[Corpora-List] examples of the use of the terms "prototypical" or "prototypicality"

[John F Sowa]

The historian of science, William Whewell (1858), wrote an analysis and
defense of the methods used by Linnaeus and other botanists:

> Though in a Natural group of objects a definition can no longer be of any
> use as a regulative principle, classes are not therefore left quite loose,
> without any certain standard or guide. The class is steadily fixed, though
> not precisely limited; it is given, though not circumscribed; it is
> determined, not by a boundary line without, but by a central point within;
> not by what it strictly excludes, but by what it eminently includes;
> by an example, not by a precept; in short, instead of a Definition we have
> a Type for our director.

See below for a longer excerpt by Whewell and an argument by J. S. Mill
for a statistical approach.

John
________________________________________________________________________

Excerpt from http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/cogcat.htm

All logic-based methods ranging from the Tree of Porphyry to the latest 
formal ontologies are examples of an Aristotelian top-down approach, but 
Aristotle himself recommended bottom-up methods for analyzing empirical 
data.  Whewell (1858) went further in claiming that top-down definitions 
are useless in biology:
    > Natural groups are given by Type, not by Definition. And this 
consideration
> accounts for that indefiniteness and indecision which we frequently find
> in the descriptions of such groups, and which must appear so strange and
> inconsistent to anyone who does not suppose these descriptions to assume
> any deeper ground of connection than an arbitrary choice of the botanist.
>
> Thus in the family of the rose tree, we are told that the ovules are very
> rarely erect, the stigmata usually simple. Of what use, it might be asked,
> can such loose accounts be? To which the answer is, that they are not
> inserted to distinguish the species, but in order to describe the family,
> and the total relations of the ovules and the stigmata of the family are
> better known by this general statement....
>
> Though in a Natural group of objects a definition can no longer be of any
> use as a regulative principle, classes are not therefore left quite loose,
> without any certain standard or guide. The class is steadily fixed, though
> not precisely limited; it is given, though not circumscribed; it is
> determined, not by a boundary line without, but by a central point within;
> not by what it strictly excludes, but by what it eminently includes;
> by an example, not by a precept; in short, instead of a Definition we have
> a Type for our director.

Mill (1865) dropped the assumption of necessary and sufficient 
conditions, but he still believed that a closed-form definition was 
possible. He advocated a weaker criterion based on all of the necessary 
characteristics and a majority of the optional ones:

> Whatever resembles the genus Rose more than it resembles any other genus,
> does so because it possesses a greater number of the characters of that
> genus, than of the characters of any other genus. Nor can there be the
> smallest difficulty in representing, by an enumeration of characters,
> the nature and degree of the resemblance which is strictly sufficient
> to include any object in the class. There are always some properties
> common to all things which are included. Others there often are, to which
> some things, which are nevertheless included, are exceptions. But the
> objects which are exceptions to one character are not exceptions to another:
> the resemblance which fails in some particulars must be made up for in others.
> The class, therefore, is constituted by the possession of all the characters
> which are universal, and most of those which admit of exceptions.

Mill, John Stuart (1865) A System of Logic, Longmans, London.

Whewell, William (1858) History of Scientific Ideas, J. W. Parker & Son, 
London.



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