Concepts and Categorization

Goldstone, R. L., Kersten, A., & Cavalho, P. F. (2012).  Concepts and Categorization.  In A. F. Healy & R. W. Proctor (Eds.) Comprehensive handbook of psychology, Volume 4: Experimental psychology.  (pp. 607-630).   New Jersey: Wiley.

Issues related to concepts and categorization are nearly ubiquitous in psychology because of people’s natural tendency to perceive a thing as  something. We have a powerful impulse to interpret our world. This act of interpretation, an act of “seeing something as  X” rather than simply seeing it (Wittgenstein, 1953), is fundamentally an act of categorization. The attraction of research on concepts is that an extremely wide variety of cognitive acts can be understood as categorizations (Murphy, 2002).

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