Deriving Categories to Achieve Goals

TL;DR: This chapter discusses that categorization focuses on the issue of access and the roles that categories play in the cognitive system following their access, and proposes that goal-derived categories provide sets of instantiations for frame attributes during planning and common taxonomic categories constitute the building blocks of world models.

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses that categorization focuses on the issue of access. Prototype models, exemplar models, and connectionist models are all attempts to address this issue. Certainly, the issue of access is important and challenging, and solving it has significant implications for both theoretical and applied research. Models of categorization seem to view categorization as an end in itself. The purpose of categorization is not to know an entity's category. Instead, the purpose of categorization is to identify information in memory that provides useful inferences. Upon accessing a category for an entity, a tremendous amount of knowledge becomes available that is useful in a variety of ways. This knowledge may specify the origins of the entity, its physical structure, its probable behavior, its implications for the perceiver's goals, or actions for interacting with it successfully. Accessing a category is not an end in itself but is instead the gateway to knowledge for understanding an entity and interacting with it appropriately. The chapter focuses on the roles that categories play in the cognitive system following their access. For example, it has been proposed that goal-derived categories provide sets of instantiations for frame attributes during planning and that common taxonomic categories constitute the building blocks of world models. To make significant progress, it is necessary to explore important issues for which meticulous answers do not exist initially but exist eventually.