Sortals for Dummies

Advocates of sortal essentialism have argued that concepts like “thing” or “object” lack the unambiguous individuative criteria necessary to play the role of genuine sortals in reference. Instead, they function as “dummy sortals” which are placeholders or incomplete designations. In disqualifying apparent placeholder sortals, however, these philosophers have posed insuperable problems for accounts of childhood conceptual development. I argue that recent evidence in psychology demonstrates that children do possess simple or basic sortals of physical objects or things. I contend that these concepts provide the genuine individuative criteria necessary for reference. As a consequence, sortalism can be made compatible with the developmental facts of conceptual development.

The role of diverse instruction in conceptual change

This study examined how a fundamental principle of induction and scientific reasoning, information diversity, could be used to promote change in children's mental models of the earth's shape. Six-year-old children (N=132) were randomly allocated to a control or to one of two training conditions. Some training groups received instruction that simultaneously challenged children's beliefs concerning (a) why the earth appears flat to a surface observer and (b) the role of gravity. Others received instruction that repeatedly challenged only one of these beliefs. An adaptation of the Vosniadou and Brewer (1992, Cognitive Psychology 24, 535-585) protocol for identifying mental models of the earth was administered before and after instruction. Both instruction methods produced increases in factual knowledge. Only children receiving instruction about two core beliefs, however, showed an increased rate of acceptance of a spherical earth model at posttest. The findings show that instruction that challenges diverse aspects of children's na?ve scientific beliefs is more likely to produce conceptual change.     

The development of interpretations for novel noun-noun conceptual combinations during the early school years

This research investigates issues surrounding early school children's use of the similarity between head and modifier terms in deriving interpretations for novel noun-noun conceptual combinations. In these experiments, 6- and 9-year-olds and adults were asked to formulate interpretations of similar and dissimilar conceptual combinations. Both children and adults were sensitive to the similarity aspect of conceptual combinations, although the children had some difficulty with the property interpretations that high-similarity combinations require. Next, we examined 40 popular children's books for the presence of noun-noun conceptual combinations. Adult participants provided interpretations for these combinations and rated the similarity of the head and modifier nouns. Results indicated that there were few high-similarity combinations and few combinations requiring property interpretations, suggesting that children have limited exposure to highly similar combinations and property interpretations. Further analysis of children's interpretations indicates that they may have difficulty in selecting and integrating properties of the modifier onto the head, a process required by property interpretations.     

Causal relations drive young children's induction, naming, and categorization

A number of recent models and experiments have suggested that evidence of early category-based induction is an artifact of perceptual cues provided by experimenters. We tested these accounts against the prediction that different relations (causal versus non-causal) determine the types of perceptual similarity by which children generalize. Young children were asked to label, to infer novel properties, and to project future appearances of a novel animal that varied in two opposite respects: (1) how much it looked like another animal whose name and properties were known, and (2) how much its parents looked like parents of another animal whose name and properties were known. When exemplar origins were known, children generalized to exemplars with similar origins rather than with similar appearances; when origins were unknown, children generalized to exemplars with similar appearances. Results indicate even young children possess the cognitive control to choose the similarities that best predict accurate generalizations.     

Oughts and ends

This paper advances a reductive semantics for ‘ought’ and a naturalistic theory of normativity. It gives a unified analysis of predictive, instrumental, and categorical uses of ‘ought’: the predictive ‘ought’ is basic, and is interpreted in terms of probability. Instrumental ‘oughts’ are analyzed as predictive ‘oughts’ occurring under an ‘in order that’ modifer (the end-relational theory). The theory is then extended to categorical uses of ‘ought’: it is argued that they are special rhetorical uses of the instrumental ‘ought’. Plausible conversational principles explain how this end-relational ‘ought’ can perform the expressive functions of the moral ‘ought’. The notion of an ‘ought-simpliciter’ is also discussed.

Differences in preschoolers’ and adults’ use of generics about novel animals and artifacts: A window onto a conceptual divide

Children and adults commonly produce more generic noun phrases (e.g., birds fly) about animals than artifacts. This may reflect differences in participants’ generic knowledge about specific animals/artifacts (e.g., dogs/chairs), or it may reflect a more general distinction. To test this, the current experiments asked adults and preschoolers to generate properties about novel animals and artifacts (Experiment 1: real animals/artifacts; Experiments 2 and 3: matched pairs of maximally similar, novel animals/artifacts). Data demonstrate that even without prior knowledge about these items, the likelihood of producing a generic is significantly greater for animals than artifacts. These results leave open the question of whether this pattern is the product of experience and learned associations or instead a set of early-developing theories about animals and artifacts.     

Why stereotypes don't even make good defaults

Many concepts have stereotypes. This leaves open the question of whether concepts are stereotypes. It has been argued elsewhere that theories that identify concepts with their stereotypes or with stereotypical properties of their instances (e.g., Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B. B. Lloyd (Ed.), Cognition and Categorization. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates; Smith, E. E., Medin, D. L. (1981). Categories and Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.) fail to provide an adequate account of the compositionality of concepts (Fodor, J., Lepore, E. (1996). The red herring and the pet fish: Why concepts still cannot be prototypes. Cognition, 58, 253-270.; Fodor, J. (1998). Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.). This paper extends this argument and reports an experiment suggesting that participants do not assume, even as a default strategy, that complex concepts inherit the stereotypes of their constituents. Thus propositions such as "Baby ducks have webbed feet" were judged to be less likely to be true than propositions like "Ducks have webbed feet." Moreover, manipulation of the type and number of noun phrase modifiers revealed a systematic departure from the unmodified noun's stereotype both with the addition of stereotypical modifiers ("Quacking ducks have webbed feet" versus "Ducks have webbed feet") and with the addition of a second modifier ("Baby Peruvian ducks have webbed feet" versus "Baby ducks have webbed feet"). Thus, in the general case the stereotypical properties of a head noun are systematically discounted when that head noun combines with modifiers. This effect represents a general principle of conceptual combination that argues against the inheritance of stereotypical features of concepts as a default strategy. Instead, we advocate a model of conceptual combination where concepts remain inert under combination, supported by a separate machinery that introduces pragmatic and knowledge-dependent inferences.     

The effect of prosody on conceptual combination

Research into people's comprehension of novel noun-noun phrases has long neglected the possible influences of prosody during meaning construction. At the same time, work in conceptual combination has disagreed about whether different classes of interpretation emerge from single or multiple processes; for example, whether people use distinct mechanisms when they interpret octopus apartment as property-based (e.g., an apartment with eight rooms) or relation-based (e.g., an apartment where an octopus lives). In two studies, we manipulate the prosodic emphasis patterns of novel noun-noun combinations (placing stress on the modifier noun, the head noun, or dual stress on both nouns) and ask participants to generate an interpretation for the novel phrase. Results show that people are faster to generate property-based interpretations when dual emphasis stresses both nouns equally, with prosody having little effect on the speed of relation-based interpretations. These findings highlight a role for prosody during meaning construction and underline important differences between relation- and property-based interpretations that are difficult to reconcile with unitary process views of conceptual combination.     

A geometric principle of indifference

That one's degrees of belief at any one time obey the axioms of probability theory is widely regarded as a necessary condition for static rationality. Many theorists hold that it is also a sufficient condition, but according to critics this yields too subjective an account of static rationality. However, there are currently no good proposals as to how to obtain a tenable stronger probabilistic theory of static rationality. In particular, the idea that one might achieve the desired strengthening by adding some symmetry principle to the probability axioms has appeared hard to maintain. Starting from an idea of Carnap and drawing on relatively recent work in cognitive science, this paper argues that conceptual spaces provide the tools to devise an objective probabilistic account of static rationality. Specifically, we propose a principle that derives prior degrees of belief from the geometrical structure of concepts.     

Modality switching costs emerge in concept creation as well as retrieval

Theories of embodied cognition hold that the conceptual system uses perceptual simulations for the purposes of representation. A strong prediction is that perceptual phenomena should emerge in conceptual processing, and, in support, previous research has shown that switching modalities from one trial to the next incurs a processing cost during conceptual tasks. However, to date, such research has been limited by its reliance on the retrieval of familiar concepts. We therefore examined concept creation by asking participants to interpret modality-specific compound phrases (i.e., conceptual combinations). Results show that modality switching costs emerge during the creation of new conceptual entities: People are slower to simulate a novel concept (e.g., auditory jingling onion) when their attention has already been engaged by a different modality in simulating a familiar concept (e.g., visual shiny penny). Furthermore, these costs cannot be accounted for by linguistic factors alone. Rather, our findings support the embodied view that concept creation, as well as retrieval, requires situated perceptual simulation.     

Qualitative differences between naïve and scientific theories of evolution

Philosophers of biology have long argued that Darwin's theory of evolution was qualitatively different from all earlier theories of evolution. Whereas Darwin's predecessors and contemporaries explained adaptation as the transformation of a species' "essence," Darwin explained adaptation as the selective propagation of randomly occurring mutations within a population. The present study explored the possibility of a parallel between early "transformational" theories of evolution and modern na?ve theories. Forty-two high school and college students and three evolutionary biologists were tested on their understanding of six evolutionary phenomena: variation, inheritance, adaptation, domestication, speciation, and extinction. As predicted, a plurality of participants demonstrated transformational reasoning inconsistent with natural selection. Correlational analyses revealed that participants who demonstrated transformational reasoning were as internally consistent as participants who demonstrated an understanding of natural selection, with the exception of one group of participants who appeared to have assimilated two heuristics--"survival of the fittest" and "acquired traits are not inherited"--into an otherwise transformational framework. These findings suggest that the widespread and early-developing tendency to essentialize biological kinds precludes students from conceptualizing species as populations of individuals differentially affected by the environment.     

The organization and dissolution of semantic-conceptual knowledge: Is the ‘amodal hub’ the only plausible model?

In recent years, the anatomical and functional bases of conceptual activity have attracted a growing interest. In particular, Patterson and Lambon-Ralph have proposed the existence, in the anterior parts of the temporal lobes, of a mechanism (the 'amodal semantic hub') supporting the interactive activation of semantic representations in all modalities and for all semantic categories. The aim of then present paper is to discuss this model, arguing against the notion of an 'amodal' semantic hub, because we maintain, in agreement with the Damasio's construct of 'higher-order convergence zone', that a continuum exists between perceptual information and conceptual representations, whereas the 'amodal' account views perceptual informations only as a channel through which abstract semantic knowledge can be activated. According to our model, semantic organization can be better explained by two orthogonal higher-order convergence systems, concerning, on one hand, the right vs. left hemisphere and, on the other hand, the ventral vs. dorsal processing pathways. This model posits that conceptual representations may be mainly based upon perceptual activities in the right hemisphere and upon verbal mediation in the left side of the brain. It also assumes that conceptual knowledge based on the convergence of highly processed visual information with other perceptual data (and mainly concerning living categories) may be bilaterally represented in the anterior parts of the temporal lobes, whereas knowledge based on the integration of visual data with action schemata (namely knowledge of actions, body parts and artefacts) may be more represented in the left fronto-temporo-parietal areas.