John McCreery gives a useful link to Berlin and Kay's work on color terms, and adds
This work is frequently cited. One notable example is in George Lakoff (1990) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things in support of the proposition that the mind does not think naturally in terms of categories, a.k.a., sets whose members uniformly share defining properties, but, instead, in terms of prototypes that represent the central tendencies in distributions of often disparate attributes.
I believe it was Eleanor Rosch (Reed 1962) who formulated what's called Prototype Theory, in which it is argued, contrary to Frege's pronouncement in the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik that a 'concept' without sharp boundaries is not even a concept, that we learn concepts (and the application of general terms) from prototypical examples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_TheoryRosch's senior thesis was 'An Investigation of Wittgenstein's Method in his Discussion of Pain in the Philosophical Investigations.' (This word order would seem open to several interpretations.)
Of course, one of Wittgenstein's targets in the early passages of the Investigations was just this Fregean dogma. (It led to his notion of 'family resemblances.') It's interesting that Rosch doesn't credit Wittgenstein's views as a stimulus to her thoughts.
There's an interesting interview with her at http://www.dialogonleadership.org/Rosch-1999.htmlIn it she gives a funny account of how and why her intellectual interests changed during her career but misremembers several things about Reed, e.g. that there were 'about 500' students there when she was; that there were only two professors of 'literature,' and that she wrote an 'honors thesis.' (Every Reed student writes a senior thesis; none is more honorable than the rest.)
Robert Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
