Family Resemblance Concept Research Articles

If engineering function is a family resemblance concept: Assessing three formalization strategies

In this paper we argue that the challenge of the formalization of functions not merely consists of analyzing and formalizing yet another concept; the challenge may also consist of formalizing a concept that is to be taken as a family resemblance concept in the Wittgensteinian sense. We focus on engineering for giving this argument and indicate briefly how the argument can also be given for biological functions. We demonstrate that in engineering there are a number of different meanings attached to the term “function”, and observe that engineers moreover seem to hold that having all these meanings is useful in their field. This observation make plausible that function indeed is to be taken as a family resemblance concept. Then we describe three strategies for the formalization of functions --the revisionary, the overarching and the descriptive strategies --and relate them to a number of the current proposals for this formalization. Assessing the strategies with the meta-ontological goals for formalizations of adequacy and minimality, we argue that if function indeed is to be taken as a family resemblance concept, then the descriptive strategy is to be preferred.

Wittgenstein and the Beginning of Cognitive Semantics

This is an analysis of Wittgenstein's ideas in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations that tries to show that he attempted truth-conditional description of the world in the TLP and, after realizing his failure to do so, resorted to different style of analysis in which he exchanged the 'crystalline purity of logic' for 'rougher ground'. Actually, Wittgenstein slowly accepted the imperfection of semantic description which could readily be shown by his introduction of language games and the concept of family resemblances. All this lead to later conception of prototypes as exemplified by Eleanor Rosch and statements of the type such as a mug is sort of cup. Eventually, I hope to be able to show that Wittgenstein was (conceptually at least) the principal forerunner of cognitive semantics.

Power: A ‘family resemblance’ concept

While Lukes’ view of power as an ‘essentially contested concept’ is a move in the right direction, it does not go far enough because it falls short of arguing for a plural view of power. Power constitutes a ‘family resemblance concept’, with family members forming complex relationships within overlapping language games. Members include, among others: episodic power, dispositional power, systemic power, power to, power over, empowerment, legitimate power and domination. This argument does not entail relativism or that ‘anything goes’, as all usages have to be justified as ‘conceptual tools’, whereby pragmatic criteria of usefulness, rather than essence, define better or worse usage. When moving language games, the relationship between signifier and referent changes, which leads to confusion, unless the family resemblance nature of power is understood. In the literature, the most significant confusion has taken place between sociological analytic and normative political theory language games.

In Word and Deed: Assessing the Strength of Progressive Catholicism in Latin America, 1960-1970s

Despite the abundant research on liberation theology and religious change in Latin America, there is little agreement regarding how to assess the political orientation of national churches. This paper reviews previous strategies and proposes that any new approach should do three things. First, the strength of liberation theology should be assessed holistically, that is, by focusing on the official statements and organizational practices of bishops, priests, nuns, and laity. Second, liberation theology should be approached as a family resemblance concept and not a classic concept. Third, while most scholars identify national churches in nominal terms, I argue liberation theology varies along a continuum, from strong to weak and that its strength varies over time. The cases of Chile, Mexico, and Colombia are presented. The paper closes with a call for future research.

Microbiology and the species problem

This paper examines the species problem in microbiology and its implications for the species problem more generally. Given the different meanings of ‘species’ in microbiology, the use of ‘species’ in biology is more multifarious and problematic than commonly recognized. So much so, that recent work in microbial systematics casts doubt on the existence of a prokaryote species category in nature. It also casts doubt on the existence of a general species category for all of life (one that includes both prokaryotes and eukaryotes). Prokaryote biology also undermines recent attempts to save the species category, such as the suggestion that species are metapopulation lineages and the idea that ‘species’ is a family resemblance concept.

‘Sport’ in Germany – from an ontological category to a concept of current times

The German and English linguistic zones have a great variety of definitions when referring to the concept of sport (Willimczik, 2001). However, the question of the linguisticphilosophic grounds on which this argument is based remains open. In addition, the perspective of both sociological observations and empirical-inductive analysis, accepts the coexistence of different sports models (Rittner, 1984) but fails to provide an available justification or theoretical basis for this. On a linguistic-philosophical basis, this article empirically reviews the scientific empirical model of prototypes, taking as a starting point the analysis of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance: 1. to what extent is sport a concept of family resemblance in Wittgenstein’s sense, and what relations of similarity exist in the concepts of work, art, play and health care; 2. what models of sport exist in ordinary language; and 3. what resemblance different sports models have with the concepts of work, art, play and health care? The results show that the concept of sport is not clearly defined in the sense of a family resemblance, but rather that its frontiers are quite frayed. However, it possesses a significant nucleus directed at high performance sport. Six models of sport could be defined as prototypes: traditional sport, professional high performance sport, hobbies close to sport, exhibition sport, experience sport and sport for health.

Conceptualising hegemonic legitimacy

AbstractWhat is international legitimacy and whence does it stem? What entities seek it and why, and who grants or withholds it? How might the different meanings of the concept be reconciled? This article argues that Family Resemblance Concept (FRC) methods are particularly well-suited to explicating the complex meanings associated with this multidimensional concept. We start with a basic level definition based on subjective perceptions and beliefs, the normative quality of oughtness, and the idea of consent. We then expand this definition by developing several secondary-level dimensions: shared values, constitutionalism (consisting of two forms of process legitimacy), and outcome legitimacy. At the indicator level, we examine 14 different survey questions asked in international public opinion polls to provide a tentative empirical glimpse of how our FRC version of legitimacy could be operationalised and tested. The paper concludes with a discussion of the usefulness of the FRC scheme in imposing some order on the legitimacy concept and in illuminating the recent legitimacy problems afflicting the United States.

Wittgenstein and the memory debate

In this paper, I survey the impact on neuropsychology of Wittgenstein's elucidations of memory. Wittgenstein discredited the storage and imprint models of memory, dissolved the conceptual link between memory and mental images or representations and, upholding the context-sensitivity of memory, made room for a family resemblance concept of memory, where remembering can also amount to doing or saying something. While neuropsychology is still generally under the spell of archival and physiological notions of memory, Wittgenstein's reconceptions can be seen at work in its leading-edge practitioners. However, neuroscientists, generally, are finding memory difficult to demarcate from other cognitive and noncognitive processes, and I suggest this is largely due to their considering automatic responses as part of memory, termed nondeclarative or implicit memory. Taking my lead from Wittgenstein's On Certainty, I argue that there is only remembering where there is also some kind of mnemonic effort or attention, and, therefore, that so-called implicit memory is not memory at all, but a basic, noncognitive certainty.

The definition of alliancing in construction as a Wittgenstein family-resemblance concept

There has been increasing interest in the concept of alliancing in construction stemming from the late 1990s. In spite of the fact that project partnering is a widely understood concept, the same is not true for alliancing. By using Nyström’s similar approach to define construction partnering, this paper focuses on alliancing and family-resemblance and makes two contributions to the concept of alliancing in construction. The first one is to clearly distinguish amongst general prerequisites, hard (contractual) and soft (relationship-based) elements, and goals when discussing the concept. For the sake of thoroughly understanding what is specific about alliancing, the focus ought to be on the hard (contractual) and soft (relationship-based) elements, which are identified through a literature review. The second one is to make use of the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of family-resemblance when defining the alliancing concept. His idea is that a complicated concept can be understood as a network of overlapping similarities. It is concluded, based on the literature review, that there are two necessary hard (contractual) elements – formal contract and real gain-share/pain-share arrangement, and three essential soft (relationship-based) elements, trust, long-term commitment, and cooperation and communication in construction alliancing, and that a number of different elements can be added to constitute a specific variant of alliancing. This provides an innovative and useful method to define the vague and versatile concept of alliancing in construction in a flexible and structured way. By doing so, industrial practitioners may find the alliancing sunflower model useful in the procurement phase of a building and construction project, particularly if needed, as a description of the concept and as a common starting point for discussions between a client and a contractor on how to procure a specific alliancing projects, thus avoiding any misinterpretations of what an alliancing project is.

Love and Service in Twelfth Night and the Sonnets

theoretical transformation of Shakespeare studies some twenty years ago, scholars have been reluctant to engage with either the word or the concept in Shakespeare's work. A pair of terms that now regularly do service in its placepower and desire-have replaced love. The word is impossibly general and vague, while power and desire, properly theorized, have promised to strip of its murkiness and sentimentality. They have enabled us to shift our attention from a relatively naive and common-sense obsession with what characters feel to the structural conditions that allow such feelings to be manipulated in relations of power and subjection. Desire and power thus assure entry into the history and politics of sexual relations that positively debars. Their critical keenness permits them to reveal the structural reality underlying talk of love. But we need to take care when we reduce one concept to another. Such a transformation, whereby one argues that love is not love-being instead desire, formations of power, ideological obfuscation of real relations, and so on-runs the risk of simplifying or distorting the concept as it does its work in the complex interactions of Shakespeare's poetry and plays. Such reductions may be analytically illuminating, but when they begin to supplant the original concept, they generally lose more than they gain. It is curious that now, within a critical milieu so committed to an historical understanding of texts, we have replaced words that Shakespeare uses frequently with ones he seldom uses and whose theoretical inflections he would have found strange. Rather than offering a refreshed, overarching concept of in Shakespeare or the early modern period, or even attempting to recover a unifying notion peculiar to Shakespeare's time, I wish to look more carefully at how the word is used in Twelfth Night and in Sonnets 26, 57, 58, and 120. Love is what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a family-resemblance concept: that is to say, it has no single, core meaning in all of its separate uses.1 Instead it produces a network of meanings, each of which may in turn be

Why does the species problem still persist?

Despite many years of discussion, the species problem has still not been adequately resolved. Why is this the case? Here I discuss two recent suggested answers to this question that place the blame on the species problem's empirical aspects or on its philosophical aspects. In contrast, I argue that neither of these two faces of the species problem constitute the principal cause of the species problem's persistence. Rather, they are merely symptoms of the real cause: the species problem has not yet gone away because of a failure to recognize that not one but a number of distinct concepts are at the heart of the problem. To illustrate this point, a recently proposed solution to the problem is examined: the suggestion to understand the concept of species as a family resemblance concept.

Species as family resemblance concepts: the (dis-)solution of the species problem?

The so-called "species problem" has plagued evolutionary biology since before Darwin's publication of the aptly titled Origin of Species. Many biologists think the problem is just a matter of semantics; others complain that it will not be solved until we have more empirical data. Yet, we don't seem to be able to escape discussing it and teaching seminars about it. In this paper, I briefly examine the main themes of the biological and philosophical literatures on the species problem, focusing on identifying common threads as well as relevant differences. I then argue two fundamental points. First, the species problem is not primarily an empirical one, but it is rather fraught with philosophical questions that require-but cannot be settled by-empirical evidence. Second, the (dis-)solution lies in explicitly adopting Wittgenstein's idea of "family resemblance" or cluster concepts, and to consider species as an example of such concepts. This solution has several attractive features, including bringing together apparently diverging themes of discussion among biologists and philosophers. The current proposal is conceptually independent (though not incompatible) with the pluralist approach to the species problem advocated by Mishler, Donoghue, Kitcher and Dupré, which implies that distinct aspects of the species question need to be emphasized depending on the goals of the researcher. From the biological literature, the concept of species that most closely matches the philosophical discussion presented here is Templeton's cohesion idea.

Kuhn's Account Of Family Resemblance: A Solution To The Problem Of Wide-Open Texture

It is a commonly raised argument against thefamily resemblance account of concepts that, on thisaccount, there is no limit to a concept's extension.An account of family resemblance which attempts toprovide a solution to this problem by including bothsimilarity among instances and dissimilarity tonon-instances has been developed by the philosopher ofscience Thomas Kuhn. Similar solutions have beenhinted at in the literature on family resemblanceconcepts, but the solution has never received adetailed investigation. I shall provide areconstruction of Kuhn's theory and argue that hissolution necessitates a developmental perspective withbuilds on both the transmission of taxonomies betweengenerations and a progressive development throughhistory.

Religion, Philosophy and Family Resemblances

Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances has been adopted by some writers either to explain the use of the word ‘religion’ or to advocate a use in the context of a definition. The purpose of this definition is supposedly to avoid an essentialist definition of religion such as ‘belief in God or gods’ which is seen as too parochially tied to Judaeo-Christian theistic origins of the word, while at the same time guaranteeing a distinctive role for religion as a universally applicable analytical concept. However, if an essentialist definition is not smuggled in for the purpose of maintaining a distinction between the ‘religion’ family and other neighbouring families such as ideologies, worldviews, values or symbolic systems, then the family becomes so indefinite that the word ceases to pick out any distinctive aspect of human culture. And this definitional dilemma in fact reflects the actual use of the word ‘religion’ by the scholarly community. Analysis of ‘religion’ texts shows that the word is used in such a large range of contexts that it is devoid of analytical value. Consequently, there is an obligation on the community of scholars to reconceptualize the wide and valuable range of work which is being carried out in ‘religion’ departments.

Philosophy in Different Cultural Contexts

The question to which I seek here to address myself may be formulated in the following way. Is philosophy to be thought of as essentially one and the same subject in all its different manifestations, carried on, certainly, in noticeably differing ways by different people at different times and in different places, but to be understood nevertheless as consisting of one overall body of knowledge? Or should the term ‘philosophy’ be regarded rather as standing for a ‘family resemblance concept’, and the family in question as containing among its members some who may be hardly capable of establishing any mutually agreed channels of communication with each other? In what follows I shall try to display, if not necessarily to disentangle, some of the underlying complexities on which, as it seems to me, answers to these questions may depend.

The Definition of ‘Game’

Besides its intrinsic interest, the definition of ‘game’ is important for three reasons. Firstly, in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations ‘game’ is the paradigm family resemblance concept. If he is wrong in thinking that ‘game’ cannot be defined, then the persuasive force of his argument against definition generally will be considerably weakened. This, in its turn, will have important consequences for our understanding of concepts and philosophical method. Secondly, Wittgenstein's later writings are full of analogies drawn from games—chess alone is mentioned scores of times—and a proper understanding of ‘game’ can lead us to exercise more caution when considering the parallels between games and non-games. Thirdly, games and play are intriguingly and closely related to art and ritual, and an analysis of games can throw considerable light on both of the latter.

Genre theory and family resemblance—revisited

In the following discussion I will examine the application of Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblance to genre theory. Despite its popularity among literary theorists, there is sometimes a discrepancy between the loose concept of family resemblance, at least in its negative-radical version, and the practical assumptions made about genres. In order to overcome the inadequacies of existing applications of the concept, I will propose two ways in which Wittgenstein's concept can be fruitfully applied to genre theory. First, by using certain working hypotheses in cognitive psychology, based on the concept of family resemblance, I will argue that literary genres are perceived as structured categories, with a ‘hard core’ consisting of prototypical members. These prototypical members are characterized by the fact that they bear a relatively high degree of resemblance to each other. Second, by focusing on the analogy between the internal structure of literary genres and that of families one can establish a ‘genealogical’ line of literary genres, i.e., the series of writers who have participated in shaping, reshaping and transmitting the textual heritage established by the ‘founding father’ of the genre, including the dialectical relationship of ‘parents’ and ‘children’ in genre history.

Findes der en vårdsubstans? En sygeplejens kærne?

In her book "Vårdandets Ide" the Finnish nurse, Katie Eriksson puts forward the thesis, that all kind af caring activities do have a common core. To establish this thesis professor Eriksson introduces the Aristotelian notion of an essence: Different kinds of caring activities do have a common set of essential properties constituting the act of caring. In this article we submit a thesis to the contrary: There may exist no set of essential properties common to all kind of caring activities: The belief is induced in us, that there may exist some common core to all caring activities, because the same term, namely "caring", is being used as a general term to cover a wide field of very different kinds of activities. Instead of the traditional Aristotelian craving for generality issuing in the notion of an essence, we suggest the use of the more modern Wittgensteinian concept of a family resemblance: There may be no common core but a set of family resemblances among the different kinds of caring activities. Instead of an abstract philosophical search for the common core of caring activities, we propose nurses to look at the actual use of the term "to care", thereby circumscribing the subject matter of caring. It goes without saying, that this article contains a good deal of philosophical arguments including, of course, an introduction to some basic Aristotelian notions, fundamental distinctions in the theory of definition, and finally the Wittgensteinian concept of family resemblance.

Analytic and holistic modes of learning family-resemblance concepts.

Three studies examined how individuals learn concepts structured according to family-resemblance principles. The materials were cartoon faces varying in the attributes of hair, mustache, ears, and nose. In contrast to previous studies purporting to show holistic modes of learning family-resemblance concepts, the present studies indicate that many individuals learn such concepts by an analytic, attribute-plus-exception rule. The attribute-plus-exception rule characterized the learning shown by adults under both intentional (Studies 1 and 2) and incidental (Study 3) learning conditions and by children under intentional learning conditions (Study 2). There was no evidence to indicate that a holistic mode is a more primitive one, since it did not occur more frequently among children or adults under incidental learning conditions. It is suggested that the extent to which holistic or analytic modes of learning are observed will be found to depend on an interaction among stimulus, task, and observer factors.

The classification of personality disorder: I. The choice of category concept.

Some common clinical statements about patients with personality disorder are examined for their implications in the choice of category concepts for classifying personality. Clinicians seem to assume that personality categories are imprecise and that membership is probabilistic. These assumptions run counter to those of current classifications. The fact that most cases of personality disorder show features of more than condition creates difficulties for categorical systems. Dimensional systems are frequently proposed as a solution to this problem. Such an approach is rejected at the present time since there is no consensus regarding basic dimensions. Polythetic and prototypic categories are examined as alternatives. It is suggested that prototypic categorization provides an approach that is more in accord with clinical judgement. This approach, based upon Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances, is better able to accommodate the imprecise or fuzzy nature of personality categories, although it does require some modification to the way categories are defined, and to the way diagnostic reliability is assessed.