The irreducible epistemic atoms underlying the curriculum. 2,888 atoms across 3 types and 2 molecules
Language and verbal labels actively structure and constrain the boundaries of deliberate thought, where assigning labels to concepts changes how those concepts are cognitively processed and what distinctions become salient.
Categories have internal structure with graded membership along a spectrum of typicality rather than binary definitional boundaries.
There exists a privileged 'basic level' of categorization (e.g., 'chair' rather than 'furniture' or 'desk chair') where categories maximize information gain while minimizing cognitive effort.
Human conceptual structure is a flexible context-dependent system that can simultaneously organize entities along multiple dimensions and construct ad hoc categories on the fly to serve current goals, cutting across stable taxonomies.