CATEGORY INTERCONFUSABILITY AND THE CONTEXT-DEPENDENCE OF CATEGORIES

Categorization is absolute, in that it is based on having to judge membership vs. nonmembership on the basis of individual instances considered alone, rather than through comparison with others. But categorization is also relative, in that it is based on the interconfusable instances of members and nonmembers that have been sampled to date, and on the basis of which the invariant features have been extracted that resolve the confusion and allow future instances to be correctly categorized.