32 This discussion on bachelors exemplifies very well the difference between a formal and a cognitive semantics. It reminds one of the famous problem: If the village barber is the one who shaves all the men who do not shave themselves, then who shaves the village barber? In cognitive terms (and once I put the question to two little children) the answers are many and all reasonable: the barber is a woman, the barber never shaves and has a very long beard, the barber is a trained orangutan, the barber is a robot, the barber is a beardless youth, the barber does not shave but singes off his beard (and so he is known as the Phantom of the Opera), and so on. But on a logical level, if the question is to make sense, we have to imagine a universe made up only of men who shave by definition.
33 On the other hand, and to leave mystic fiction for a moment: at a conference some astronomers are discussing the long defunct star N4, which winked out a million years ago and whose light can be detected only with the aid of a complex apparatus. The astronomers know well how to identify the star, and they associate its name with an MC made up of very sophisticated information. Nevertheless, while they are talking about it, each one has a relatively similar CT of N4 that includes the procedures they follow in order to identify it and the signals (of whatever kind they may be) that they receive when they focus on it.
34 Neisser (1987: 9) talks of cognitive schemata but makes it clear that they are neither categories nor models; in fact they appear as systems of expectations, based on previous experiences, which orient the construction of the perceptual judgment. He does admit, however, that «I cannot say what they are: we will not know how to characterize the structural prerequisites for perception until we are able to describe the information that perceivers pick up. There is little reason to believe that those ‘prerequisite structures’ have much in common with the cognitive models on which categorization depends; there is every reason to believe that they are exquisitely tuned to the ecologically relevant properties of the real world.»
35 In what follows, I have taken into account Rosch 1978, Rosch and Mervis 1975, Rosch et al. 1976, Neisser 1987, Lakoff 1987, Reed 1988, and Violi 1997.
36 One might object that these texts are vitiated by the fact that the subject must respond verbally: I bet that perceptually and emotionally anyone can distinguish a pair of evening trousers from a pair of pink hot pants with the same immediacy with which he distinguishes trousers from a jacket. But I have certainly chosen a sly example, because it is evident that we distinguish a banana from an apple better than we distinguish a rennet from a Golden Delicious.
37 «Since the semantics of a language is not separable from a semantics of the natural world, the schemata that we use to understand the language are not different from those we use to understand the world. If the experience of the world may not be reduced to limited and preformed inventories, the same holds good for the linguistic sense» (Violi 1997, 11.1).
38 Violi (1997: 5.2.2) notes: «Let us think of manufactured objects: a chair, a bed, or a shirt are all objects whose function may be defined by an intensional act on the basis of which a defined motor program and one common to all the objects of that type will be developed. All chairs are objects on which I sit following the same sequence of actions, all glasses are objects from which I drink in the same way, and so on. When I move from this level to the superordinate, the category of furniture for example, I can no longer identify a single motor program, because furniture does not give rise to a single common interaction, but to various different kinds of action.»
This insistence on the role of corporeality in determining both meaning and categorization brings us back to the theme of affordances, and constitutes one of the turning points in contemporary cognitivism with respect to traditional semantics.
39 Reed (1988: 197) wonders why, having elaborated a category of clothes, it is more difficult to recognize a bow tie as clothing than a shirt. It depends on the fact that clothes have been defined as something one puts on to keep warm, and in this case a bow tie would not even be clothing. However, the test would obtain different results if instead of the category of clothing we were to propose to the subject the category of items of dress. But I am afraid that in this case the category would be commercial rather than functional, and so the bow tie would go very well alongside shirts and belts because one buys them in the same shops, or one keeps them with trousers and handkerchiefs in the wardrobe or in the bedroom rather than on the bookshelf or in the kitchen. At a certain level of categorial ability, bicycle and motor car can be put together among the Vehicles, but if the category is objects suitable for birthday presents, the bicycle joins the watch or the scarf and the motor car risks exclusion from the group.
40 Some suggest that if we are asked to draw a triangle, we usually draw an equilateral triangle. I do not intend to discuss whether the matter is due to memories of school days or the fact that both in nature and in culture the triangular forms we see (such as mountains or Egyptian pyramids) are more easily comparable to the equilateral model than the right-angled one (even though in general mountains are somewhat scalene). What makes these experiments scarcely relevant to a discourse on cognitive types as prototypes is their statistical value. Let us suppose that 99% of the population of the world draws triangles as equilaterals. This would leave 1%, practically the entire population of the UK, which would behave differently. Now let us ask a representative of the 99% and a representative of the 1% to decide whether something is triangular rather than square or circular: I imagine there would be consensus. This would tell us that it is not necessary for the CT of the triangle to be identified with the statistically more widespread prototype.
41 Lakoff (1987: 49) distinguishes between categories as kinds and effects of classification, but makes no distinction between kinds and categories. On page 54 he calls cause a category in the sense that there is a prototype of how and why a thing must be considered a cause (an agent does something, a patient undergoes it, their interaction constitutes a single event, part of what the agent does changes the patient’s state, there is a transfer of energy between the agent and the patient, et cetera—all features that strike me as regarding only human causality). Therefore with regard to cause Lakoff talks of category in a Kantian sense; nevertheless the list of frames or grammatical cases supplied to define cause make one think (in Kantian terms) not of the category but of the schema. Once more an ambiguity has appeared that could have been reduced by considering the history of the concept of category with more care.
42 I find it strange that normal subjects did not also define it as something with the shape of a box, difficult to open when in movement or when it stops between one floor and another, seeing that it is precisely these two properties that explain the instinctive claustrophobia that this means of transport inspires in many. Perhaps the whole sample group was made up exclusively of agoraphobics.
43 Lakoff (1987: 66) notes that prototypical effects are real but superficial. They spring from a variety of sources. It is important not to confuse prototypical effects with the structure of the category as it is given by cognitive models. Note the meritorious confusion that Lakoff creates regarding common opinions on the content and possible uses of mother (and his pages seem particularly prophetic, or at least brilliantly pioneering, in the context of the current debates on cloning and artificial insemination).
44 The reader is referred to Violi (1997: 6.13.2) for the difference between categorial prototypicality and the typicality of meaning.
45 The situation is not different from that imagined by Locke for the sensations (Essay II, xxxii, 15): «Neither would it carry any imputation of falsehood to our simple ideas, if, by the different structure of our organs, it were so ordered that the same object should produce in several men’s minds different ideas at the same time; v.g., if the idea that a violet produced in one man’s mind by his eyes were the same that a marigold produced in another man’s, and vice versa. For since this could never be known;…neither the ideas hereby nor the names would be at all confounded, or any falsehood be in either. For, all things that had the texture of a violet producing constantly the idea which he called «blue»; and those which had the texture of a marigold producing constantly the idea which he as constantly called «yellow»; whatever those appearances were in his mind, he would be able regularly to distinguish things for his use by those appearances, and understand and signify those distinctions, marked by the names «blue» and «yellow,» as if the appearances, or ideas in his mind, received from those two
