, etc.) few significant features can be added to that of the basic level whereas at the superordinate level, these conceptual similarities are hard to pinpoint. Basic categories are relatively homogeneous in terms of sensory-motor affordances - a chair is associated with bending of one's knees, a fruit with picking it up and putting it in your mouth, etc. The other notion related to prototypes is that of a basic level in cognitive categorization. In Cognitive linguistics it has been argued that linguistic categories also have a prototype structure, like categories of common words in a language. Contrary to the classical view, prototypes and gradations lead to an understanding of category membership not as an all-or-nothing approach, but as more of a web of interlocking categories which overlap. As in the example of furniture above, couch is more central than wardrobe. Every member of the class is not equally central in human cognition. The prototype is the center of the class, with all other members moving progressively further from the prototype, which leads to the gradation of categories. The prototype of a category can be understood in lay terms by the object or member of a class most often associated with that class. Rather than defining concepts by features, the prototype theory defines categories based on either a specific artifact of that category or by a set of entities within the category that represent a prototypical member. Necessary conditions refers to the set of features every instance of a concept must present, and sufficient conditions are those that no other entity possesses. Rosch and others developed prototype theory as a response to, and radical departure from, the classical theory of concepts, which defines concepts by necessary and sufficient conditions. Rosch later defined it as the most central member of a category. The term prototype, as defined in psychologist Eleanor Rosch's study 'Natural Categories', was initially defined as denoting a stimulus, which takes a salient position in the formation of a category, due to the fact that it is the first stimulus to be associated with that category. In formulating prototype theory, Rosch drew in part from previous insights in particular the formulation of a category model based on family resemblance by Wittgenstein (1953), and by Roger Brown's How shall a thing be called? (1958). Prototype theory has also been applied in linguistics, as part of the mapping from phonological structure to semantics. For example: when asked to give an example of the concept furniture, a couch is more frequently cited than, say, a wardrobe. In this prototype theory, any given concept in any given language has a real world example that best represents this concept. It has been criticized by those that still endorse the traditional theory of categories, like linguist Eugenio Coseriu and other proponents of the structural semantics paradigm.

It emerged in 1971 with the work of psychologist Eleanor Rosch, and it has been described as a ' Copernican revolution' in the theory of categorization for its departure from the traditional Aristotelian categories. Prototype theory is a theory of categorization in cognitive science, particularly in psychology and cognitive linguistics, in which there is a graded degree of belonging to a conceptual category, and some members are more central than others.

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