Background knowledge is highly important in our conceptualization and in the formation of new categories.1 Concepts are nested both in our perception and in our actions, they somehow become incorporated attitudes.2 They sustain situated action, the activity immanent to a plain of consistence. But a concept can be adopted in a wide array of situated conceptualizations and may therefore have a variable representation.3 A central model predefines the conditions of an amplified model but remains inaccessible to change due to its abstract, superordinate, character which does not permit an alteration by means of experience in a somatosensorial form, thus remaining attached to our direct experience but inalterable.4 A connectionist model of learning supposes the formation of nodes of information that become more robust and, simultaneously, more inaccessible, achieving a higher level in the cognitive hierarchy, becoming, in a sense, a prioris to knowledge.5 Still, a certain resemblance can enhance the categorization of a novel concept as long as there is a minimal information able to connect the new object to the given knowledge.6
A contemporary example of such a structural-cognitive model that becomes ubiquous is the metaphor of a network.7 It has been applied both to the tendencies of capital delocalization, the embeddedment of large multinationals within sovereign states, and also to an understanding of man that relies on, on the one hand, the developments in cognitive science and the models of parallel distributed processing of information, in the functioning of a decentralized body-brain system, and by asserting the variably scattered, extended, character of personality.8
1 B.H. Ross, “Remindings and their effects in learning a cognitive skill”, Cognitive Psychology, 16, 1984, pp. 371-416.
2 Cf. G.L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts, Massachusetts, 2002. D.L. Medin, “Concepts and conceptual structure”, American Psychologist 44, 1989, pp. 1469–1481. M. Morris and G. L. Murphy, “Converging operations on a basic level in event taxonomies”, Memory and Cognition 18, 1990, pp. 407–418. L.A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman (eds.) Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, New York, 1994.
3 L.W. Barsalou, “Situated Conceptualization”, H. Cohen and C. Lefebvre (eds.), Handbook of categorization in cognitive sciences, Saint Louis, 2005.
4 G. Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things
5 Cf. J.K. Kruschke, “ALCOVE: An exemplar-based connectionist model of category learning”, Psychological Review, 99, 1992, pp. 22-44.
6 A.S. Kaplan and G.L. Murphy, “Category learning with minimal prior knowledge”, Journal of Experimental.
7 A.S. Kaplan and G.L. Murphy, “Category learning with minimal prior knowledge”, Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Leaning, Memory and Cognition, 26(4), 2000, pp. 829-46. Cf. E.M. Pothos and N. Charter, “A simplicity principle in unsupervised human categorization”, Cognitive Science, 26, 2002, pp. 303-43.
8 Cf. M. Castells, The rise of the network society (3 vols.), Oxford, 2000 ff.
