Spencer.Star@H.CS.CMU.EDU.UUCP (07/07/87)
> ...a penguin is not a bird of degree...
The point of view that a bird IS a bird, and a rose IS a rose, has
limited usefulness. If the question that we are trying to answer is
seen as how a person will classify a penguin after having seen one for
the first time, I think the answer is clear. A large number of people
would not classify a penguin as a bird. A program would likely be more
successful at imitating a human response if it based its response on
the features of the human answering the query as well as the features
of the concept it was trying to recognize. Whether a penguin is a bird
then becomes quite dependent on context as well as a simple relation
between features and classes.