Classifying is a fundamental operation in the acquisition of knowledge. Taxonomic theory can help students of cognition, evolutionary psychology, ethology, anatomy, and sociobiology to avoid serious mistakes, both practical and theoretical. More positively, it helps in generating hypotheses useful to a wide range of disciplines. Composite wholes, such as species and societies, are “individuals” in the logical sense, and should not be treated as if they were classes. A group of analogous features is a natural kind, but a group of (...) homologous features is not. Imposing hypotheses justified only on the basis of nominalist, realist, phenomenalist, or conceptualist metaphysics upon the neurophysiology of organisms or upon the causes of behavior exemplifies the “psychologist's fallacy” of William James. Levels should be distinguished from their members and from classes of levels, and the ontological status of entities ranked at levels should be made clear. It is important not to confuse such categories as substance and process with one another. Several genetical terms, such as “gene” and chromosome,” are even more equivocal than has been realized. Discussions about units of selection, behavior, and thinking suffer from the ambiguity of a “unit of” an entity. An important source of misunderstanding about natural selection is the habit of treating it as an “agent”: in an important sense, natural selection does not “act” at all. (shrink)

Concepts are highly theoretical entities. One cannot study them empirically without committing oneself to substantial preliminary assumptions. Among the competing theories of concepts and categorization developed by psychologists in the last thirty years, the implicit theoretical assumption that what falls under a concept is determined by description () has never been seriously challenged. I present a nondescriptionist theory of our most basic concepts, which include (1) stuffs (gold, milk), (2) real kinds (cat, chair), and (3) individuals (Mama, Bill Clinton, the (...) Empire State Building). On the basis of something important that all three have in common, our earliest and most basic concepts of substances are identical in structure. The membership of the category like that of is a natural unit in nature, to which the concept does something like pointing, and continues to point despite large changes in the properties the thinker represents the unit as having. For example, large changes can occur in the way a child identifies cats and the things it is willing to call without affecting the extension of its word The difficulty is to cash in the metaphor of in this context. Having substance concepts need not depend on knowing words, but language interacts with substance concepts, completely transforming the conceptual repertoire. I will discuss how public language plays a crucial role in both the acquisition of substance concepts and their completed structure. (shrink)

The current prominent influence of the theories of L. S. Vygotsky on studies of education, particularly of pedagogic practice, requires a re-examination. The dominance of deficient editions of his writings has had regrettable consequences such as a misplaced reading of the 'zone of proximal development'. The publication of his recent, albeit incomplete, "Collected Works" in English affords an opportunity to reassess Vygotsky's work. Potential areas for such rethinking include: a comparison between his work and influence with that of Piaget; Vygotsky's (...) own epistemology and methodology; and the relevance of his approach to contemporary concerns. (shrink)

Although our concepts of “Mama,” “milk,” and “mice” have much in common, the suggestion that they are identical in structure in the mind of the prelinguistic child is mistaken. Even infants think about objects as different from substances and appreciate the distinction between kinds (e.g., mice) and individuals (e.g., Mama). Such cognitive capacities exist in other animals as well, and have important adaptive consequences.

This is a reminiscence and short biographical sketch of the late philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor. It includes a summary of his main proposals about the mind: his “Language of Thought” hypothesis; his rejection of analyticity and conceptual role semantics; his “mad dog nativism”; his proposal of mental modules and—by contrast—his skepticism about a computational theory of central cognition; his anti‐reductionist, but still physicalist, views about psychology; and, lastly, his attacks on selectionism. I conclude with some discussion of his (...) idiosyncratic style and of his aesthetic and other interests. An appendix provides some memorable quotes. (shrink)

In some circumstances, children of 5 produce identical classifications to 10 year olds when asked to sort a collection of objects. This has been interpreted as meaning that the process of constructing classifications is very similar at 5 and 10 years. But this conclusion rests on a comparison of the product of children's sortings, rather than on a study of their activity in producing sortings. The present paper argues that the process of classifying is in fact very different for 5 (...) and 10 year olds: whereas the older children treat the whole classification as a single unit composed of interrelated classes, the younger children proceed as though each class were independent of the others. At around 7 years, there is evidence for a transitional phase, in which children directly work on the relations between classes and so organize their initially “juxtaposed” procedures into more coherent systems. The tendency to work on the relations between elements in the process of classifying is not, however, simply an age‐related phenomenon: evidence for a similar effect can be observed in children throughout the age range of 5 to 10 years, during the course of short experimental sessions. Furthermore, the effect is not merely a response to errors or difficulties: the tendency to work on classifying relations can be seen in 5‐year‐old children in a task in which they are already successful. It seems that children spontaneously discover and use information about their procedures and the relations between them. This process is an end in itself. It occurs whether or not its results yield more successful performance. The approach taken in this paper is not confined to one area of behavior. This analysis of children's classifying fits closely with work in a very different domain, i.e. Karmiloff‐Smith's work on children's language and other representational systems. The analysis has implications for computer models of skill acquisition, as well as for psychological theories of development. (shrink)