title: Parts of activities: reply to Fellbaum and Miller (1990).
abstract: If people believe that one activity is a kind of another, they also tend to believe that the second activity is a part of the first. For example, they assert that deciding is a kind of thinking and that thinking is a part of deciding. Fellbaum and Miller's (1990) explanation for this phenomenon is based on the idea that people interpret part of in the domain of verbs as a type of logical entailment. Their explanation, however, suffers from at least 2 deficiencies. First, it fails to account for parallel effects with nouns (e.g., a contest is a kind of an activity, and an activity is a part of a contest). Second, it contains a flaw that incorrectly predicts many activities to be parts of each other (e.g., coming is part of going and going part of coming). However, a hypothesis Rips and Conrad (1989) originally proposed for the kind-part reciprocal effect avoids both of these difficulties.
authors: Psychology Department, University of Chicago, Illinois 60637.
authors: L J
authors: LJ
authors: Rips
authors: F G
authors: FG
authors: Conrad
mesh_terms: D001519:Behavior; D006801:Humans; D008606:Mental Processes; D008960:Models, Psychological; D012660:Semantics