Education of the republic of uzbekistan state university of world languages

Theory-theory. Theory-theory is a reply to the preceding two theories that expands on them. According to this view, concept classification is similar to scientific reasoning. Ideas are not learned in isolation, but rather as a result of our interactions with the world around us. In this sense, the structure of concepts is determined by their links to other concepts as prescribed by a certain mental theory about the state of the world¹³. The mechanism by which this is said to work is less evident than in the preceding two ideas, but it is nonetheless a prominent and notable theory. Theory-theory also holds that people's worldviews are what shape their conceptual knowledge of the universe. As a result, examining people's theories might provide insights into their ideas. In this context, "theory" refers to a person's mental interpretation rather than scientific truth. This theory critiques classical and prototype theory for depending too heavily on similarities as a sufficient constraint. It implies that theories or mental understandings, rather simply weighted similarities, contribute more to what belongs to a group, and that a coherent category is produced more by what makes sense to the perceiver. Tversky established that the weights assigned to features fluctuate and alter based on context and experimental task. As a result, similarities between members may be incidental rather than causal¹⁴.
1.3. The problems of conceptualization and categorization
Conceptualization
A concept, along with a category and cognition, is one of the most significant notions in cognitive linguistics. The term is employed in a variety of liberal arts disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies. Both the idea as a unit of knowledge and the conceptualization process play a significant role in world cognition and the formation of its language representation. One of the fundamental problems with natural language conceptualization is that academics do not agree on a definition of concept - a description that accurately describes its nature, traits, and functions. Z. Popova and I. Sternin specifically mentioned this issue: "... despite the fact that the notion of concept may be considered firmly established in modern cognitive science, the meaning of this notion varies quite significantly depending on different conceptions of various scholarly traditions and single scientists."¹⁵. Important notions are lexically represented".
When we continue to address topics affecting the process of conceptualization of the world, we come into the question of the relationship between language and brainwork. To be more specific, we will discuss the relationship between language and cognitive activity, or, in other words, the role that natural language plays in the conceptualization process and certain associated issues.

By definition, human mental activity is not verbal. The paragraph from “Cognitive linguistics” by Z. Popova and I. Sternin runs as follows: "Human’s brainwork is non-verbal, it operates by means of universal subject code. Humans conceive in terms of concepts that are coded by the bits of this code, and these concepts serve as the foundation of universal subject code". Conceptions are produced during the cognitive activity process are nonverbal in the beginning. Natural language is used to objectify concepts, although this does not occur in every circumstance.

A notion and its language representation have no direct relationship. Among cognitive scientists, there are even two opposing views on the topic "Do we really require a language to think with concepts?". Some of them, known as "verbalists," believe that brainwork necessitates the use of language as a mechanism for representing knowledge and transmitting it as information. M. Müller, W. von Humboldt, F. Schleiermacher, F. de Saussure, A. Reformatskiy, and others are among these scientists¹⁶. Some researchers (such as N. Zhinkin, J. Piaget, B. Serebrennikov, and P. Galperin) believe that language is not a necessary quality of cognitive thinking because humans think on a pre-linguistic level and work primarily through nonverbal conceptions. Humans can surely conduct mental and cognitive tasks without using language. At the same time, we must accept that in current culture, a person who does not speak any language appears unusual and unnatural. As example is the best sermon: consider a child; the process of his mental and linguistic development reflects that of humanity in general. Hence, at the beginning of development, a child's brain is nonverbal because he does not communicate any language. But, his brain is already developing nonverbal concepts. At this stage, the child's brain employs a pre-linguistic image system - a rudimentary version of what will become the universal subject code (USC). “Mental activity doesn’t always mean reference to language. Brain operates by means of universal subject code”¹⁷. As the child grows older, he learns and interacts with other people, reaching a certain level of consciousness, and he begins to use words to objectify concepts. “No generalization of human experience is possible out of a language, without a language”¹⁸.
Another difficulty involving the process of world conceptualization is the link between mental and linguistic units. In other words, we'll talk about how various people can objectify the same concept. While we recognize the critical role that natural language plays in the conceptualization process, we must also remember a fundamental concept: language is simply a means of representing and objectifying concepts: “The cognitive approach to study of linguistic phenomena is based on the understanding of the fact that language as a semiotic system and a form of activity is based on the system of knowledge about the world, i.e. the conceptual world image which is formed in human’s mind as a result of his cognitive activity and in the process of communication and transformation activity. Language itself is considered to be one of cognitive mechanisms that form this system”¹⁹. Thus, language is nothing more than a tool for actualizing nonverbal mental units. Furthermore, we believe that this instrument is rather imprecise, if not rough and unpleasant. On the one hand, everyone thinks in general in the same ways, regardless of where they reside or what language they speak. "Despite the fact that each person possesses unique knowledge about the world," N. Boldyrev observes, "basic cognitive processes of conceptualization (overthinking and consolidating the results of cognitive activity in the form of knowledge units, i.e. concepts) and categorization (putting concepts into certain experience cells, i.e. categories) prove to follow the same patterns"²⁰. “The world is divided into concepts by a human and represented in language differently because in every natural language it is exclusively the result of processes of conceptualization and categorization that are performed slightly differently in different languages”²¹. According to a research results done by Victoria Dobrova1, Alexander Zhuravlev, Irina Sysueva, Svetlana Menshenina ,and Elchin Gashimov, taking everything mentioned above into consideration, they believe that the ultimate definition of concept is provided by V. Maslova, who defines concept as "a semantic unit marked with linguistic and cultural particularity that characterizes to some extent the people belonging to a certain ethnic culture"²².
Categorization issues
A semiotic system that consolidates and reflects the knowledge obtained, as well as the information processing results, in the form of objectified ideas and categories is one of the requirements that provide regular flow of conceptualization and categorization processes in the human mind. Categorization is the ability and activity of recognizing shared features or similarities between elements of the world's experience (such as objects, events, or ideas), organizing and classifying experience by associating it to a more abstract group (that is, a category, class, or type)²³, on the basis of their traits, features, similarities, or other universal to the group criteria. Categorization is regarded as one of the most fundamental cognitive abilities, and as such, it is extensively researched in psychology and cognitive linguistics. Categorization is commonly confused with classification (cf., Classification synonyms). Categorization and classification enable humans to organize and simplify their understanding of the universe by organizing things, objects, and concepts that exist around them²⁴. Humans and other species categorize things: "doing the correct thing with the right kind of thing." Categorization can be a nonverbal or spoken action. Categorization allows humans to recognize, differentiate, and comprehend both concrete objects and abstract ideas. Things are typically classified for adaptive or pragmatic reasons.
Theories of categorization:

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  Classical theory
  
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  Prototype theory
  
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  Exemplar theory
  

Two of the theories were mentioned briefly above in the first paragraph and now our main focus is directed to exemplar theory. The exemplar theory, another example of a similarity-based method to categorization, analyzes the resemblance of potential category members to stored memory representations. All known occurrences of a category are kept in memory as exemplars according to the exemplar theory. For determining the category membership of an unfamiliar entity, exemplars from potentially relevant categories are retrieved from memory and the object's similarity to those exemplars is averaged to generate a categorization decision²⁵. The Context model developed by Medin and Schaffer (1978) adopts a nearest neighbor technique that multiplies an entity's similarities to relevant exemplars rather than summing them to offer weighted similarities that represent the entity's proximity to relevant exemplars. This successfully steers categorization judgments toward exemplars that are most comparable to the entity to be classified.