1987 Volume 6 Issue 1 Pages 29-34
Fuzziness of hierarchical organization of the concepts, which construct a concrete-abstract hierarchy and a part-whole hierarchy, was examined. The items which were generated by both exemplar-generating subjects and part-generating subjects in Yamashita (1986) were analyzed, and the fuzzy structures of 12 concepts (4 living things, 4 objects, and 4 scenes) were represented, in terms of the rated confidence by 3 raters in classifying the items according to the relation-types. The represented structures revealed the followings: 1) In the case of the concepts of living things and objects, while the concrete-abstract hierarchy was rather clear, the part-whole hierarchy was fuzzy. 2) In the case of the scene concepts, both of the two types of hierarchy were fuzzy and the relationship between them were also ambiguous. These results suggest the efficiency of fuzzy model to investigate the fuzziness of hierarchical organization of concepts.
