Mutability and the determinants of conceptual transformability

摘要: Features differ in their mutability. For example, a robin could still be a robin even if it lacked a red breast; but it would probably not count as one if it lacked bones. One hypothesis to explain this differential transformability is that having bones is more critical to a biological theory than having a red breast is. We reject this hypothesis in favor of a theory of mutability based solely on local dependency links and expressed in the form of an iterative equation. We hypothesize that features are immutable to the extent other features depend on them and offer supporting data.