Prototype Theory
Description
Lissa Johnson:
“ One theory, in particular, has helped researchers grapple with the complex mental processes of forming common sense conclusions drawn from extrapolated sense data. Prototype Theory describes the sort of thinking that informs our decisions for how we go about categorising the multiplicity of natural phenomena we encounter.
The various taxonomies in the sciences, for example, are the result of human perception of objects and behaviours — such as reproduction — and our tendency to consider and categorise these phenomena. Theorists such as Brent Berlin, Paul Kay, Eleanor Rosch, Barbara Lloyd, Eugene Hunn, Carolyn Mervis, Barbara Tversky and others have described an important level of human interaction with and recognition of the external environment located in gestalt perception, mental imagery, and motor movements. At this level of perception, we function most effectively in dealing with discontinuities in our surrounding environment. So, it is easy to recognise, for instance, when one man is sufficiently equipped to compete fairly against another in the octagon.
Over the past millennia, humans have had little difficulty recognising patterns and discontinuities in the various strengths and weaknesses exhibited in both sexes, and so this basic level of cognition helped to clear the groundwork for the roles humans naturally adopted in civilising communities, cultures, societies, and landscapes. We can generally recognise outward differences across ethnic categories, but another level down in perceptual acuity is considerably more complex. The difference between someone born and raised in Seoul, for example, and someone born and raised in Jeju is not so easy to determine at first glance.
As the theory goes, our basic-level gestalt perception isn’t adjusted for easily recognising such key differences at lower levels. This makes sense if we consider the origin and development of the scientific method, itself, as a systematic effort to discern clearly what is accessible to observation. Overt discontinuities in otherwise predictable patterns of behaviour trigger deeper levels of scientific inquiry (if the science has not been corrupted and stifled by the promise of favour or material profit). Lakoff argues that studies of categorisation at the basic level suggest that human experience itself is, at this level, structured pre-conceptually. It is why we can so easily see discontinuities and patterns of discontinuity at the basic level but need more time, careful observation, and study — with better tools and laboratory techniques — to even begin to notice more complex patterns and discontinuities at the lower level.
The naked eye alone would be useless to the epidemiologist grappling with what appears to be apparent cause-and-effect connections between Covid-19 injectable gene therapies, for instance, and the shocking precipitous decline in global rates of fertility. In fact, the new injectable mRNA technology remains largely fixed — thanks to the dominant corporate media system — in the basic-level mental category for “vaccine” precisely because of the decades of background conditioning in the culture and the aggressive marketing that directs public consciousness — fusing the technology with all the positive signs and symbols signifying the sterile work we imagine, and expect, in clinical immunisations. In much the same way, the naked eye alone has proven increasingly incapable of helping observers identify the discontinuities that had, for millennia, distinguished men from women in a culture nowadays swayed by the systematic top-down operation fusing and, thus, erasing both with “gender-affirming care”.”