Program
Will Davies (Oxford, Balliol College),'On Inconsistency Theories: what can we learn from LEW?'
Roberson, Davidoff & Braisby (1999) report the case of an aphasic patient LEW, who has specific difficulties in naming colours, amongst other things. In one experiment, LEW was asked to freesort a collection of colour chips. Whereas normal patients freesorted the chips into groupings around focal points for ordinary colour terms 'red', 'orange', etc., LEW grouped the chips according to pairwise similarity. Describing this case, Roberson et al. say that LEW 'is adopting precisely [a] sort of Sorites reasoning'. In my 2008 BPhil thesis, I argued that LEW provides evidence for a cognitively represented similarity constraint on categorisation, which is inhibited in normal patients by prototype information associated with linguistic labels. On the resulting model, categorisation in normal patients is subject to conflicting, sometimes inconsistent, constraints - a view I called 'Cognitive Inconsistentism'. In this talk, I want to explore the case of LEW further, and reevaluate the prospects for Cognitive Inconsistentism.