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  1. Paley's ipod: The cognitive basis of the design argument within natural theology.Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt - 2010 - Zygon 45 (3):665-684.
    The argument from design stands as one of the most intuitively compelling arguments for the existence of a divine Creator. Yet, for many scientists and philosophers, Hume's critique and Darwin's theory of natural selection have definitely undermined the idea that we can draw any analogy from design in artifacts to design in nature. Here, we examine empirical studies from developmental and experimental psychology to investigate the cognitive basis of the design argument. From this it becomes clear that humans spontaneously discern (...)
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  • Mindreading, communication and the learning of names for things.Paul Bloom - 2002 - Mind and Language 17 (1-2):37–54.
    There are two facts about word learning that everyone accepts. The first is that words really do have to be learned. There is controversy over how much conceptual structure and linguistic knowledge is innate, but nobody thinks that this is the case for the specific mappings between sounds (or signs) and meanings. This is because these mappings vary arbitrarily from culture to culture. No matter how intelligent a British baby is, for instance, she still has to learn, by attending to (...)
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  • Developmental changes in the understanding of generics.Paul Bloom - 2007 - Cognition 105 (1):166-183.
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  • (1 other version)Can Artificial Intelligence Make Art?Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė & Markus Kneer - 2022 - ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interactions.
    In two experiments (total N=693) we explored whether people are willing to consider paintings made by AI-driven robots as art, and robots as artists. Across the two experiments, we manipulated three factors: (i) agent type (AI-driven robot v. human agent), (ii) behavior type (intentional creation of a painting v. accidental creation), and (iii) object type (abstract v. representational painting). We found that people judge robot paintings and human painting as art to roughly the same extent. However, people are much less (...)
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  • Pragmatics in the False-Belief Task: Let the Robot Ask the Question!Jean Baratgin, Marion Dubois-Sage, Baptiste Jacquet, Jean-Louis Stilgenbauer & Frank Jamet - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11:593807.
    The poor performances of typically developing children younger than 4 in the first-order false-belief task “Maxi and the chocolate” is analyzed from the perspective of conversational pragmatics. An ambiguous question asked by an adult experimenter (perceived as a teacher) can receive different interpretations based on a search for relevance, by which children according to their age attribute different intentions to the questioner, within the limits of their own meta-cognitive knowledge. The adult experimenter tells the child the following story of object-transfer: (...)
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  • Function is not the sum of an object’s parts.Krista Casler - 2018 - Thinking and Reasoning 25 (3):300-323.
    Prior research shows adults believe objects exist for specialised purposes. This “one tool, one function” cognitive bias promotes efficient mastery of artefact function but could mean indiv...
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  • Cognitive Constraints on the Visual Arts: An Empirical Study of the Role of Perceived Intentions in Appreciation Judgements.Jean-Luc Jucker & Justin L. Barrett - 2011 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (1-2):115-136.
    What influences people’s appreciation of works of art? In this paper, we provide a new cognitive approach to this big question, and the first empirical results in support of it. As a work of art typically does not activate intuitive cognition for functional artefacts, it is represented as an instance of non-verbal symbolic communication. By application of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory of communication, we hypothesize that understanding the artist’s intention plays a crucial role in intuitive art appreciation judgements. About (...)
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  • Artifacts and Original Intent: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Design Stance.H. Clark Barrett, Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence - 2008 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 8 (1-2):1-22.
    How do people decide what category an artifact belongs to? Previous studies have suggested that adults and, to some degree, children, categorize artifacts in accordance with the design stance, a categorization system which privileges the designer’s original intent in making categorization judgments. However, these studies have all been conducted in Western, technologically advanced societies, where artifacts are mass produced. In this study, we examined intuitions about artifact categorization among the Shuar, a hunter-horticulturalist society in the Amazon region of Ecuador. We (...)
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  • Intuitions and Arguments: Cognitive Foundations of Argumentation in Natural Theology.Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (2):57-82.
    This paper examines the cognitive foundations of natural theology: the intuitions that provide the raw materials for religious arguments, and the social context in which they are defended or challenged. We show that the premises on which natural theological arguments are based rely on intuitions that emerge early in development, and that underlie our expectations for everyday situations, e.g., about how causation works, or how design is recognized. In spite of the universality of these intuitions, the cogency of natural theological (...)
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  • The intuitive concept of art.Alessandro Pignocchi - 2012 - Philosophical Psychology 27 (3):425-444.
    A great deal of work in analytic philosophy of art is related to defining what counts as art. So far, cognitive approaches to art have almost entirely ignored this literature. In this paper I discuss the role of intuition in analytic philosophy of art, to show how an empirical research program on art could take advantage of existing work in analytic philosophy. I suggest that the first step of this research program should be to understand how people intuitively categorize something (...)
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  • Not Only Size Matters: Early‐Talker and Late‐Talker Vocabularies Support Different Word‐Learning Biases in Babies and Networks.Eliana Colunga & Clare E. Sims - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S1):73-95.
    In typical development, word learning goes from slow and laborious to fast and seemingly effortless. Typically developing 2-year-olds seem to intuit the whole range of things in a category from hearing a single instance named—they have word-learning biases. This is not the case for children with relatively small vocabularies. We present a computational model that accounts for the emergence of word-learning biases in children at both ends of the vocabulary spectrum based solely on vocabulary structure. The results of Experiment 1 (...)
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  • The true self: A psychological concept distinct from the self.Nina Strohminger, Joshua Knobe & George Newman - 2017 - Perspectives on Psychological Science 12 (4):551-560.
    A long tradition of psychological research has explored the distinction between characteristics that are part of the self and those that lie outside of it. Recently, a surge of research has begun examining a further distinction. Even among characteristics that are internal to the self, people pick out a subset as belonging to the true self. These factors are judged as making people who they really are, deep down. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the true self and (...)
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  • Design discourse and the cognitive science of design.Jeroen de Ridder - 2014 - Philosophia Reformata 79 (1):37-53.
    Much of Alvin Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies will contain few surprises for those who have been following his work over the past decades. This —I hasten to add — is nothing against the book. The fact alone that his ideas on various topics, which have appeared scattered throughout the literature, are now actualized, applied to the debate about the conflict between science and religion, and organized into an overarching argument with a single focus makes this book worthwhile. Moreover, (...)
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  • From the Lexicon to Expectations About Kinds: A Role for Associative Learning.Eliana Colunga & Linda B. Smith - 2005 - Psychological Review 112 (2):347-382.
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  • The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning.Michael Waldmann (ed.) - 2017 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Causal reasoning is one of our most central cognitive competencies, enabling us to adapt to our world. Causal knowledge allows us to predict future events, or diagnose the causes of observed facts. We plan actions and solve problems using knowledge about cause-effect relations. Without our ability to discover and empirically test causal theories, we would not have made progress in various empirical sciences. In the past decades, the important role of causal knowledge has been discovered in many areas of cognitive (...)
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  • How Do Children Represent Pretend Play?Ori Friedman - 2013 - In Marjorie Taylor (ed.), Oxford handbook of the development of imagination. Oxford University Press. pp. 186-195.
    How do young children represent pretend play? One possibility is that recognizing and representing pretend play depends on children’s ability to infer the mental states of the person engaged in pretend play (mentalist account). The two dominant alternative possibilities are that children view as a distinctive form of non-representational behavior (behavioral account), and that children represent pretense by temporarily treating objects as though they have fictional or make-believe properties (flagging account). This chapter provides an overview of the debate between these (...)
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  • Educating the design stance: Issues of coherence and transgression.Norman H. Freeman & Melissa L. Allen - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2):141 - 142.
    Bullot & Reber (B&R) put forth a design stance to fuse psychological and art historical accounts of visual thinking into a single theory. We argue that this aspect of their proposal needs further fine-tuning. Issues of transgression and coherence are necessary to provide stability to the design stance. We advocate looking to Art Education for such fundamentals of picture understanding.
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  • History and essence in human cognition.Susan A. Gelman, Meredith A. Meyer & Nicholaus S. Noles - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2):142-143.
    Bullot & Reber (B&R) provide compelling evidence that sensitivity to context, history, and design stance are crucial to theories of art appreciation. We ask how these ideas relate to broader aspects of human cognition. Further open questions concern how psychological essentialism contributes to art appreciation and how essentialism regarding created artifacts (such as art) differs from essentialism in other domains.
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  • Causal-explanatory pluralism: how intentions, functions, and mechanisms influence causal ascriptions.Tania Lombrozo - 2010 - Cognitive Psychology 61 (4):303-332.
    Both philosophers and psychologists have argued for the existence of distinct kinds of explanations, including teleological explanations that cite functions or goals, and mechanistic explanations that cite causal mechanisms. Theories of causation, in contrast, have generally been unitary, with dominant theories focusing either on counterfactual dependence or on physical connections. This paper argues that both approaches to causation are psychologically real, with different modes of explanation promoting judgments more or less consistent with each approach. Two sets of experiments isolate the (...)
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  • (1 other version)On the functional origins of essentialism.H. Clark Barrett - 2001 - [Journal (Paginated)] (in Press) 2 (1):1-30.
    This essay examines the proposal that psychological essentialism results from a history of natural selection acting on human representation and inference systems. It has been argued that the features that distinguish essentialist representational systems are especially well suited for representing natural kinds. If the evolved function of essentialism is to exploit the rich inductive potential of such kinds, then it must be subserved by cognitive mechanisms that carry out at least three distinct functions: identifying these kinds in the environment, constructing (...)
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  • Is There Preferential Attachment in the Growth of Early Semantic Noun Networks?Thomas T. Hills, Mounir Maouene, Josita Maouene, Adam Sheya & Linda B. Smith - 2008 - In B. C. Love, K. McRae & V. M. Sloutsky (eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society.
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  • Category essence or essentially pragmatic? Creator’s intention in naming and what’s really what.Barbara C. Malt & Steven A. Sloman - 2007 - Cognition 105 (3):615-648.
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  • Preschoolers favor the creator's label when reasoning about an artifact's function.Vikram K. Jaswal - 2006 - Cognition 99 (3):B83-B92.
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  • The role of historical intuitions in children's and adults' naming of artifacts.Grant Gutheil, Paul Bloom, Nohemy Valderrama & Rebecca Freedman - 2004 - Cognition 91 (1):23-42.
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  • Conceiving of entities as objects and as stuff.Sandeep Prasada, Krag Ferenz & Todd Haskell - 2002 - Cognition 83 (2):141-165.
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  • Artifact Categorization. Trends and Problems.Massimiliano Carrara & Daria Mingardo - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (3):351-373.
    The general question (G) How do we categorize artifacts? can be subject to three different readings: an ontological, an epistemic and a semantic one. According to the ontological reading, asking (G) is equivalent to asking in virtue of what properties, if any, a certain artifact is an instance of some artifact kind: (O) What is it for an artifact a to belong to kind K? According to the epistemic reading, when we ask (G) we are investigating what properties of the (...)
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  • Substitutive, Complementary and Constitutive Cognitive Artifacts: Developing an Interaction-Centered Approach.Marco Fasoli - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (3):671-687.
    AbtractTechnologies both new and old provide us with a wide range of cognitive artifacts that change the structure of our cognitive tasks. After a brief analysis of past classifications of these artifacts, I shall elaborate a new way of classifying them developed by focusing on an aspect that has been previously overlooked, namely the possible relationships between these objects and the cognitive processes they involve. Cognitive artifacts are often considered as objects that simply complement our cognitive capabilities, but this “complementary (...)
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  • A developmental dissociation between category and function judgments about novel artifacts.Margaret A. Defeyter, Jill Hearing & Tamsin C. German - 2009 - Cognition 110 (2):260-264.
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  • British and American children's preferences for teleo-functional explanations of the natural world.Deborah Kelemen - 2003 - Cognition 88 (2):201-221.
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  • Young children's use of functional information to categorize artifacts: three factors that matter.Deborah G. Kemler Nelson, Anne Frankenfield, Catherine Morris & Elizabeth Blair - 2000 - Cognition 77 (2):133-168.
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  • The Proper Function of Artifacts: Intentions, Conventions and Causal Inferences.Sergio E. Chaigneau & Guillermo Puebla - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (3):391-406.
    Designers’ intentions are important for determining an artifact’s proper function (i.e., its perceived real function). However, there are disagreements regarding why. In one view, people reason causally about artifacts’ functional outcomes, and designers’ intended functions become important to the extent that they allow inferring outcomes. In another view, people use knowledge of designers’ intentions to determine proper functions, but this is unrelated to causal reasoning, having perhaps to do with intentional or social forms of reasoning (e.g., authority). Regarding these latter (...)
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  • Picasso Paintings, Moon Rocks, and Hand-Written Beatles Lyrics: Adults' Evaluations of Authentic Objects.Brandy Frazier, Susan Gelman, Bruce Hood & Alice Wilson - 2009 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 9 (1-2):1-14.
    Authentic objects are those that have a historical link to a person, event, time, or place of some significance. The current study examines everyday beliefs about authentic objects, with three primary goals: to determine the scope of adults' evaluation of authentic objects, to examine such evaluation in two distinct cultural settings, and to determine whether a person's attachment history predicts evaluation of authentic objects. We found that college students in the UK and the USA consistently evaluate a broad range of (...)
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  • Essentialism and Folksociology: Ethnicity Again.Martin Kanovsky - 2007 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 7 (3-4):241-281.
    The aim of this article is to show that empirical evidence suggests that no particular causal process of essence acquisition is constitutive for essentialism in folksociology. Innate potential and biological inheritance, however powerful they may be for the human cognitive mind in the domain of folkbiology, are far from necessary in essentialist folksociological classifications. Essentialism in folksociology is not defined by any particular causal process of essence acquisition. Even when we are able to detect the innateness in a particular folksociology, (...)
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  • Empirical Constraints and Quine's Indeterminacy of Reference.Timothy J. Nulty - 2010 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 43 (3):377-393.
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  • (1 other version)Categorical structure among shared features in networks of early-learned nouns.Thomas T. Hills, Mounir Maouene, Josita Maouene, Adam Sheya & Linda Smith - 2009 - Cognition 112 (3):381-396.
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  • Optimality vs. intent: Limitations of Dennett's artifact hermeneutics.Krist Vaesen & Melissa van Amerongen - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (6):779 – 797.
    Dennett has argued that when people interpret artifacts and other designed objects ( such as biological items ) they rely on optimality considerations , rather than on designer's intentions. On his view , we infer an item's function by finding out what it is best at; and such functional attribution is more reliable than when we depend on the intention it was developed with. This paper examines research in cognitive psychology and archaeology , and argues that Dennett's account is implausible. (...)
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  • Your kid could not have done that: Even untutored observers can discern intentionality and structure in abstract expressionist art.Leslie Snapper, Cansu Oranç, Angelina Hawley-Dolan, Jenny Nissel & Ellen Winner - 2015 - Cognition 137:154-165.
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  • Common minds, uncommon thoughts: a philosophical anthropological investigation of uniquely human creative behavior, with an emphasis on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study.Johan De Smedt - unknown
    The aim of this dissertation is to create a naturalistic philosophical picture of creative capacities that are specific to our species, focusing on artistic ability, religious reflection, and scientific study. By integrating data from diverse domains within a philosophical anthropological framework, I have presented a cognitive and evolutionary approach to the question of why humans, but not other animals engage in such activities. Through an application of cognitive and evolutionary perspectives to the study of these behaviors, I have sought to (...)
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  • Relevance and the Role of Labels in Categorization.Felix Gervits, Megan Johanson & Anna Papafragou - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (12):e13395.
    Language has been shown to influence the ability to form categories. Nevertheless, in most prior work, the effects of language could have been bolstered by the fact that linguistic labels were introduced by the experimenter prior to the categorization task in ways that could have highlighted their relevance for the task. Here, we compared the potency of labels to that of other non‐linguistic cues on how people categorized novel, perceptually ambiguous natural kinds (e.g., flowers or birds). Importantly, we varied whether (...)
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  • The inherence heuristic: An intuitive means of making sense of the world, and a potential precursor to psychological essentialism.Andrei Cimpian & Erika Salomon - 2014 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5):461-480.
    We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is an inherently feminine color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing (...)
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  • Set size, individuation, and attention to shape.Lisa Cantrell & Linda B. Smith - 2013 - Cognition 126 (2):258-267.
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  • A psycho-historical research program for the integrative science of art.Nicolas J. Bullot & Rolf Reber - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2):163-180.
    Critics of the target article objected to our account of art appreciators' sensitivity to art-historical contexts and functions, the relations among the modes of artistic appreciation, and the weaknesses of aesthetic science. To rebut these objections and justify our program, we argue that the current neglect of sensitivity to art-historical contexts persists as a result of a pervasive aesthetic–artistic confound; we further specify our claim that basic exposure and the design stance are necessary conditions of artistic understanding; and we explain (...)
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  • Category Cognition and Dennett’s Design Stance.Hector MacIntyre - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (3):483-495.
    Vaesen and van Amerongen (Philosophical Psychology 21:779-797, 2008) criticize Dennett’s design stance, arguing that as a cognitive thesis about artifact categorization, it is falsified by empirical findings. I assess their criticism in light of both further results and alternate findings the authors acknowledge (but did not discuss in detail). I argue that the design stance still stands in virtue of the conflicting character of these findings, and suggest shifting the domain of empirical scrutiny.
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  • Précis of how children learn the meanings of words.Paul Bloom - 2001 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (6):1095-1103.
    Normal children learn tens of thousands of words, and do so quickly and efficiently, often in highly impoverished environments. In How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, I argue that word learning is the product of certain cognitive and linguistic abilities that include the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic cues to meaning, and a rich understanding of the mental states of other people. These capacities are powerful, early emerging, and to some extent uniquely human, but they are (...)
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  • Two-year-olds use artist intention to understand drawings.Melissa Allen Preissler & Paul Bloom - 2008 - Cognition 106 (1):512-518.
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  • Cognitive linguistics as a methodological paradigm.Prof A. V. Kravchenko - 2002 - In [Book Chapter].
    A general direction in which cognitive linguistics is heading at the turn of the century is outlined and a revised understanding of cognitive linguistics as a methodological paradigm is suggest. The goal of cognitive linguistics is defined as understanding what language is and what language does to ensure the predominance of homo sapiens as a biological species. This makes cognitive linguistics a biologically oriented empirical science.
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  • (1 other version)Was it designed to do that? Children’s focus on intended function in their conceptualization of artifacts.Yvonne M. Asher & Deborah G. Kemler Nelson - 2008 - Cognition 106 (1):474-483.
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  • More than words: A reply to Malt and Sloman.Paul Bloom - 2007 - Cognition 105 (3):649-655.
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  • Action Alters Shape Categories.Linda B. Smith - 2005 - Cognitive Science 29 (4):665-679.
    Two experiments show that action alters the shape categories formed by 2-year-olds. Experiment 1 shows that moving an object horizontally (or vertically) defines the horizontal (or vertical) axis as the main axis of elongation and systematically changes the range of shapes seen as similar. Experiment 2 shows that moving an object symmetrically (or asymmetrically) also alters shape categories. Previous work has shown marked developmental changes in object recognition between 1 and 3 years of age. These results suggest a role for (...)
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  • Educating the design stance: Issues of coherence and transgression. Commentary on Bullot & Reber.Norman H. Freeman & Melissa L. Allen - forthcoming - Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
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