Name Strategy: Its Existence and Implications

Name Strategy: Its Existence and Implications

Department of Mathematics & Statisitics, University of Surrey, GU2 7XH,
[email protected], http://cosmology.mth.uct.ac.za/~roberts

August 20, 2003

Abstract

It is argued that colour name strategy, object name strategy, and
chunking strategy in memory are all aspects of the same general phenom-
ena, called stereotyping, and this in turn is an example of a know-how
representation. Such representations are argued to have their origin in
a principle called the minimum duplication of resources. For most the
subsequent discussions existence of colour name strategy suffices. It is
pointed out that the Berlin-Kay universal partial ordering of colours and
the frequency of traffic accidents classified by colour are surprisingly sim-
ilar; a detailed analysis is not carried out as the specific colours recorded
are not identical. Some consequences of the existence of a name strategy
for the philosophy of language and mathematics are discussed: specifically
it is argued that in accounts of truth and meaning it is necessary through-
out to use real numbers as opposed to bivalent quantities; and also that
the concomitant label associated with sentences should not be of uncon-
ditional truth, but rather several real valued quantities associated with
visual communication. The implication of real valued truth quantities is
that the Continuum Hypothesis of pure mathematics is side-stepped,
because real valued quantities occur ab initio. The existence of name
strategy shows that thought/sememes and talk/phonemes can be sepa-
rate, and this vindicates the assumption of thought occurring before talk
used in psycholinguistic speech production models.

Contents

1 Introduction                                                       2

1.1  Motivation ................................. 2

1.2  Diagram ................................... 3

1.3  Sectional Contents ............................. 3

1.4  Stereotypes Compared to Other Representations ............ 5

1.5  Minimal Duplication of Resources ..................... 6

2 Name Strategy in Colour Perception                              7

2.1  Berlin-Kay Colour Ordering ........................ 7

2.2  The Sapir-Worf Hypothesis......................... 8

2.3  Name Strategy ............................... 8

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