implications for particular processing models nor for a theory of cognitive representations of categories (see the introduction to Part III and Chapter 9). What is very clear from the extant research is that the prototypicality of items within a category can be shown to affect virtually all of the major dependent variables used as measures in psychological research.

Speed of Processing: Reaction Time.

The speed with which subjects can judge statements about category membership is one of the most widely used measures of processing in semantic memory research within the human information-processing framework. Subjects typically are required to respond true or false to statements of the form: X item is a member of Y category, where the dependent variable of interest is reaction time. In such tasks, for natural language categories, responses of true are invariably faster for the items that have been rated more prototypical. Furthermore, Rosch et al. (1976b) had subjects learn artificial categories where prototypicality was defined structurally for some subjects in terms of distance of a gestalt configuration from a prototype, for others in terms of means of attributes, and for still others in terms of family resemblance between attributes. Factors other than the structure of the category, such as frequency, were controlled. After learning was completed, reaction time in a category membership verification task proved to be a function of structural prototypicality.

Speed of Learning of Artificial Categories (Errors) and Order of Development in Children.

Rate of learning of new material and the naturally obtainable measure of learning (combined with maturation) reflected in developmental order are two of the most pervasive dependent variables in psychological research. In the artificial categories used by Rosch et al. (1976b), prototypicality for all three types of stimulus material predicted speed of teaming of the categories. Developmentally, Anglin (1976) obtained evidence that young children learn category membership of good examples of categories before that of poor examples. Using a category-membership verification technique, Rosch (1973) found that the differences in reaction time to verify good and poor members were far more extreme for 10-year-old children than for adults, indicating that the children had learned the category membership of the prototypical members earlier than that of other members.

Order and Probability of Item Output.

Item output is normally taken to reflect some aspect of storage, retrieval, or category search. Battig and Montague (1969) provided a normative study of the probability with which college students listed instances of superordinate semantic categories. The order is correlated with prototypicality ratings (Rosch, 1975b). Furthermore, using the artificial categories in which frequency of experience with all items was controlled, Rosch et al. (1976b) demonstrated that the most prototypical items were the first and most frequently produced items when subjects were asked to list the members of the category.

Effects of Advance Information on Performance: Set, Priming.

For colors (Rosch, 1975c), for natural superordinate semantic categories (Rosch, 1975b), and for artificial categories (Rosch et al., 1976b), it has been shown that degree of prototypicality determines whether advance information about the category name facilitates or inhibits responses in a matching task.

The Logic of Natural Language Use of Category Terms: Hedges, Substitutability into Sentences, Superordination in ASL. Although logic may treat categories as though membership is all or none, natural languages themselves possess linguistic mechanisms for coding and coping with gradients of category membership.

1. Hedges. In English there are qualifying terms such as “almost” and “virtually,” which Lakoff (1972) calls “hedges.” Even those who insist that statements such as “A robin is a bird” and “A penguin is a bird” are equally true, have to admit different hedges applicable to statements of category membership. Thus it is correct to say that a penguin is technically a bird but not that a robin is technically a bird, because a robin is more than just technically a bird; it is a real bird, a bird par excellence. Rosch (1975a) showed that when subjects were given sentence frames such as “X is virtually Y,” they reliably placed the more prototypical member of a pair of items into the referent slot, a finding which is isomorphic to Tversky’s work on asymmetry of similarity relations (Chapter 4).

2. Substitutability into sentences. The meaning of words is initimately tied to their use in sentences. Rosch (1977) has shown that prototypicality ratings for members of superordinate categories predicts the extent to which the member term is substitutable for the superordinate word in sentences. Thus, in the sentence “Twenty or so birds often perch on the telephone wires outside my window and twitter in the morining,” the term “sparrow” may readily be substituted for “bird” but the result turns ludicrous by substitution of “turkey,” an effect which is not simply a matter of frequency (Rosch, 1975d).

3. Productive superordinates in ASL. Newport and Bellugi (Chapter 3) demonstrate that when superordinates in ASL are generated by means of a partial fixed list of category members, those members are the more prototypical items in the category.

In summary, evidence has been presented that prototypes of categories are related to the major dependent variables with which psychological processes are typically measured. What the work summarized does not tell us, however, is considerably more than it tells us. The pervasiveness of prototypes in real-world categories and of prototypicality as a variable indicates that prototypes must have some place in psychological theories of representation, processing, and learning. However, prototypes themselves do not constitute any particular model of processes, representations, or learning. This point is so often misunderstood that it requires discussion:

1. To speak of a prototype at all is simply a convenient grammatical fiction; what is really referred to are judgments of degree of prototypicality. Only in some artificial categories is there by definition a literal single prototype (for example, Posner, Goldsmith, & Welton, 1967; Reed, 1972; Rosch et al., 1976b). For natural-language categories, to speak of a single entity that is the prototype is either a gross misunderstanding of the empirical data or a covert theory of mental representation.

2. Prototypes do not constitute any particular processing model for categories. For example, in pattern recognition, as Palmer (Chapter 9) points out, a prototype can be described as well by feature lists or structural descriptions as by templates. And many different types of matching operations can be conceived for matching to a prototype given any of these three modes of representation of the prototype. Other cognitive processes performed on categories such as verifying the membership of an instance in a category, searching the exemplars of a category for the member with a particular attribute, or understanding the meaning of a paragraph containing the category name are not bound to any single process model by the fact that we may acknowledge prototypes. What the facts about prototypicality do contribute to processing notions is a constraint – process models should not be inconsistent with the known facts about prototypes. For example, a model should not be such as to predict equal verification times for good and bad examples of categories nor predict completely random search through a category.

3. Prototypes do not constitute a theory of representation of categories. Although we have suggested elsewhere that it would be reasonable in light of the basic principles of categorization, if categories were represented by prototypes that were most representative of the items in the category and least representative of items outside the category (Rosch & Mervis, 1975; Rosch, 1977), such a statement remains an unspecified formula until it is made concrete by inclusion in some specific theory of representation. For example, different theories of semantic memory can contain the notion of prototypes in different fashions (Smith, 1978). Prototypes can be represented either by propositional or image systems (see Chapters 8 and 9). As with processing models, the facts about prototypes can only constrain, but do not determine, models of representation. A representation of categories in terms of conjoined necessary and sufficient attributes alone would probably be incapable of handling all of the presently known facts, but there are many representations other than necessary and sufficient attributes that are possible.

4. Although prototypes must be learned, they do not constitute any particular theory of category learning. For example, learning of prototypicality in the types of categories examined in Rosch and Mervis (1975) could be represented in terms of counting attribute frequency (as in Neuman, 1974), in terms of storage of a set of exemplars to which one later matched the input (see Chapter 6 and the introduction to Part II), or in terms of explicit teaching of the prototypes once prototypicality within a category is established in a culture (e.g., “Now that’s a real coat.”)

In short, prototypes only constrain but do not specify representation and process models. In addition, such models further constrain each other. For example, one could not argue for a frequency count of attributes in children’s learning of prototypes of categories if one had reason to believe that children’s representation of attributes did not allow for separability and selective attention to each attribute (see Chapter 5 and the introduction to Part 11).

TWO PROBLEMATICAL ISSUES

The Nature of Perceived Attributes.

The derivations of basic objects and of prototypes from the basic principles of categorization have depended on the notion of a structure in the perceived world – bundles of perceived world attributes that formed natural discontinuities. When the research on basic objects and their prototypes was initially conceived (Rosch et al., 1976a), I thought of such attributes as inherent in the real world. Thus, given an organism that had sensory equipment capable of perceiving attributes such as wings and feathers, it was a fact in the real world that wings and feathers co-occurred. The state of knowledge of a person might be ignorant of (or indifferent or inattentive to) the attributes or might know of the attributes but be ignorant concerning their correlation. Conversely, a person might know of the attributes and their correlational structure but exaggerate that structure, turning partial into complete correlations (as when attributes true only of many members of a category are thought of as true of all members). However, the environment was thought to constrain categorizations in that human knowledge could not provide correlational structure where there was none at all. For purposes of the basic object experiments, perceived attributes were operationally defined as those attributes listed by our subjects. Shape was defined as measured by our computer programs. We thus seemed to have our system grounded comfortably in the real world.

On contemplation of the nature of many of the attributes listed by our subjects, however, it appeared that three types of attributes presented a problem for such a realistic view: (1) some attributes, such as “seat” for the object “chair,” appeared to have names that showed them not to be meaningful prior to knowledge of the object as chair; (2) some attributes such as “large” for the object “piano” seemed to have meaning only in relation to categorization of the object in terms of a superordinate category – piano is large for furniture but small for other kinds of objects such as buildings; (3) some attributes such as “you eat on it” for the object “table” were functional attributes that seemed to require knowledge about humans, their activities, and the real world in order to be understood (see Chapter 10). That is, it appeared that the analysis of objects into attributes was a rather sophisticated activity that our subjects (and indeed a system of cultural knowledge) might well be considered to be able to impose only after the development of the category system.

In fact, the same laws of cognitive economy leading to the push toward basic level categories and prototypes might also lead to the definition of attributes of categories such that the categories once given would appear maximally distinctive from one another and such that the more prototypical items would appear even more representative of their own and less representative of contrastive categories. Actually, in the evolution of the meaning of terms in languages, probably both the constraint of real-world factors and the construction and reconstruction of attributes are continually present. Thus, given a particular category system, attributes are defined such as to make the system appear as logical and economical as possible. However, if such a system becomes markedly out of phase with real-world constraints, it will probably tend to evolve to be more in line with those constraints – with redefinition of attributes ensuing if necessary. Unfortunately, to state the matter in such a way is to provide no clear place at which we can enter the system as analytical scientists. What is the unit with which to start our analysis? Partly in order to find a more basic real-world unit for analysis than attributes, we have turned our attention to the contexts in which objects occur – that is, to the culturally defined events in which objects serve as props.

The Role of Context in Basic-Level Objects and Prototypes.

It is obvious, even in the absence of controlled experimentation, that a man about to buy a chair who is standing in a furniture store surrounded by different chairs among which he must choose will think and speak about chairs at other than the basic level of “chair.” Similarly, in regard to prototypes, it is obvious that when asked for the most typical African animal, people of any age will not name the same animal as when asked for the most typical American pet animal. Because interest in context is only beginning, it is not yet clear just what experimentally defined contexts will affect what dependent variables for what categories. But it is predetermined that there will be context effects for both the level of abstraction at which an object is considered and for which items are named, learned, listed, or expected in a category. Does this mean that our findings in regard to basic levels and prototypes are relevant only to the artificial situation of the laboratory is which a context is not specified?

Actually, both basic levels and prototypes are, in a sense, theories about context itself. The basic level of abstraction is that level of abstraction that is appropriate for using, thinking about, or naming an object in most situations in which the object occurs (Rosch et al., 1976a). And when a context is not specified in an experiment, people must contribute their own context. Presumably, they do not do so randomly. Indeed, it seems likely that, in the absence of a specified context, subjects assume what they consider the normal context or situation for occurrence of that object. To make such claims about categories appears to demand an analysis of the actual events in daily life in which objects occur.

THE ROLE OF OBJECTS IN EVENTS

The attempt we have made to answer the issues of the origin of attributes and the role of context has been in terms of the use of objects in the events of daily human life. The study of events grew out of a interest in categorizations of the flow of experience. That is, our initial interest was in the question of whether any of the principles of categorization we had found useful for understanding concrete objects appeared to apply to the cutting up of the continuity of experience into the discrete bounded temporal units that we call events.

Previously, events have been studied primarily from two perspectives in psychology. Within ecological and social psychology, an observer records and attempts to segment the stream of another person’s behavior into event sequences (for example, Barker & Wright, 1955; Newtson, 1976). And within the artificial intelligence tradition, Story Understanders are being constructed that can “comprehend,” by means of event scripts, statements about simple, culturally predictable sequences such as going to a restaurant (Shank, 1975).

The unit of the event would appear to be a particularly important unit for analysis. Events stand at the interface between an analysis of social structure and culture and an analysis of individual psychology. It may be useful to think of scripts for events as the level of theory at which we can specify how culture and social structure enter the individual mind. Could we use events as the basic unit from which to derive an understanding of objects? Could we view objects as props for the carrying out of events and have the functions, perceptual attributes, and levels of abstraction of objects fall out of their role in such events?

Our research to date has been a study rather than an experiment and more like a pilot study at that. Events were defined neither by observation of others nor by a priori units for scripts but introspectively in the following fashion. Students in a seminar on events were asked to choose a particular evening on which to list the events that they remembered of that day- e.g., to answer the question what did I do? (or what happened to me?) that day by means of a list of the names of the events. They were to begin in the morning. The students were aware of the nature of the inquiry and that the focus of interest was on the units that they would perceive as the appropriate units into which to chunk the days’ happenings. After completing the list for that day, they were to do the same sort of lists for events remembered from the previous day, and thus to continue backwards to preceding days until they could remember no more day’s events. They also listed events for units smaller and larger than a day: for example, the hour immediately preceding writing and the previous school quarter.

The results were somewhat encouraging concerning the tractability of such a means of study. There was considerable agreement on the kinds of units into which a day should be broken – units such as making coffee, taking a shower, and going to statistics class. No one used much smaller units: That is, units such as picking up the toothpaste tube, squeezing toothpaste onto the brush, etc., never occurred. Nor did people use larger units such as “got myself out of the house in the morning” or “went to all my afternoon classes.” Furthermore, the units that were listed did not change in size or type with their recency or remoteness in time to the writing. Thus, for the time unit of the hour preceding writing, components of events were not listed. Nor were larger units of time given for a day a week past than for the day on which the list was composed. Indeed, it was dramatic how, as days further and further in the past appeared, fewer and fewer events were remembered although the type of unit for those that were remembered remained the same. That is, for a day a week past, a student would not say that he now only remembered getting himself out of the house in the morning (though such “summarizing” events could be inferred); rather he either did or did not remember feeding the cat that day (an occurrence that could also be inferred but for which inference and memory were introspectively clearly distinguishable). Indeed, it appeared that events such as “all the morning chores” as a whole do not have a memory representation separate from memory of doing the individual chores – perhaps in the way that superordinate categories, such as furniture, do not appear to be imageable per se apart from imaging individual items in the category. It should be noted that event boundaries appeared to be marked in a reasonable way by factors such as changes of the actors participating with ego, changes in the objects ego interacts with, changes in place, and changes in the type or rate of activity with an object, and by notable gaps in time between two reported events.

A good candidate for the basic level of abstraction for events is the type of unit into which the students broke their days. The events they listed were just those kinds of events for which Shank (1975) has provided scripts. Scripts of events analyze the event into individual units of action; these typically occur in a predictable order. For example, the script for going to a restaurant contains script elements such as entering, going to a table, ordering, eating, and paying. Some recent research has provided evidence for the psychological reality of scripts and their elements (Bower, 1976).

Our present concern is with the role of concrete objects in events. What categories of objects are required to serve as props for events at the level of abstraction of those listed by the students? In general, we found that the event name itself combined most readily with superordinate noun categories; thus, one gets dressed with clothes and needs various kitchen utensils to make breakfast. When such activities were analyzed into their script elements, the basic level appeared as the level of abstraction of objects necessary to script the events; e.g., in getting dressed, one puts on pants, sweater, and shoes, and in making breakfast, one cooks eggs in a frying pan.

With respect to prototypes, it appears to be those category members judged the more prototypical that have attributes that enable them to fit into the typical and agreed upon script elements. We are presently collecting normative data on the intersection of common events, the objects associated with those events and the other sets of events associated with those objects.2 In addition, object names for eliciting events are varied in level of abstraction and in known prototypicality in given categories. Initial results show a similar pattern to that obtained in the earlier research in which it was found that the more typical members of superordinate categories could replace the superordinate in sentence frames generated by subjects told to “make up a sentence” that used the superordinate (Rosch, 1977). That is, the task of using a given concrete noun in a sentence appears to be an indirect method of eliciting a statement about the events in which objects play a part; that indirect method showed clearly that prototypical category members are those that can play the role in events expected of members of that category.

The use of deviant forms of object names in narratives accounts for several recently explored effects in the psychological literature. Substituting object names at other than the basic level within scripts results in obviously deviant descriptions. Substitution of superordinates produces just those types of narrative that Bransford and Johnson (1973) have claimed are not comprehended; for example, “The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient [p. 400].” It should be noted in the present context that what Bransford and Johnson call context cues are actually names of basic-level events (e.g., washing clothes) and that one function of hearing the event name is to enable the reader to translate the superordinate terms into basic-level objects and actions. Such a translation appears to be a necessary aspect of our ability to match linguistic descriptions to world knowledge in a way that produces the “click of comprehension.”

On the other hand, substitution of subordinate terms for basic-level object names in scripts gives the effect of satire or snobbery. For example, a review (Garis, 1975) of a pretentious novel accused of actually being about nothing more than brand-name snobbery concludes, “And so, after putting away my 10 year-old Royal 470 manual and lining up my Mongol number 3 pencils on my Goldsmith Brothers Formica imitation-wood desk, I slide into my oversize squirrel-skin L. L. Bean slippers and shuffle off to the kitchen. There, holding Decades in my trembling right hand, I drop it, plunk, into my new Sears 20-gallon, celadon-green Permanex trash can [p. 48].”

Analysis of events is still in its initial stages. It is hoped that further understanding of the functions and attributes of objects can be derived from such an analysis.

SUMMARY

The first part of this chapter showed how the same principles of categorization could account for the taxonomic structure of a category system organized around a basic level and also for the formation of the categories that occur within this basic level. Thus the principles described accounted for both the vertical and horizontal structure of category systems. Four converging operations were employed to establish the claim that the basic level provides the cornerstone of a taxonomy. The section on prototypes distinguished the empirical evidence for prototypes as structural facts about categories from the possible role of prototypes in cognitive processing, representation, and learning. Then we considered assumptions about the nature of the attributes of real-world objects and assumptions about context – insofar as attributes and contexts underlie the claim that there is structure in the world. Finally, a highly tentative pilot study of attributes and functions of objects as props in culturally defined events was presented.

REFERENCES

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Barker, R., & Wright, H. Midwest and its children. Evanston, 111.: Row-Peterson, 1955. Battig, W. F., & Montague, W. E. Category norms for verbal items in 56 categories: A replication and extension of the Connecticut category norms. Journal of Experimental Psychology Monograph, 1969, 80(3, Pt. 2).

Beach, L. R. Cue probabilism and inference behavior. Psychological Monographs. 1964, 78, (Whole No. 582). (a)

Beach, L. R. Recognition, assimilation, and identification of objects. Psychological Monographs, 1964, 78(Whole No. 583). (b)

Berlin, B. Speculations on the growth of ethnobotanical nomenclature. Language in Society, 1972, 1, 51-86.

Borges, J. L. Other inquisitions 1937-1952. New York: Washington Square Press, 1%6. Bower, G. Comprehending and recalling stories. Paper presented as Division 3 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., September 1976.

This work is being done by Elizabeth Kreusi.

Bransford, 1. D., & Johnson, M. K. Considerations of some problems of comprehension. In W. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing. New York: Academic Press, 1973. Bruner, J. S., Olver, R. R., & Greenfield, P. M. Studies in cognitive growth. New York: Wiley, 1966.

Gar* L. The Margaret Mead of Madison Avenue. Ms., March 1975, pp. 47-48.

Garner, W. R. The processing of information and structure. New York: Wiley, 1974. Kay, P. Taxonomy and semantic contrast. Language, 1971, 47, 866-887.

Lakoff, G. Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts. Papers from the eighth regional meeting, Chicago Linguistics Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Linguistics Department, 1972.

Nelson, K. Concept, word and sentence: Interrelations in acquisition and development. Psychological Review, 1974, 81, 267-285.

Neuman, P. G. An attribute frequency model for the abstraction of prototypes. Memory and Cognition, 1974, 2, 241-248.

Newtson, D. Foundations of attribution: The perception of ongoing behavior. In J. Harvey, W. Ickes, & R. Kidd (Eds.), New directions in attribution research. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1976.

Pillmer. S. Hierarchical structure in perceptual representation. Cognitive Psychology, in press.

Peterson, M. J., & Graham, S. E. Visual detection and visual imagery. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1974, 103, 509-514.

Piaget, J. The origins of intelligence in children. New York: International Universities Press, 1952.

Posner, M. 1., Goldsmith, R., & Welton, K. E. Perceived distance and the classification of distorted patterns. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1967, 73, 28-38.

Reed, S. K. Pattern recognition and categorization. Cognitive Psychology, 1972, 3, 382407.

Rips, L. J., Shoben, E. J., & Smith, E. E. Semantic distance and the verification of semantic relations. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1973, 12, 1-20.

Rosch, E. On the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories. In T. E. Moore (Ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. New York: Academic Press, 1973.

Rosch, E. Linguistic relativity. In A. Silverstein (Ed.), Human communication: Theoretical perspectives. New York: Halsted Press, 1974.

Rosch, E. Cognitive reference points. Cognitive Psychology, 1975, 7, 532-547. (a)

Rosch, E. Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General., 1975, 104, 192-233. (b)

Rosch, E. The nature of mental codes for _color categories es. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, 1975, 1, 303-322. (c)

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Rosch, E. Human categorization. In N. Warren (Ed.), Advances in cross-cultural psychology (Vol. 1). London: Academic Press, 1977.

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Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., & Boyes-Braem, P. Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 1976, 8, 382-439. (a)

Rosch, E., Simpson, C., & Miller, R. S. Structural bases of typicality effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 1976, 2. 491-502. (b)

Shank, R. C. The structure of episodes in memory. In D. G. Bobrow & A. Collins (Eds.), Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science. New York: Academic Press, 1975.

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Smith, E. E., Balzano, G. J., & Walker, J. H. Nominal, perceptual, and semantic codes is picture categorization. In J. Cotton & R. Klatzky (Eds.), Semantic factors in cognition. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1978.

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Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

[ It could be that more academics are liberal because that's what (generally) happens to people who devote their lives to the expansion of the mind. Thanks to Michael Roselius for passing this article along. --BL ]

November 18, 2004 | New York Times

by JOHN TIERNEY

BERKELEY, Calif. – At the birthplace of the free speech movement, campus radicals have a new target: the faculty that came of age in the 60’s. They say their professors have been preaching multiculturalism and diversity while creating a political monoculture on campus.

Conservatism is becoming more visible at the University of California here, where students put out a feisty magazine called The California Patriot and have made the Berkeley Republicans one of the largest groups on campus. But here, as at schools nationwide, the professors seem to be moving in the other direction, as evidenced by their campaign contributions and two studies being published on Nov. 18.

One of the studies, a national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University and a co-author of the study.

In a separate study of voter registration records, Professor Klein found a nine-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans on the faculties of Berkeley and Stanford. That study, which included professors from the hard sciences, engineering and professional schools as well as the humanities and social sciences, also found the ratio especially lopsided among the younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183 Democrats versus 6 Republicans.

The political imbalance on faculties has inspired a campaign to have state legislatures and Congress approve an “academic bill of rights” protecting students and faculty members from discrimination for their political beliefs. The campaign is being led by Students for Academic Freedom, a group with chapters at Berkeley and more than 135 other campuses. It was founded last year by the leftist-turned-conservative David Horowitz, who helped start the 1960’s antiwar movement while a graduate student at Berkeley.

“Our goal is not to have the government dictate who’s hired but to take politics out of the hiring process and the classroom,” said Mr. Horowitz, who called the new studies the most compelling evidence yet of hiring bias. “Right now, conservative students are discouraged from pursuing scholarly careers, because they see very clearly that their professors consider Republicans to be the enemy.”

Academic leaders have resisted his group’s legislative proposal, saying that discrimination is rare and already forbidden, and they dispute the accusations of faculty bias. Robert J. Birgeneau, the chancellor of Berkeley, said that he was not sure if the new study of his faculty accurately reflected the professors’ political leanings, and that these leanings were irrelevant anyway.

“The essence of a great university is developing and sharing new knowledge as well as questioning old dogma,” Dr. Birgeneau said. “We do this in an environment which prizes academic freedom and freedom of expression. These principles are respected by all of our faculty at U.C. Berkeley, no matter what their personal politics are.”

Professors at Berkeley and other universities provided unprecedented financial support for the Democratic Party this election. For the first time, universities were at the top of the list of organizations ranked by their employees’ contributions to a presidential candidate, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group.

In first and second place, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, were the University of California system and Harvard, whose employees contributed $602,000 and $340,000, respectively, to Senator John Kerry. At both universities, employees gave about $19 to the Kerry campaign for every dollar for the Bush campaign.

One theory for the scarcity of Republican professors is that conservatives are simply not that interested in academic careers. A Democrat on the Berkeley faculty, George P. Lakoff, who teaches linguistics and is the author of “Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think,” said that liberals choose academic fields that fit their world views. “Unlike conservatives,” he said, “they believe in working for the public good and social justice, as well as knowledge and art for their own sake, which are what the humanities and social sciences are about.”

Some non-Democrats prefer to attribute the imbalance to the structure of academia, which allows hiring decisions and research agendas to be determined by small, independent groups of scholars. These fiefs, the critics say, suffer from a problem described in The Federalist Papers: an autonomous “small republic” is prone to be dominated by a cohesive faction that uses majority voting to “outnumber and oppress the rest,” in Madison’s words.

“Our colleges have become less marketplaces of ideas than churches in which you have to be a true believer to get a seat in the pews,” said Stephen H. Balch, a Republican and the president of the National Association of Scholars. “We’ve drifted to a secular version of 19th-century denominational colleges, in which the university’s mission is to crusade against sin and make the country a morally better place.”

Dr. Balch’s organization of what he calls traditional scholars is publishing the two new faculty studies in its journal, Academic Questions (online at www.nas.org). In one study, Professor Klein and Charlotta Stern, a sociologist at the Institute for Social Research in Sweden, asked the members of scholars’ professional associations which party’s candidates they had mostly voted for over the previous decade.

The ratio of Democratic to Republican professors ranged from 3 to 1 among economists to 30 to 1 among anthropologists. The researchers found a much higher share of Republicans among the nonacademic members of the scholars’ associations, which Professor Klein said belied the notion that nonleftists were uninterested in scholarly careers.

“Screened out, expelled or self-sorted, they tend to land outside of academia because the crucial decisions – awarding tenure and promotions, choosing which papers get published – are made by colleagues hostile to their political views,” said Professor Klein, who classifies himself as a libertarian.

Martin Trow, an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley who was chairman of the faculty senate and director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, said that professors tried not to discriminate in hiring based on politics, but that their perspective could be warped because so many colleagues shared their ideology.

“Their view comes to be seen not as a political preference but what decent, intelligent human beings believe,” said Dr. Trow, who calls himself a conservative. “Debate is stifled, and conservatives either go in the closet or get to be seen as slightly kooky. So if a committee is trying to decide between three well-qualified candidates, it may exclude the conservative because he seems like someone who has poor judgment.”

The students’ magazine, The California Patriot, has frequently criticized Berkeley for the paucity of conservative views and for cases of what it has called discrimination against conservative students.

“I’m glad to get the liberal perspective, but it would be nice to get the other side, too,” said Kelly Coyne, the editor of the magazine and a senior majoring in political science. “I’m really having a hard time finding courses my last year. I don’t want to spend another semester listening to lectures about victims of American oppression.”

Role of Letter Order in Parsing Language

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

by Brendan Lalor

This is posted various places around the net.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty esdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!

Graham Rawlinson wrote a thesis entitled “The significance of letter position in word recognition” at Nottingham University in 1976.

New Tack Wins Prisoner’s Dilemma

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

[ For more on the Prisoner's Dilemma, visit Serge Helfrich's page. Thanks to Jared Childers for forwarding the article. --BL ]

Oct. 13, 2004 | Wired

by Wendy M. Grossman

Proving that a new approach can secure victory in a classic strategy game, a team from England’s Southampton University has won the 20th-anniversary Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma competition, toppling the long-term winner from its throne.

The Southampton group, whose primary research area is software agents, said its strategy involved a series of moves allowing players to recognize each other and act cooperatively.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game-theory problem for two players. As typically described, two accomplices are arrested and separated for interrogation by the police, who give each the same choice: confess to authorities (defect) or remain silent (cooperate). If one defects and the other cooperates, the defector walks free and the cooperator gets 10 years in jail. If both cooperate, both get six months. If both defect, both get six years. Neither suspect knows the other’s choice.

“The Prisoner’s Dilemma is this canonical problem of how to get cooperation to emerge from selfish agents,” said Nick Jennings, a professor in computer science at Southampton University and leader of the winning team along with his Ph.D. student, Gopal Ramchurn. “People are very keen on it because they can see so many parallels in real life.”

Before Southampton came along, a strategy called Tit for Tat had a consistent record of winning the game. Under that strategy, a player’s first move is always to cooperate with other players. Afterward, the player echoes whatever the other players do. The strategy is similar to the one nuclear powers adopted during the Cold War, each promising not to use its weaponry so long as the other side refrained from doing so as well.

The 20th-anniversary competition was the brainchild of Graham Kendall, a lecturer in the University of Nottingham’s School of Computer Science and Information Technology and a researcher in game theory, and was based on the original 1984 competition run by a University of Michigan political scientist, Robert Axelrod.

The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is a version of the game in which the choice is repeated over and over again and in which the players can remember their previous moves, allowing them to evolve a cooperative strategy. The 2004 competition had 223 entries, with each player playing all the other players in a round robin setup. Because Axelrod’s original competition was run twice, Kendall will run a second competition in April 2005, for which he hopes to attract even more entries.

Teams could submit multiple strategies, or players, and the Southampton team submitted 60 programs. These, Jennings explained, were all slight variations on a theme and were designed to execute a known series of five to 10 moves by which they could recognize each other. Once two Southampton players recognized each other, they were designed to immediately assume “master and slave” roles — one would sacrifice itself so the other could win repeatedly.

If the program recognized that another player was not a Southampton entry, it would immediately defect to act as a spoiler for the non-Southampton player. The result is that Southampton had the top three performers — but also a load of utter failures at the bottom of the table who sacrificed themselves for the good of the team.

Another twist to the game was the addition of noise, which allowed some moves to be deliberately misrepresented. In the original game, the two prisoners could not communicate. But Southampton’s design lets the prisoners do the equivalent of signaling to each other their intentions by tapping in Morse code on the prison wall.

Kendall noted that there was nothing in the competition rules to preclude such a strategy, though he admitted that the ability to submit multiple players means it’s difficult to tell whether this strategy would really beat Tit for Tat in the original version. But he believes it would be impossible to prevent collusion between entrants.

“Ultimately,” he said, “what’s more important is the research.”

“What’s interesting from our point of view,” he said, “was to test some ideas we had about teamwork in general agent systems, and this detection of working together as a team is a quite fundamental problem. What was interesting was to see how many colluders you need in a population. It turns out we had far too many — we would have won with around 20.”

Jennings is also interested in testing the strategy on an evolutionary variant of the game in which each player plays only its neighbors on a grid. If your neighbors do better than you do, you adopt their strategy.

“Our initial results tell us that ours is an evolutionarily stable strategy — if we start off with a reasonable number of our colluders in the system, in the end everyone will be a colluder like ours,” he said.

The winners don’t get much — an unexpected $50 check and a small plaque. But, says Kendall, “Everybody in our field knows the name of Anatol Rapoport, who won the Axelrod competition. So if you can win the 20th-anniversary one, in our field there’s a certain historical significance.”

Can I Get a Job With a Philosophy Degree?

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

by Brendan Lalor

If you want to “be all you can be” as a human being, it’s hard to imagine a more practical course of training than the study of philosophy. As Aristotle argued, philosophical activity — reflective, appreciative understanding of and speculation about the world — is conducive to the most fulfilling life. Hence, philosophy is a perfectly practical area of study for people who care to live good lives. But even we philosophers have to consider the other sort of “practical” use of philosophy more closely tied to employment and economic considerations.

Not an MBA, a Philosophy degree
Here’s the beginning of, “The Management Myth,” which appeared in the June, 2006 Atlantic Monthly:

Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead

by Matthew Stewart

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy – nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.

For the rest of the article, visit the Atlantic site.

Philosophers Score Better
As the University of St. Thomas Philosophy Department reports:

The University of Virginia’s Office of Career Planning and Placement reports in “A Comparative Study by Major of Law School Admission Test Performance,” that the average LSAT (Law School Admissions Test) score for a philosophy major at that school was approximately 15 points higher than the average for any other major. In addition, the American Medical Association conducted a study in which they found philosophy majors had the third highest acceptance rate into American medical schools. York University investigated philosophy major’s performance on the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and also found philosophy majors performed an average of 5% better than the average. In the verbal portion of the exam, philosophy majors scored higher than all other fields, including English. The quantitative portion of the GRE is historically where humanities majors do poorly, however philosophy majors still performed higher than social science majors with the exception of economics.

Test Performance by Undergraduate Major

Rank	LSAT	GMAT	GRE Verbal	GRE Quant.
1	Mathematics	Mathematics	Philosophy	Physics
2	Economics	Philosophy	English	Mathematics
3	Philosophy	Engineering	Anthropology	Engineering
4	Engineering	Chemistry	History	Computer Science
5	Chemistry	Economics	Foreign Languages	Chemistry
6	Other Humanities	English	Physics	Other Science
7	Foreign Languages	Computer Science	Other Humanities	Economics
8	English	Foreign Languages	Journalism	Biology
9	Anthropology	History	Political Science	Philosophy
10	Biology	Other Humanities	Biology	Anthropology

(These data were reported in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66:1, 1992. The rankings are by average mean differential.)

Philosophers Get Jobs
However amusing the stereotype of the unemployed philosopher is, it could hardly reflect employment statistics less well. As the American Philosophical Association reports, only 2.3% of philosophy majors were unemployed, based on National Research Council data for 1995. That’s less than half the national unemployment rate at the time. So philosophers are employed at a rate that easily bests average. While not all employed philosophers work in educational institutions, 79.7% were. As for the rest: 6.9% worked for a private company, 4.4% were self-employed, 4.6% worked for a non-profit, and 4.1% worked for government.

Why are philosophers so overwhelmingly employed? They have learned to think critically and creatively, to articulate, and to find outside-the-box solutions. Take, for instance, this snip from a Chronicle of Higher Education piece from 1982 reported on the St. Mary’s Philosophy Department website:

My company took a contract to extract beryllium from a mine in Arizona. I called in several consulting engineers and asked, ‘Can you furnish a chemical or electrolytic process that can be used at the mine site to refine directly from ore?’ Back came a report saying that I was asking for the impossible — a search of the computer tapes had indicated that no such process existed. I paid the engineers for their work. Then I hired a student from Stanford University who was home for the summer. He was majoring in Latin American history with a minor in philosophy. I gave him an airplane and a credit card and told him, ‘Go to Denver and research the Bureau of Mines archives and locate a process for the recovery of beryllium.’ He left on Monday. I forgot to tell him that I was sending him for the impossible. He came back on Friday. He handed me a pack of notes and booklets and said, ‘Here is the process. It was developed 33 years ago at a government research station at Rolla, Mo.’ He then continued, ‘And here also are other processes for the recovery of mica, strontium, columbium, and yttrium, which also exist as residual ores that contain beryllium.’ After one week of research, he was making sounds like a metallurgical expert. He is now back in school, but I am keeping track of him. When other companies are interviewing the engineering and the business-administration mechanics, I’ll be there looking for that history-and-philosophy major.

As the Times of London opines:

In this country [England], the Higher Education Statistics Survey puts philosophy of science right up with medicine in its employment record for graduates.

Philosophy is, in commercial jargon, the ultimate “transferable work skill.” That is not the only argument for expanding philosophy departments, and encouraging sixth-formers to read Plato, or John Stuart Mill on liberty. Chris Woodhead, the Chief Inspector of Schools, has cautioned against an obsession with the narrowly vocational. Lecturing the Confederation of British Industry on the “sly utilitarianism” of employers, he defends a liberal education as needing “no justification beyond the satisfaction and enjoyment that it brings.” Teenagers waiting for their A level results and pondering degree courses should consider philosophy. It is rewarding in itself; and it could nowadays be the passport to a successful, varied career. (15 August 1998)

Philosophers’ Monetary Compensation is Adequate
According to the Princeton Review, philosophers’ starting salary averages $27,000, but after 5 years averages $40,000, and hits $60,000 after 10 to 15 years. Philosophers typically work 50 hours per week.

UCO’s Philosophy Majors
To give a feel for what graduates from the UCO Philosophy Program are doing, here are a few accounts: one became very successful in business after completing a political science oriented M.A. at Chicago; numerous have graduated from seminary, and are working in the ministry; some are now successful lawyers; one is an Army officer acting as liaison with the Air Force; many are in philosophy graduate programs at institutions including the University of Oklahoma, Texas Tech, and Syracuse University. Others are in graduate programs in education, anthropology, art history, cultural studies, or studying at the London School of Economics.

Other Articles on the Topic
Following are some articles for those interested in the employment value of a philosophy degree.

Well-Known Philosophy Majors
Uses of Philosophy [American Philosophical Association]
To Beat the Market: Hire a Philosopher [New York Times 1999]
Philosophers Find the Degree Pays Off in Life And in Work [New York Times 1997]
How to Get to the Top — Study Philosophy [Globe and Mail 1990]

Email me with additions to this list.

Well-Known Philosophy Majors

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

by Brendan Lalor

I believe it was the good philosophers at Belmont University, who started the list of well-known people who were philosophy majors. The folks at at Eastern Kentucky University added significantly to the list. The list is reprinted below. I’ll take any additions you may want to submit, along with the documentation.

What Can I Do With a Philosophy Degree? The truth is; you can do ANYTHING with your degree. But don’t take our word for it – the following is a list of people, all who’ve earned some degree in philosophy and what they are doing now. Recognize any of these names?

Steve Allen (writer & comedian)

Emile de Antonio* (documentary filmmaker)

William Bennett (former Drug czar & NEH leader, Books of Virtues)

William Jefferson Clinton (former President)

Woody Allen (director & comedian)

Mary Higgins Clark (mystery writer)

Gene Siskel (movie reviewer, Siskel & Ebert at the Movies)

Philip K. Dick (science fiction writer)

David Duchovny (actor on X-Files)

John Elway (quarterback, Denver Broncos)

Ivan Frolov (editor of Pravda)

Rebecca Goldstein (novelist & MacArthur prize recipient)

Don Harron (Canadian comedian, author of Anne of Green Gables libretto)

Harrison Ford (actor)

Christy Haubegger (editor of Latina)

Vaclav Havel (former President of Czeckoslovakia)

Peter Hoeg (author of Smilla’s Sense of Snow)

Mark Hulbert (financial columnist for Forbes magazine)

Carl Icahn (business person & corporate raider, bought TWA)

Martin Luther King, Jr. (civil rights leader)

Bruce Lee (martial arts & actor)

Michael Lerner (editor of Tikkun)

Peter Lynch (director)

Steve Martin (comedian & actor)

Kate Millett (author of Sexual Politics)

Bob Moses (civil rights activist)

Robert Motherwell (painter)

Iris Murdoch (novelist)

Lachlan Murdoch (son of Rupert Murdoch, media magnate)

Robert Musil (Austrian novelist)

Freeman Patterson (photographer, author of The Art of Seeing)

Neil Peart (drummer for rock group, Rush)

Chaim Potok (novelist)

Pope John Paul II (vicar of Christ)

Patricia Rozema (film-maker, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing)

Mick Schmidt (former Philadelphia Philly)

John Silber (former president of Boston University)

Susan Sontag (essayist)

George Soros (money manager, Soros Foundation)

Dave Thomas (SCTV)

Alex Trebeck (Jeopardy!)

David Foster Wallace (novelist & MacArthur prize recipient)

Robert Weaver (doyen of Canadian literature, head of CBC’s ANTHOLOGY)

Moses Znaimer, (Owner of CITY-TV and MUCH-MUSIC, Toronto)

* – thanks to Michael W. Howard for this one.

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

excerpted from the American Philosophical Association’s Philosophy:
A Brief Guide for Undergraduates

General Uses of Philosophy

Much of what is learned in philosophy can be applied in virtually any endeavor. This is both because philosophy touches on so many subjects and, especially, because many of its methods are usable in any field.

General Problem Solving. The study of philosophy enhances, in a way no other activity does, one’s problem-solving capacities. It helps one to analyze concepts, definitions, arguments and problems. It contributes to one’s capacity to organize ideas and issues, to deal with questions of value, and to extract what is essential from masses of information. It helps one both to distinguish fine differences between views and to discover common ground between opposing positions. And it helps one to synthesize a variety of views or perspectives into a unified whole.
Communication Skills. Philosophy also contributes uniquely to the development of expressive and communicative powers. It provides some of the basic tools of self-expression?for instance, skills in presenting ideas through well-constructed, systematic arguments?that other fields either do not use, or use less extensively. It helps one to express what is distinctive of one’s view; enhances one’s ability to explain difficult material; and helps one to eliminate ambiguities and vagueness from one’s writing and speech.
Persuasive Powers. Philosophy provides training in the construction of clear formulations, good arguments, and apt examples. It thereby helps one develop the ability to be convincing. One learns to build and defend one’s own views, to appreciate competing positions, and to indicate forcefully why one considers one’s own views preferable to alternatives. These capacities can be developed not only through reading and writing in philosophy, but also through the philosophical dialogue, in and outside the classroom, that is so much a part of a thoroughgoing philosophical education.
Writing Skills. Writing is taught intensively in many philosophy courses, and many regularly assigned philosophical texts are unexcelled as literary essays. Philosophy teaches interpretive writing through its examination of challenging texts, comparative writing through emphasis on fairness to alternative positions, argumentative writing through developing students’ ability to establish their own views, and descriptive writing through detailed portrayal of concrete examples: the anchors to which generalizations must be tied. Striker and technique, then, are emphasized in philosophical writing. Originality is also encouraged, and students are generally urged to use their imagination and develop their own ideas.

The Uses of Philosophy in Educational Pursuits

The general uses of philosophy just described are obviously of great academic value. It should be clear that the study of philosophy has intrinsic rewards as an unlimited quest for understanding of important, challenging problems. But philosophy has further uses in deepening an education, both in college and in the many activities, professional and personal, that follow graduation.

Understanding Other Disciplines. Philosophy is indispensable for this. Many important questions about a discipline, such as the nature of its concepts and its relation to other disciplines, do not belong to that discipline, are not usually pursued in it, and are philosophical in nature. Philosophy of science, for instance, is needed to supplement the understanding of the natural and social sciences which one derives from scientific work itself. Philosophy of literature and philosophy of history are of similar value in understanding the humanities, and philosophy of art is important in understanding the arts. Philosophy is, moreover, essential in assessing the various standards of evidence used by other disciplines. Since all fields of knowledge employ reasoning and must set standards of evidence, logic and epistemology have a general bearing on all these fields.
Development of Sound Methods of Research and Analysis. Still another value of philosophy in education is its contribution to one’s capacity to frame hypotheses, do research, and put problems into manageable form. Philosophical thinking strongly emphasizes clear formulation of ideas and problems, selection of relevant data, and objective methods for assessing ideas and proposals. It also emphasizes development of a sense of the new directions suggested by the hypotheses and questions one encounters in doing research. Philosophers regularly build on both the successes and failures of their predecessors. A person with philosophical training can readily learn to do the same in any field.

The Uses of Philosophy in Non-Academic Careers

It should be stressed immediately that the non-academic value of a field of study must not be viewed mainly in terms of its contribution to obtaining one’s first job after graduation. Students are understandably preoccupied with getting their first job, but even from a narrow vocational point of view it would be short-sighted to concentrate on that at the expense of developing potential for success and advancement once hired. What gets graduates initially hired may not yield promotions or carry them beyond their first position, particularly given how fast the needs of many employers alter with changes in social and economic patterns. It is therefore crucial to see beyond what a job description specifically calls for. Philosophy need not be mentioned among a job’s requirements in order for the benefits derivable from philosophical study to be appreciated by the employer, and those benefits need not even be explicitly appreciated in order to be effective in helping one advance.

It should also be emphasized here that?as recent studies show?employers want, and reward, many of the capacities which the study of philosophy develops: for instance, the ability to solve problems, to communicate, to organize ideas and issues, to assess pros and cons, and to boil down complex data. These capacities represent transferable skills. They are transferable not only from philosophy to non-philosophy areas, but from one non-philosophical field to another. For that reason, people trained in philosophy are not only prepared to do many kinds of tasks; they can also cope with change, or even move into new careers, more readily than others.

Regarding current trends in business, a writer in the New York Times reported that “businessmen are coming to appreciate an education that at its best produces graduates who can write and think clearly and solve problems” (June 23, 1981). A recent long-term study by the Bell Telephone Company, moreover, determined that majors in liberal arts fields, in which philosophy is a central discipline, “continue to make a strong showing in managerial skills and have experienced considerable business success” (Career Patterns, by Robert E. Beck). The study concluded that “there is no need for liberal arts majors to lack confidence in approaching business careers”. A related point is made by a Senior Vice President of the American Can Company:

Students with any academic background are prepared for business when they can educate themselves and can continue to grow without their teachers, when they have mastered techniques of scholarship and discipline, and when they are challenged to be all they can be. (Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1981.)

As all this suggests, there are people trained in philosophy in just about every field. They have gone not only into such professions as teaching (at all levels), medicine, and law, but into computer science, management, publishing, sales, criminal justice, public relations, and other fields. Some professionally trained philosophers are also on legislative staffs, and the work of some of them, for a senior congressman, prompted him to say:

It seems to me that philosophers have acquired skills which are very valuable to a member of Congress. The ability to analyze a problem carefully and consider it from many points of view is one. Another is the ability to communicate ideas clearly in a logically compelling form. A third is the ability to handle the many different kinds of problems which occupy the congressional agenda at any time. (Lee H. Hamilton, 9th District, Indiana, March 25, 1982.)

In emphasizing the long-range benefits of training in philosophy, whether through a major or through only a sample of courses in the field, there are a least two further points to note. The first concerns the value of philosophy for vocational training. The second applies to the whole of life.

First, philosophy can yield immediate benefits for students planning postgraduate work. As law, medical, business, and other professional school faculty and admissions personnel have often said, philosophy is excellent preparation for the training and later careers of the professionals in question. In preparing to enter such fields as computer science, management, or public administration, which, like medicine, have special requirements for post-graduate study, a student may of course major (or minor) both in philosophy and some other field.

The second point here is that the long-range value of philosophical study goes far beyond its contribution to one’s livelihood. Philosophy broadens the range of things one can understand and enjoy. It can give one self-knowledge, foresight, and a sense of direction in life. It can provide, to one’s reading and conversation, special pleasures of insight. It can lead to self-discovery, expansion of consciousness, and self-renewal. Through all of this, and through its contribution to one’s expressive powers, it nurtures individuality and self-esteem. Its value for one’s private life can be incalculable; its benefits for one’s public life as a citizen can be immeasurable.

To Beat the Market: Hire a Philosopher

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

10 January 1999 | The New York Times

by EDWARD WYATT

BALTIMORE, Md. — Perhaps it is the references to the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, the late Argentine author whose metaphysical imagery he uses to illustrate a point about price-to-earnings ratios. Or maybe it is the nods to the philosophy of William James, whose theories are called upon to justify why America Online is a value stock. Certainly some hint is in the “thought experiments” that he calls upon his staff to perform.

Spend even a few minutes talking with William H. Miller III and it becomes clear that he is not a typical mutual fund manager.

The performance of his fund speaks to that. In each of the last eight years, the $6 billion Legg Mason Value Trust has outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. Since the beginning of the 90s, shareholders of the fund have seen their investment grow by 453 percent, or 20.9 percent a year, on average — well ahead of the 17.8 percent annual return of the S&P.

None of the thousands of other mutual fund managers currently plying the trade has equaled that feat; barely 1 in 10, in fact, have beaten the benchmark over the last three years. Anyone else aspiring to the mantle of fund manager of the decade should note that not even Peter Lynch, the legendary former overseer of the Fidelity Magellan fund, ever strung together such a consistent record.

Yet almost nothing that Miller does would seem to fit within the traditional parameters of the religion he claims to practice: “value investing,” the method of buying assets for a small portion of their true worth whose best-known evangelist is Warren E. Buffett.

By contrast, Miller, 48, oversees a portfolio whose two largest holdings are Dell Computer and America Online, stocks whose market values have been hyperinflated by the craze for anything to do with the Internet. Such stocks are all but shunned by strict value types.

That those two stocks account for more than three-quarters of the gains in the Legg Mason Value Trust over the last two and a half years only adds to the skepticism of people who doubt that Miller is anything more than a crowd-follower. Without those investments, Miller might be just another value fund manager, struggling to keep up with a runaway bull market.

At the least, the holdings raise questions for current and prospective investors in his fund — including whether he can realize profits without causing huge tax burdens for fund shareholders.

Soft-spoken and unflappable, Miller expresses confidence in both his methods and the results, steadfastly defending his style as holding to traditional value methods.

“Most people don’t want to figure out what a company is worth,” Miller said. “They want to know where the stock is going. We’re always trying a Rubik’s Cube approach, looking at something from all different directions. We want to know, ‘What’s the best description of what’s going on?‘”

It is an approach he honed in the mid-1970s at Johns Hopkins University as a graduate student — not in business, but in philosophy.

Michael Hooker, a former philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins who is now chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recalls his first impressions of Miller. “Every morning I was the first faculty member to get to work,” Hooker said. “And when I would arrive, Bill would be sitting in the faculty library reading The Wall Street Journal. It was odd.”

Over months of talking to Miller about a dummy portfolio he was managing and hearing Mr. Miller’s excited explanations of the theories of Buffett and Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, Hooker began to discern in the student “an ability to connect the dots where other people don’t even see the dots.”

Hooker encouraged his protege to quit philosophy — before earning the doctorate he had been studying for — and to try his hand at finance.

The principles that have had the greatest influence on Miller are those of William James, the father of the school of philosophy known as pragmatism. James believed that the way one knows that an idea is true is if it is useful, and that knowledge can be rightly understood only in its context. To Miller, that means that the value of companies like America Online and Dell Computer must be considered in light of how technology is changing the ways in which companies do business and people communicate.

For example, technological advances that let companies better control their inventories have taken some of the big swings out of the economy — and, as a result, out of the fortunes of historically cyclical companies, like makers of heavy equipment.

Traditional value investors might be tempted to buy those relatively cheap, cyclical stocks, in anticipation of the next big upturn in the economy. Miller, however, thinks any such swings will be longer in coming and of smaller significance than history teaches.

By contrast, Dell serves companies capitalizing on this new economy — and its own inventory controls are the envy of its industry.

“It is a lot like the change from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy,” Miller said. “It didn’t happen all at once; it happened very subtly, year after year, but the accumulated change was very large.”

That way of thinking also informed the discussion of America Online on a recent blustery December morning at the offices of Legg Mason, hard by Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The evening before, American Online had been selected as the newest addition to the S&P 500. Its stock was certain to open higher, as investors anticipated the surge of buy orders that would come from index funds that track the S&P.

On that morning, Miller was meeting with his team of analysts and portfolio managers, who contribute to the Value Trust but who also manage four other funds, Legg Mason Special Investment Trust, Total Return Trust, American Leading Companies and Focus Trust. The topic was whether America Online’s rising value should lead the fund to sell some of its shares.

The fund had bought the stock in late 1996, when a flood of new subscribers to America Online overwhelmed the capacity of the service’s computers. Investors, fearing that subscribers would flee from the service, sent the shares down 50 percent from their high.

But Lisa Rapuano, an analyst on Miller’s team, believed that Wall Street misunderstood the significance of America Online’s problems. The higher demand meant customers loved the service, she figured — that it was changing the way that millions of people gathered and shared information. She convinced Miller to buy a million shares for the Value Trust.

Now, two years later, America Online’s shares were trading at about $138, about 15 times the $9 or so that Value Trust had paid. Based on Ms. Rapuano’s models, which calculate the immediate value of the future cash flows of America Online’s business, the stock was close to its full value.

But in the longer term, Ms. Rapuano said, America Online’s potential remained great. “The company has a $60 billion market value,” she said. “In our long-term model, this is potentially a gigantic company — $200 billion to $300 billion over the next 10 years. Over the next 12 to 24 months, we shouldn’t have quite so much in AOL, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to have a large position over the 5-to-10 year horizon.” The fund sold a few hundred thousand of its eight million shares that day.

In the roughly two years after Miller bought America Online and Dell Computer for the Value Trust, those stocks grew to account for 14 percent and 9 percent of the fund’s assets, respectively. But even though the fund took in more than $3 billion in new cash from investors over that period — by itself enough to triple the fund’s size — the fund has made no additions to those holdings. On balance, the fund has sold more than $100 million of those stocks since its first purchase.

Still, it is unusual for a fund called the Value Trust to be holding on to stock that trades for 600 times the company’s earnings, as America Online does. The issue is not lost on Miller.

“There are a lot of value funds out there with good long-term records and not-so-good one- and five-year records,” he said. But he said the Value Trust’s superior performance this decade goes beyond Dell and America Online.

In the early 1990s, Miller invested a big portion of the fund in bank and financial stocks, which were depressed because of high interest rates and worries over loans to developing countries. Since then, financial stocks have been among the market leaders, and the fund still counts many of them among its holdings.

In the mid-1990s, the Value Trust snapped up shares of health care companies when they were beaten down by concerns over President Clinton’s health care plan.

“I’ll easily trade no rate of return in the near term for higher confidence that a stock will outperform in the long term,” he said.

There are plenty of examples of that philosophy in the Value Trust’s portfolio. Consider Circus Circus, the casino stock that Miller bought in the first quarter of 1996 — at the same time he bought Dell Computer.

While Dell’s shares have since increased 35-fold, Circus Circus has fallen from the mid-30s to $12. Miller has responded by gradually quadrupling his holdings of Circus Circus, to more than five million shares — more than 5 percent of the company. And recently he has been adding shares of Mirage Resorts and MGM Grand as well.

“The stocks are flat, but the cash flows of gaming companies have been growing,” he explained. With new construction slowing down in Las Vegas, Nev., Miller expects those companies’ cash flows to soar.

Low-priced assets, high cash flow, a business turnaround — all traditional value-investing approaches, Miller points out.

How to detect the signs of change that will lead to big turnarounds in a company’s market value is the subject of an exercise occasionally used by Miller for his team of analysts and portfolio managers. He calls the drills “thought experiments.”

In a recent example, Miller — drawing on the work of Douglas North, the 1993 Nobel laureate in economics — asked the group to think of two continents with the same climate, land mass, indigenous populations and natural resource base that were settled at about the same time. Then, he asked them to figure out why one had created enormous wealth and the other had not.

Like many experiments in a science lab, the “answer” lies as much in the process as in the results. The continents, he explained to his team, are North and South America, and the application of traditional economic theory might lead one to conclude that, because the two continents started with equal assets, they should have been able to create equal levels of wealth.

But when viewed in the context of the ideas and institutions that guided the settlement and development of North and South America, Miller said, those assets have very different values — and the outcomes, of course, have been far different, too.

What does any of that have to do with managing a mutual fund?

“It gives us a framework to think about things,” said Jay Leopold, who follows health care and finance companies for Miller’s team. “He doesn’t cram philosophy down our throats. But he gets us to think about how the context of something affects the anticipated outcome.”

Miller also draws on the work of the Santa Fe Institute, a research organization in New Mexico devoted to studying the science of complexity — things like swarm behavior, the collective actions of groups of bees, ants, birds or portfolio managers.

Just as managers have swarmed to stocks with even a glancing connection to the Internet, so have traditional value investors fled from the high price-earnings ratios that those stocks carry.

“People look at price-earnings ratios like the Aleph,” referring to the Borges short story by the same name. “The Aleph” is a mystical tale of a man who discovers in his cellar a point in space that contains all points in time, a center of infinite knowledge where, Borges writes, “without admixture or confusion, all of the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist.”

To perceive the P/E ratio as an Aleph, a be-all indicator of a company’s value, Miller says, is a “pathetically simple view,” one which would have led him to sell his most successful investments months ago. No simple ratio can tell everything that any investor — value or otherwise — needs to know about a stock.

One of the monumental tasks ahead of Miller is dealing with new investors, who likely believe that the fund’s 40 percent annualized returns over the last four years should continue.

“The probabilities favor those returns being a lot lower in the future,” he said. “Our record looks great right now,” he added. “But I’ve had streaks that look really bad. We could have a streak that makes us look really mediocre.”

In fact, he eschews summing up his legacy. “As William James would say, we can’t really draw any final conclusions about anything.”

How to Get to the Top — Study Philosophy

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Questions of Principle

2 January 1990 | Globe and Mail [Toronto]

by Thomas Hurka

CALGARY – How should Canada educate students to compete successfully in the business world? Some provincial governments think it is by teaching them business.

The Alberta government has announced plans for an “unprecedented” expansion of business education at its three universities. Already, 120 extra students are studying management at the University of Calgary.

Recent evidence suggests this approach is mistaken. We will produce better managers if we educate them first in traditional subjects in the arts and sciences. We may do best of all of we educate them in philosophy.

Each year, thousands of undergraduates write admissions tests for the prestigious graduate programs. There’s the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) for business study, and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) for other fields. A 1985 study for the U.S. Department of Education compared tests of students from different disciplines, with surprising results.

Consider the GMAT, used for admission to MBA programs and, ultimately, to the highest levels of management. Undergraduate business students, whom you would think would be especially well prepared for this test, do badly on it, scoring below average for all test takers. The best results are by math students, followed by philosophy students and engineers.

This is typical. Business students score below average on almost all the tests, as do, excepting engineers, all other students in applied or occupational fields. The best results come from students in the natural sciences and humanities. The study concludes that, on tests measuring aptitude for advanced professional study, “undergraduates who major in professional and occupational fields consistently underperform those who major in traditional arts and science fields.”

The most consistent performers are philosophy students. They are first out of 28 disciplines on one test, second on another, and third on a third. On their weakest test they are still 4.6 per cent above the average, the best performance on a weakest test of any group.

Although data here are less consistent, the superior performance of arts and science students continues after university. According to a book by sociologist Michael Useem, they have more difficulty finding beginning managerial jobs than those with business or professional degrees because they lack specific skills in finance or engineering. When they are hired, it is usually lower in the company hierarchy. Once hired, however, they advance more rapidly than their colleagues.

On average, arts and science graduates end their careers level with business and engineering graduates, having closed the gap. In some companies with less of an engineering or MBA “culture,” they pass them. An AT&T study showed that, after 20 years with the company, 43 per cent of liberal-arts graduates had reached upper-middle management, compared with 32 per cent of engineers. The Chase Manhattan Bank found that 60 per cent of its worst managers had MBAs while 60 per cent of its best managers had BAs. At IBM, nine of the company’s top 13 executives had liberal-arts degrees.

What explains the success of arts and science students? Many arguments for liberal education cite a contemporary cliche — that we live in a time of unprecedented change. If the world is in flux, an applied education will soon be out of date. Better the breadth and flexibility given by general studies.

A better explanation points to what cannot change: the basic elements of reasoning and problem-solving. The study of admissions tests found that students do best “who major in a field characterized by formal thought, structural relationships, abstract models, symbolic languages, and deductive reasoning.” The more abstract a subject, the more it develops pure reasoning skills; and the stronger a person’s reasoning skills, the better he or she will do in any applied field.

This fits the data from business. Corporations report that, though technical skills are most important in low-level managerial jobs, they become less so in middle and top jobs, where the key traits include communications skills, the ability to formulate problems, and reasoning. Liberal-arts education may be weak in the prerequisites for beginning managerial jobs, but provides just what’s needed for success at the top.

This doesn’t mean there’s no place for business education. Canadian industry needs specialized business skills, and our universities should supply them. But in the increasingly competitive world economy there will be a premium on vision, creativity and analytical power, traits better fostered by liberal education.

This points to the recommendation now heard most from chief executive officers: first an arts and science degree in a field like English, physics, or philosophy, then an MBA. First some general intellectual skills, then the specific knowledge needed to apply them to business.

So to train successful business leaders, Canada should strengthen education in the arts and sciences. And this will have another effect. Students educated in the liberal arts will be better rounded individuals, knowing more of the natural world or the history of their culture, and better at reasoning about morality and politics. At the very least, a nice side effect.

Prof. Hurka teaches philosophy at the University of Calgary.

Philosophers Find the Degree Pays Off in Life And in Work

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

26 December 1997 | New York Times

by CAROL MARIE CROPPER

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – What can you do with a philosophy degree?

In an age of M.B.A.’s and computer scientists, more than 4,000 American college students graduate each year with a bachelor’s degree in the ancient discipline. Sometimes their parents and friends wonder what will happen to them.

One thing is certain: Not many of them will go on to make a living as philosophers. Even those who persevere through a doctorate may wind up doing something else. More than 1,000 people with Ph.D’s in philosophy applied for the 448 openings listed in the last year in “Jobs for Philosophers,” said Eric Hoffman, executive director of the American Philosophical Association. And many of those jobs were temporary or nontenure-track teaching positions.

Yet students majoring in philosophy – the study of the principles underlying conduct, thought and knowledge – seem passionately unconcerned.

Shaharyar Khan, a philosophy major at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, is one of a handful of seniors selected to live in the early l9th-century academic village designed here by Thomas Jefferson. He awakens each morning in a dormitory room that opens onto the university’s mist-covered lawn, with the rotunda that Jefferson modeled on the Pantheon rising to his left.

“We look at what we do, how we justify things,” the 22-year-old said of his philosophy classes. “In that there is sublimity and nobility.”

Mr. Khan plans to go to medical school – if he is not seduced by an academic career. He considered majoring in a science but decided he would get enough of that later. Philosophy was his personal luxury. “This was something I could do for myself,” he said

For some, an accidental major can shape careers outside academia.

But what of other philosophy majors? What do they do when confronted with the real world, where there are groceries to buy and mortgages to pay? How do they compete for jobs with all those sensible accounting and engineering majors?

For all the jokes about them, philosophy majors appear to do remarkably well. That, at least, is the conclusion one can draw from an unscientific survey, 20 years after graduation, of the class of 1977 at four schools: Princeton University, the University of Virginia, the University of Nebraska and Texas A & M University.

These 40-somethings fell in love with philosophy almost by accident and went on to careers in other fields. But for the most part they are convinced that their studies, which covered logic and ethics among other topics, helped them in their jobs and their lives.

Their professional success may stem from the fact that philosophy students seem more likely than those with other degrees to attend graduate or professional school. Of 20 philosophy majors interviewed from the four universities, only four had not added a graduate or professional degree.

“I suppose I’m lucky I got into medical school,” said Joseph P. Bruner, who graduated from Nebraska. “I would have probably wound up parking cars otherwise.”

Or maybe not. Jorge Secada, director of undergraduate studies in philosophy at Virginia, said his students almost always found jobs-though not in philosophy. “We are doing better in finding employment for graduates than most majors in the arts and sciences area,” he said. “Apparently people in the real world think philosophy majors are well trained. They are trained to think, to analyze. They express themselves well. They write.”

At Texas A & M, philosophy majors – like math and music students – are benefiting these days from a job market desperate for computer scientists, said Dr. Leigh Turner, director of the university’s career center. Students with such majors are thought to have an aptitude for technology jobs, she said.

In the early days of this century philosophy was thought of as fundamental to a well-rounded liberal arts education, Mr. Hoffman of the American Philosophical Association said. Considered more than just the teachings of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, philosophy was regarded as a broad search for knowledge, encompassing the latest scientific and social theories.

But that was before those concerns became independent fields of study, leaving philosophy with a narrower focus. And it was before college-age baby boomers gave way to a baby bust. Cash-starved colleges started looking for departments to trim. And students, watching the cost of a college education at selective private schools soar, turned into pragmatic consumers weighing the economic value of a diploma that could put them in debt by more than $100,000.

By 1994, one survey found that a philosophy course was required at only 18 percent of colleges, Mr. Hoffman said. Between 1992 and 1996, more than 400 standalone philosophy departments disappeared, according to the Directory of American Philosophers. Schools offering a major in the subject slipped from 683 to 660; those offering even scattered courses plummeted from 947 to 606.

The leap from Aristotle to computers can be a short one.

All this occurred despite the fact that philosophy, in the last 20 years, has taken a more marketable turn as the issues faced in industry and the professions have grown more complex.

Dr. Bruner’s career hints at the changes. He heads a medical team, including two ethicists, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville that developed a surgical procedure for repairing spina bifida in fetuses. The procedure raised several ethical issues – whether, for instance, it is appropriate to perform an operation that could kill a fetus incapable of giving consent to repair a condition that is not life-threatening.

“We’ve published almost as many articles on the ethics issues as on the medical issues,” Dr. Bruner said.

While so many other schools were cutting back, Princeton has maintained what is widely considered one of the best philosophy departments in the country. Its famous graduates – include Carl C. Icahn, the financier, who earned his B.A. in 1957, his senior thesis was titled “The Problem of Formulating an Adequate Explication of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning.” Philosophy majors in the class of 1977 have spent the last two decades building striking resumes-just not in philosophy.

Jay M. Behmke, 42, did what so many philosophy majors do: He became a lawyer. But he built a practical career with a twist. After a few years in corporate law, followed by a year teaching in France as a Fulbright Scholar, Mr. Behmke returned to American wine country and became the chief financial officer at a winery. He then opened a law practice in Sonoma County, Calif.; representing vineyards.

“Some days I’m sorry I didn’t go on as a professor, because I did have a some things to say,” said Mr. Behmke, who taught undergraduate philosophy courses at Yale while attending law school there. “I have a fantasy of making a fortune and retiring early and teaching philosophy.”

More men than women study philosophy; Nanci Heller McAlpin, a freelance writer in Manhattan, was the lone female philosophy major in Princeton’s class of 1977. She knew from the start that she was not earning a practical degree.

“When we entered the department, we were handed a paper and it said, ‘Why not to go to graduate school in philosophy,’ ” Ms. McAlpin recalled.

Such discouragements by Princeton and other schools apparently worked. The number of students earning doctorates in philosophy dropped to 298 in 1995 from 382 in 1976 and dipped as low as 215 in 1984, according to various studies.

But almost 92 percent of those with doctorates in philosophy were employed full time in 1995, compared with 85 percent of those with music Ph.D.’s and 87 percent with Ph.D.’s in art history, according to a study by the National Research Council. The median income for philosophy Ph.D.’s that year was S46,800, compared with median 1995 earnings of $48,100 for engineers and $124,000 for family doctors.

Unlike students who choose a major with a career in mind, philosophers typically fall into the subject by taking a class they enjoy, said Mr. Secada of the University of Virginia. One recent day here, students listened as Prof. James Cargile lectured on the utilitarian theory of justice, which holds that justice can be arrived at by weighing such things as the total happiness an act produces. But if that makes sense, he asked, should the person who enjoys wealth the most have more of it than others? In another class, Richard Rorty, one of the nation’s best-known philosophers, discussed Nietzsche’s thoughts on homosexuality and celibacy.

Like Princeton’s, Virginia’s class of ‘77 produced its share of lawyers, but graduates also headed for such typical philosophers’ occupations as medicine and computing. And some who chose law came to it circuitously.

After graduation, Ralph Gilbert returned to a profession of which Jefferson would have approved. He raised soybeans, sheep and pigs on his family’s North Carolina farm for five years before drought, corn mold and mounting debt drove him from farming into law.

Mr. Gilbert, who is 45, said he still read philosophy and enjoyed philosophical discussions with a friend who is an Episcopal minister. He toys with the idea of going back to school for a divinity degree. But he credits philosophy with helping him neither in farming nor law; it has only improved his life.

“I think it influences the way I go about doing things,” Mr. Gilbert said.

“I think it’s given me a sense of the complications that we face as human l beings. It gives me a sense ofthe beauty and wonder of life. It helps me understand people in dire circumstances.”

Of all the gifts that his philosophy degree has gioven him, said Dr. Bruner, the Nebraska graduate, creativity is probably the most important. Those who majored in science, the headed straight for medical school and years of practice can have a narrow outlook, he said. “They don’t have enough raw data outside their scientific training to provide those insights, those flashes of creativity,” he said.

Philosophy has many strains, of course – not all of them quite so evocative of those moments of Romantic inspiration. Briggs Myrick, a 1977 Texas A&M graduate, became a sales clerk and manager at a hardware store after college. But within three years – and without further training – he was programming computers at the university. The leap was easy, he said: A lot of early computer scientists were philosophers.

“In philosophy, we study logic,” he said. “We have a very mathmatical way of going about it. Computers are a lot like that as well.”

Both philosophers and computer programmers use Boolean logic, Mr. Myrick explained, though philosophers are more likely to call it Aristotelian logic. “Any assertion is either true or false,” he said. “If it is true or false, it can be on or off. And it can be a switch. And computers have a lot of little, tiny switches.”

Of course, philosophy majors work in fields other than law, medicine and computer science-especially if they set out into the working world with just a bachelor’s degree.

One Princeton graduate shelved books in libraries to support his interest in acting before returning to school years later for a master’s degree in library science. One 1977 Virginia graduate sells herbs and flowers; another owns a service station.

Some 1977 philosophy graduates earn less than S30,000 a year, the herb seller expects to clear S6,000 in 1997. But more common are incomes of $50,000 or $60,000, and a few darn more than $200,000.

Money aside, Dr. Bruner figures that his philosophy degree helped make his medical career possible – though there were moments of doubt. The 44-year-old obstetrician still recalls sitting before the admisslons panel at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine, scrambling to explain why he wanted to be a doctor after majoring in philosophy.

“I told them that I could get a medical degree and still, to some extent, practice philosophy,” he said. “But if I stayed in philosophy and tried to practice medicine, they’d probably try to put me in jail.

“Not one of them cracked a smile.”

There It Is . org » philosophy

Principles of Categorization

THE PRINCIPLES

THE VERTICAL DIMENSION OF CATEGORIES: BASIC-LEVEL OBJECTS

Implications for Other Fields

THE HORIZONTAL DIMENSION: INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF CATEGORIES: PROTOTYPES

Effects of Prototypicality on Psychological Dependent Variables

TWO PROBLEMATICAL ISSUES

SUMMARY

REFERENCES

Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find

Role of Letter Order in Parsing Language

New Tack Wins Prisoner’s Dilemma

Can I Get a Job With a Philosophy Degree?

Well-Known Philosophy Majors

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY

General Uses of Philosophy

The Uses of Philosophy in Educational Pursuits

The Uses of Philosophy in Non-Academic Careers

To Beat the Market: Hire a Philosopher

How to Get to the Top — Study Philosophy

Questions of Principle

Philosophers Find the Degree Pays Off in Life And in Work