Today, ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, we are talking about categories; groups of things and how we think about them. A nice lady named Eleanor Rosch once taught me about categories of things, how we mentally group things and define people, places, and things, nouns, using two concepts: prototypes and exemplars. She also tried to explain how these concepts lend themselves to the practice of compassion and love for all living things.
An exemplar, like the word suggests, is an example of something that fits in a category, it is a single object or concept, person or other thing that exemplifies or is a good example of something that fits a certain definition. For instance, the “word” word is a good example of a word. It is made up of letters and it is a combination of letters forming a symbol that points to or stands for a concept, that concept being a symbol that has shared (between people speaking the same language) meaning. A simpler example comes from thinking about fruits and vegetables.
A fruit is something that grows around seeds on plants, bushes, and trees. A blueberry is a tiny fruit with even tinier seeds, a mango is a bigger fruit with one big giant seed and both of these things are round. The roots and flowers of plants, bushes, and trees can also be eaten like fruit can but they do not have seeds and are usually less spherical and more cylindrical. Potatoes are kept with vegetables in the supermarket as are tomatoes, but potatoes and tomatoes are respectively considered a starch and a fruit. Potatoes and tomatoes are not (the best) examples of veggies but often fall in this category when we group fruits, veggies, and other plant-based foods.
Plant-based protein goods are kept in the frozen section of the grocery store because vegetarians and vegans want meat-eaters to try veggie patties, but that’s a different story. Point being: when teaching kids about fruits and veggies, we stick to exemplars like apples, that clearly have seeds and grow from trees and are round, and spinach, that is more a part of plants, has no seeds, is green, clearly is shaped differently than fruit, etc. Apples and spinach are exemplars in our minds from an early age, they are go-to nouns that easily, without debate, fit the categories of fruits and vegetables. Also, they are real tangible things we can actually experience, taste, touch, and smell.
Anyway, we get that an exemplar is a single instance that clearly fits a category and every category has exceptions that either seem like a good fit but are not or do not seem like they fit but do. Of course one thing, like a person, which is way harder to define than a fruit or vegetable, can fit in multiple categories. Liberals do not like categorizing people because it leads to blanket statements about groups of people being used to define individuals and conservatives think this is ridiculous. People with dissociative personality disorders tend to understand and drive themselves crazy seeing both perspectives. Another way we think about things and their categories is via prototypes.
A prototype is something that does not actually exist and is an idealized instance of a category. Thinking about numbers and number theory, let us say we are looking at prime numbers, which are numbers that can only be divided evenly by themselves or the number one but there is no most prime-y prime number. The number one is a special case that cannot be divided by another number than itself and one meaning one and itself are the same thing. Other prime numbers can be divided evenly by two numbers, one can only be divided evenly by one so it is special and perhaps the most prime, prime number of them all. That aside, a prototype is the definitive member of a category, it is not just a good example, it is the primary, best example; a perfect fit and we form it by essentially combining examples, morphing them together, to form an idealized prototype.
For example, what is a human being? A person is a creature that walks on two legs, gives birth to live young, speaks a language, is bilaterally symmetrical, has two eyes two ears a nose and a mouth and generally is believed to think thoughts, feel feelings, and enact behaviors; they are mammals and animals that are known through the shared use of symbols to be self-aware and know about their own mortality, and are medium-hairy; not as hairy as a monkey or a bear but more hairy than a snake or bird. Some people, however, do not walk, some cannot speak, others are missing a finger. Some people are very hairy almost like an ape, some people have brown eyes, other people have blue eyes, others are blind and can have milky eyes. Before getting too depressing with it, let’s pick apart the word. But first…
When we teach kids about living things we eventually tell them that birds are different from reptiles and amphibians that are different from mammals and we teach them that though having hair differentiates most mammals from birds and snakes, whales and dolphins are mammals too because they don’t lay eggs like the rest of the non-microscopic, non-plant world. What does a prototypical mammal look like then, when some walk on two legs, some have leathery skin, and the platypus lays eggs? It is easier to illustrate when talking about groups of people.
When something is prototypical it is both typical and exemplary, it is the mold, the definition almost of a category but the idealized, perfect version of things do not exist but in the imagination. What is the prototypical human but a purely androgynous being that has a nose that is medium-sized and in the middle of the spectrum from curvy to straight, button-nose to pointy, with eyes that are a mix of every color or somewhere between dark brown and light brown, deep blue and light blue, etc., etc? When people say humans were made in G-d’s image is this what they mean? That there is a perfect mold of a person that was fashioned or imagined by an omnipotent force that created everything in this way, as an ideal that the earth and its denizens can only fall short of? Even without belief in such a being, everything is relative, what is the perfectly formed human, what is the ideal? Short of people we historically call prophets or messiahs, buddhas and such, who among us looks and acts perfectly? Nobody. However, we all have an ideal in our minds to strive for or that we find most attractive.
Research has shown that the most attractive faces are those whose features are a certain distance apart so that for instance the ratio of the distance from pupil to bridge of nose and bridge of nose to where the lips come together is about 1.6. Furthermore, the more pictures one morphs together, the closer the image of a face will get to this ratio and the more attractive it will be, meaning the face that does not actually exist but is a combination of a bunch of faces ends up the most idealized face. Speaking again of liberals and conservatives, who is the prototypical liberal and conservative? Think of one of your friends, who are they, do we judge them by specific instances of their behavior or do we know them because they exhibit patterns? All this is to again draw the comparison between exemplars and prototypes [and to put you to sleep].
It is interesting to think about people as a morph of different instances of behavior that then puts them in a category. Someone has traveled all over the world we would call an existentialist, unless their tendency to want to stay at home has been demonstrated more. Meaning: based on if someone knows another person well or not, they would make different categorizations. Let’s say I know you traveled to Japan from Europe and are a US citizen but I do not know that ever since then you don’t like traveling even to other counties in your state, I have an example of behavior I’m taking to be highly representative of all of your behavior and not knowing that typically you’re a homebody, so I call you an existentialist.
In social psychology, the study of the effect of people on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, a prototype is the set of traits that defines a group. An exemplar would be an instance, a person, that exists, and fits the definition in some way. A prototype is an ideal that members can strive to be like. The most prototypical Christ-ian was the founder of the religion, the messianic figure whose birth many celebrate at Christ-mas time, a person whose example many try to follow. If a person goes to church on Sundays they are by most considered to be in the category but none would claim to be perfect examples. Priests are prototypical members of the category because they are presumed to follow H-s teachings to the letter. Though they too are not perfect, research shows that leaders including probably religious ones are considered to be more prototypical group members. So what is the point?
The moral of the story: People like creating different mental baskets to make sense of their experiences with by categorizing them. We tend to have an idea of what are better or worse examples of different categories that people like to form. We have in our minds also an ideal that defines categories. There is no such thing as a prototypical fruit other than what we can imagine as the most fruit-like fruit, a perfectly oval thing with the perfect balance of sour and sweet flavor, that is a mix of all the colors ripe fruit can be, etc. So there are real tangible instances, and then there is the ideal. There is the prototypical apple that is the most apple-like then there are the ones we buy from the store or see rotting on the ground (some apples don’t look like apples eventually) that are more-or-less your typical apple. With each category come the specific instances we can recall from experience and the idealized one we can imagine.
What is a person? Are they the traits we extrapolate from all their behavior or do we define them by specific moments where they acted a certain way? We tend to judge people both ways and both can provide accuracy when predicting how someone will act in a given situation. But, we should strive to give people a chance always to show who they are without preconception or prediction. Otherwise we will usually get what we want to see regardless of how it negatively affects the person we are judging. Let us try to forgive people their trespasses and debts and understand each example of behavior from a person does not have to be how they act all the time; maybe they were under stress, maybe they need someone to have patience and teach them the error of their ways because we should strive to accept and love everyone…from afar at least…and maybe not everyone but you know what I mean.
The end.
Alex Ash Creative 