Information Processing Limits

Abstract

Abstract In this chapter we will examine the implications of Miller’s “;Magical Number 7 ... “; article1 ( 1956) for semantic and decision structures of the sort studied by cognitive anthropology; in doing so, we will relate Miller’s work to Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin’s (1956:chap. 4) discussion of concept-formation strategies. We will be looking at limitations on our ability to process information, at the devices we utilize to get around such limitations, and on the relationship of these devices to the kinds of culturally standardized cognitive structures we have found within the semantics of natural language. I will suggest a cognitive structural explanation of a set of interre lated anthropological findings regarding the nature of complex semantic structures. We will see why early cognitive anthropologists (or ethnoscientists) kept finding one or the other of only two semantic structures: taxonomy-like tree structures (based on elaborated inclusion relations) and componential-like paradigmatic ones (based on elaborated contrast relations). We will explore the differences between the two structures in the relationship of attributes to categories, and we will explore the relative degree of foregrounding of the defining attributes versus the categories themselves in these alternative semantic structures. We will conclude by examining how the same explanation might apply to different kinds oflinguistic and anthropological structures, including syntactic structures and the structures cognitive anthropologists have found to underlie a variety of culturally standardized natural decision processes.