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From: Spencer.Star@H.CS.CMU.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: Re: AIList Digest   V5 #169
Message-ID: <552668421.star@h.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 7-Jul-87 11:00:00 EDT
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Posted: Tue Jul  7 11:00:00 1987
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> ...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.