creators_name: Harnad, Stevan creators_id: 63 editors_name: Villaroya, Oscar editors_name: Valencia, Leonardo type: bookchapter datestamp: 2005-03-29 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:52 metadata_visibility: show title: Spare Me the Complements: An Immoderate Proposal for Eliminating the "We/They" Category Boundary ispublished: inpress subjects: cog-psy full_text_status: public keywords: category learning, uncomplemented categories, early experience, socialization, critical period, ethnocentrism, we/they distinction abstract: A speculative hypothesis about how to eliminate the "we/they" distinction by rearing children (during early critical years) in "aggregates in flux" instead of in kinship-based families: A category cannot be formed from positive examples only: one must be able to sample both what is and what is not in a category in order to recognise the category at all. The basis for the distinction is the features shared by the members (invariants), and absent from the non-members. In "aggregates in flux," the individual members would be constantly varying (and unrelated, genetically). The only invariant would be that they are all human. date: 2005 date_type: published publication: The Social Brain. Biology of conflicts and cooperation refereed: FALSE referencetext: Harnad, S. (1987, unpublished) Uncomplemented Categories, or, What is it Like to be a Bachelor? 1987 Presidential Address: Society for Philosophy and Psychology. http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/21/34/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 Harnad, S. (2003) Cognition is Categorization. UQaM Summer Institute in Cognitive Sciences on Categorization. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/catconf.html citation: Harnad, Stevan (2005) Spare Me the Complements: An Immoderate Proposal for Eliminating the "We/They" Category Boundary. [Book Chapter] (In Press) document_url: http://cogprints.org/4151/1/we-they.htm document_url: http://cogprints.org/4151/2/we-they.pdf document_url: http://cogprints.org/4151/3/we-they.doc