Referential Categories Research Articles

Referential communication and category acquisition.

Explanations of category coherence include that categories reflect feature correlations in the world, that the human conceptual system is designed to create systematic categories, and that people have theories about the world that bind together seemingly unrelated features. The authors have suggested that the need to establish reference in communication also influences category coherence. This proposal was tested in 2 studies involving a referential communication task. In these studies, consistency was promoted between individuals by communication, which synchronized the category structures of different people. Further, people were focused on the commonalities of objects and on the differences related to the commonalities by communication--a pattern that is compatible with what has been observed in existing categories. These results suggest that categorization research must incorporate communication tasks into the canon of methodologies used to study category structure.

France révolutionnaire, France révolutionnée, France en Révolution : pour une clarification des rythmes et des concepts.

As a contribution to current discussions), the author sets out to delineate three referential categories: revolutionary France, France during the process of revolution and France as a product of revolution. The first one applies to the whole of the social and ideological forces at work in the political process; the second defines the active and the re-active milieu within which the process took place; as for revolutionized France, although its roots go back long before, it concerns the period after Thermidor; a France which is the result of the conservative dream, that of putting an end to the Revolution by finishing it, the ambition of establishing a social order and political stability based on the administration first and foremost of private interests and of private living.