Disentangling Similarity Judgments from Pragmatic Judgments: Response to Sloutsky and Fisher

摘要

Sloutsky and Fisher attempt to reframe the results presented in Noles and Gelman as a pure replication of their original work validating the Similarity, Induction, Naming, and Categorization (SINC) model. However, their critique fails to engage with the central findings reported in Noles and Gelman, and their re-analysis fails to examine the key comparison of theoretical interest. In addition to responding to the points raised in Sloutsky and Fisher’s critique, we elaborate on the pragmatic factors and methodological flaws present in that biased children’s similarity judgments. Our careful replication of this study suggests that, rather than measuring the influence of labels on judgments of perceptual similarity, the original design measured sensitivity to the pragmatics of task demands. Together, the results reported in Noles and Gelman and the methodological problems highlighted here represent a serious challenge to the validity of the SINC model specifically and the words-as-features view more generally.