On Philosophical Foundations of Prototype Theory and Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

The main purpose of the paper is to show the influence of various philosophical ideas on the development of prototype theory, an integral part of experiential realism and one of the key strongpoints of modern cognitive linguistics. After providing an overview of the main tenets of experiential realism, the paper deals with the position of prototypes within the basic approaches to categorization in thought and language, which is followed by a summary of a number of ideas of Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl and Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a special emphasis on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and the Blue and Brown Books, i.e. on his explorations of the problem of categorization, language games and family resemblances. The paper proves that the philosophical thread which brings us to the modern ideas of cognitive linguistics began with Kant’s views on knowledge and the nature of categorization, Husserl’s concept of categorical intuition and, finally, Wittgenstein’s treatment of categories based on the complex network of family resemblances.