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The theory-based model of categorization posits that concepts are represented as theories rather than as feature lists. Thus, it is particularly interesting that the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), establishes a set of atheoretical guidelines for diagnosis in the domain of mental disorders. Five experiments investigated how clinicians handle an atheoretical nosology. Clinical psychologists' causal theories for DSM-IV disorders and their responses on diagnostic and memory tasks were measured. Participants were more likely to diagnose a hypothetical patient with a disorder if that patient had causally central rather than causally peripheral symptoms according to their theory of the disorder. They also showed biased memory for the causally central symptoms. Clinicians are cognitively driven to form and apply theories despite decades of training and practice with the DSM's atheoretical guidelines. Clinical Psychologists' Theory-Based Representations of Mental Disorders Predict their Diagnostic Reasoning and Memory The theory-based view of categorization proposes that concepts are represented as theories or causal explanations. Murphy and Medin (1985) suggested that our nave theories about the world hold the features of a concept together in a cohesive package. For instance, a layperson's concept of anorexia not only contains the features "fear of becoming fat" and "refuses to maintain minimal body weight," but also the notion that the fear of becoming fat helps cause the refusal to maintain minimal body weight (Kim & Ahn, 2002). Indeed, a growing body of evidence supports the notion that the human mind constantly seeks out rules and explanations that make sense of incoming data concerning its surroundings, and forms concepts based on its theories about the ...

this paper is to examine how pervasive the effect of memory for a reference set is and how memory is used for naming. Specifically, we investigated how naming an ambiguous object would be affected by recent exposure to common and familiar objects that vary in their similarity to the target object and in their typicality

We evaluate three theories of categorization in the domain of artifacts. Two theories are versions of psychological essentialism; they posit that artifact categorization is a matter of judging membership in a kind by appealing to a belief about the true, underlying nature of the object. The first version holds that the essence can be identified with the intended function of objects. The second holds that the essence can be identified with the creator's intended kind membership. The third theory is called "minimalism" (Strevens, 2001a). It states that judgments of kind membership are based on beliefs about causal laws, not beliefs about essences. We conclude that each theory makes unnecessary assumptions in explaining how people make everyday classifications and inductions with artifacts. Essentialist theories go wrong in assuming that the belief that artifacts have essences is critical to categorization. All theories go wrong in assuming that artifacts are treated as if they belong to stable, fixed kinds. Theories of artifact categorization must contend with the fact that artifact categories are not stable, but rather depend on the categorization task at hand. 3 Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that object categorization is a matter of assigning kind membership on the basis of a belief about the true, underlying nature of the object. Most of the discussion of psychological essentialism has concerned judgments about naturally occurring entities and their classification into natural kinds. Strevens (2001a) and Rips (2001) both make convincing cases against an essentialist view of everyday categorization for naturally occurring entities. Strevens argues instead for a minimalist view. The minimalist view assumes that categorization is a matter of judging kind me...

We investigate the problem of finding informative superordinates in a broad-coverage taxonomy of nominal concepts. We present results from a study which shows that speakers often exhibit strong preferences on what superordinate is more informative, together with a solid bias for specific classes. We then define the task of identifying the properties that characterize such concepts in the taxonomy as a ranking problem. We identify several such properties which are related to properties of basic concepts. While these properties provide accurate sources of information for identifying the most useful superordinate, their interaction remains obscure.