Abstract
Sixty undergraduate students made category membership decisions for each of 132 candidate exemplar-category name pairs (e.g., chess – Sports) in each of two separate sessions. They were frequently inconsistent from one session to the next, both for nominal categories such as Sports and Fish, and ad hoc categories such as Things You Rescue from a Burning House. A mixture model analysis revealed that several of these inconsistencies could be attributed to criterial vagueness: participants adopting different criteria for membership in the two sessions. This finding indicates that categorization is a probabilistic process, whereby the conditions for applying a category label are not invariant. Individuals have various functional meanings of nominal categories at their disposal and entertain competing goals for ad hoc categories.
Highlights
In 2006 the number of planets in our solar system suddenly dropped from nine to eight
We apply the mixture model from the studies that informed the stimulus selection to the repeated categorization data in order to determine to what extent differences between sessions represent criterial vagueness
For three nominal and three ad hoc categories, participants decided on the category membership of various target items
Summary
In 2006 the number of planets in our solar system suddenly dropped from nine to eight. In 2015 the High Court of Tarbes (France) overruled the earlier decision by the supreme court of appeal (Cour de Cassation) that involuntary homicide cannot be committed on a fetus, effectively changing what it means to be a Person. Both examples serve to show that even in scientific and legal contexts, where precision is arguably of the utmost importance, concepts are vague and the criteria for determining whether an instance belongs in a category or not are subject to change (Egré, 2018). Most of the concepts we use in our daily lives can be argued to be vague
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