ABSTRACT
The English scientist Francis Galton tackled many different issues during his long career. One problem he considered was the notion of ‘typicality’ and his particular concern was ‘what does the average criminal look like?’. Galton’s idea was to collect together the negatives of photographs of known criminals, lay one on top of another, and print the resulting photographic collage. Galton believed that ‘typicality’ was represented by taking some kind of average of all the exemplars of a category. Galton may have been misguided in thinking that there was a ‘criminal look’—although not that long ago British policemen were advised to attend courts in order to learn what criminals look like. In this chapter, we will see that what determines typicality is a central issue in the representation of knowledge and that Galton’s idea of a cumulative average is still an influential concept. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203724637/b1f4ca16-4c8f-417a-8fd4-5fa3aaf8c843/content/page151_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> In Get Carter, Michael Caine played the anti-hero Jack Carter, a London gangster avenging the murder of his brother. Do you think that he looks like a ‘typical’ gangster?
