Language and the career of similarity

Abstract

It is probable … that man's superior association by similarity has much to do with those discriminations of character on which his higher flights of reasoning are based. William James (1890, p. 345) The brute irrationality of our sense of similarity, its irrelevance to anything in logic and mathematics, offers little reason to expect that this sense is somehow in tune with the world. Quine (1969, pp. 125–126) Similarity has been cast both as hero and as villain in theories of cognitive processing, and the same is true for cognitive development. On the positive side, Rosch and her colleagues have suggested that similarity is an initial organizing principle in the development of categorization (e.g., Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976), and Carey (1985) implicates a similarity mechanism in children's learning of the biological domain. It has also been suggested that similarity may play a role in word acquisition (Anglin, 1970; Bowerman, 1973, 1976; E. V. Clark, 1973; Davidson & Gelman, 1990; Gentner, 1982c). Others have taken a more pessimistic view, according to which similarity is either a misleading or at best an inferior strategy used as a last resort. Keil (1989), for example, posits that children begin with theories of the world and that similarity functions merely as a fallback strategy to be resorted to when theory fails. A related issue is the course of development of similarity. Many researchers have suggested that children's use of similarity changes from an early and naiïve form to a later, more enlightened form.