creators_name: Harnad, Stevan creators_id: 63 editors_name: Cohen, Henri editors_name: Lefebvre, Claire type: bookchapter datestamp: 2003-06-19 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:18 metadata_visibility: show title: Cognition is categorization ispublished: pub subjects: cog-psy subjects: comp-sci-robot full_text_status: public keywords: categorization, cognition, learning, categorical perception, invariants, Borges, Watanabe, Fodor, Chomsky note: Paper presented at UQˆM Summer Institute in Cognitive Sciences on Categorisation 2003 http://www.unites.uqam.ca/sccog/liens/program.html abstract: We organisms are sensorimotor systems. The things in the world come in contact with our sensory surfaces, and we interact with them based on what that sensorimotor contact “affords”. All of our categories consist in ways we behave differently toward different kinds of things -- things we do or don’t eat, mate-with, or flee-from, or the things that we describe, through our language, as prime numbers, affordances, absolute discriminables, or truths. That is all that cognition is for, and about. date: 2005-07 date_type: published publication: Handbook of Categorization publisher: Elsevier refereed: FALSE referencetext: Biederman, I. & Shiffrar, M. M. (1987) Sexing day-old chicks: A case study and expert systems analysis of a difficult perceptual-learning task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition 13: 640 - 645. ftp://geon.usc.edu/Articles/1987/Sexing%20Day-Old%20Chicks.PDF http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/richardh/chicken.htm Borges, J.L. (1962) Funes el memorioso http://www.bridgewater.edu/~atrupe/GEC101/Funes.html Cangelosi, A. & Harnad, S. (2001) The Adaptive Advantage of Symbolic Theft Over Sensorimotor Toil: Grounding Language in Perceptual Categories. Evolution of Communication 4(1) 117-142 http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/20/36/index.htm Chomsky, N. (1976) In Harnad, Stevan and Steklis, Horst D. and Lancaster, Jane B., Eds. Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech, page 58. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Fodor, J. A. (1975) The language of thought. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Fodor, J. A. (1981) RePresentations. Cambridge MA: MIT/Bradford. Fodor, J. A. (1998). In critical condition: Polemical essays on cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. (Currently published by Lawrence Eribaum, Hillsdale, NJ http://cognet.mit.edu/MITECS/Entry/gibson1 Goldstone, R.L., (1994) Influences of categorization on perceptual discrimination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 123: 178Ð200 Goldstone, R.L. (2001) The Sensitization and Differentiation of Dimensions During Category Learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 130: 116-139 Harnad, S. (1987) Category Induction and Representation, In: Harnad, S. (ed.) (1987) Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition . New York: Cambridge University Press. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/15/72/index.html Harnad, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D 42: 335-346. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/06/15/index.html Harnad, S. (2000) Minds, Machines, and Turing: The Indistinguishability of Indistinguishables. Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 9(4): 425-445. (special issue on "Alan Turing and Artificial Intelligence") http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/16/index.html Harnad, S. (2001) No Easy Way Out. The Sciences 41(2) 36-42. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/23/index.html Harnad, S. (2003) Categorical Perception. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/catperc.html Harnad, S. (2003) Symbol-Grounding Problem. Encylopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/symgro.htm Livingston, Kenneth and Andrews, Janet and Harnad, Stevan (1998) Categorical Perception Effects Induced by Category Learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 24(3):732-753 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00006883/ Luria, A. R. (1968) The Mind of a Mnemonist. Harvard University Press http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~phil158a/memory/luria.htm Miller, George (1956) The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. Psychological Review 63:81-97 http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000730/ Rosch, E. & Lloyd, B. B. (1978) Cognition and categorization. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum Associates Steklis, Horst Dieter and Harnad, Stevan (1976) From hand to mouth: Some critical stages in the evolution of language, In: Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech (Harnad, Stevan, Steklis , Horst Dieter and Lancaster, Jane B., Eds.), 445-455. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/08/66/index.html Watanabe, S., (1985) "Theorem of the Ugly Duckling", Pattern Recognition: Human and Mechanical. Wiley http://www.kamalnigam.com/papers/thesis-nigam.pdf Whorf, B.L. (1956) Language, Thought and Reality. (J.B. Carroll, Ed.) Cambridge: MIT http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/Whorf/blwquotes.html citation: Harnad, Stevan (2005) Cognition is categorization. [Book Chapter] document_url: http://cogprints.org/3027/1/catconf.html