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Theories of relations between language and conceptual development benefit from empirical evidence for concepts available in infancy, but such evidence is comparatively scarce. Here, we examine early representations of specific concepts, namely, sets of dynamic events corresponding either to predicates involving two variables with a reversible, asymmetric relation between them (such as the set of all events that correspond to a linguistic phrase like “a dog is pushing a car,”) or to comparatively simpler, one-variable predicates (such as the set of (...) |
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This dissertation focuses on teleology and functions in biology. More precisely, it focuses on the scientific legitimacy of teleofunctional attributions and explanations in biology. It belongs to a multi-faceted debate that can be traced back to at least the 1970s. One aspect of the debate concerns the naturalization of functions. Most authors try to reduce, translate or explain functions and teleology in terms of efficient causes so that they find their place in the framework of the natural sciences. Our approach (...) |
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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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Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that—beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations—people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which category generalizations would distract from the main goal (...) |
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According to the theory of natural pedagogy, humans have a set of cognitive adaptations specialized for transmitting and receiving knowledge through teaching; young children can acquire generalizable knowledge from ostensive signals even in a single interaction, and adults also actively teach young children. In this article, we critically examine the theory and argue that ostensive signals do not always allow children to learn generalizable knowledge more efficiently, and that the empirical evidence provided in favor of the theory of natural pedagogy (...) |
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There is no room for pragmatic expectations about communicative interactions in core cognition. Spelke takes the combinatorial power of the human language faculty to overcome the limits of core cognition. The question is: Why should the combinatorial power of the human language faculty support infants' pragmatic expectations not merely about speech, but also about nonverbal communicative interactions? |
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In recent years, a number of approaches to social cognition research have emerged that highlight the importance of embodied interaction for social cognition (Reddy, How infants know minds, 2008; Gallagher, J Conscious Stud 8:83–108, 2001; Fuchs and Jaegher, Phenom Cogn Sci 8:465–486, 2009; Hutto, in Seemans (ed.) Joint attention: new developments in psychology, philosophy of mind and social neuroscience, 2012). Proponents of such ‘interactionist’ approaches emphasize the importance of embodied responses that are engaged in online social interaction, and which, according (...) |
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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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The role of personal background knowledge—in particular knowledge about the context of production of an artwork—has been only marginally taken into account in cognitive approaches to art. Addressing this issue is crucial to enhancing these approaches’ explanatory power and framing their collaboration with the humanities (Bullot and Reber 2012). This paper sketches a model of the experience of artworks based on the mechanisms of intention attribution, and shows how this model makes it possible to address the issue of personal background (...) |
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A theory of conceptual development must specify the innate representational primitives, must characterize the ways in which the initial state differs from the adult state, and must characterize the processes through which one is transformed into the other. The Origin of Concepts (henceforth TOOC) defends three theses. With respect to the initial state, the innate stock of primitives is not limited to sensory, perceptual, or sensorimotor representations; rather, there are also innate conceptual representations. With respect to developmental change, conceptual development (...) |
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Gergely and Csibra's theory, known as "natural pedagogy theory", is meant to explain how infants fast-learn generic knowledge from adults. In this paper, my goal is to assess the explanatory import of this theory in a particular case, namely the phenomena known as "A-not-B errors". I first propose a clarification of natural pedagogy theory's fundamental hypotheses. Then, I describe Topál et al.'s (Science, 321, 1831-1834, 2008) experiments, which consist in applying natural pedagogy theory's framework to the A-not-B errors. Finally, I (...) |
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This study examined 4-year-olds’ problem-solving under different social conditions. Children had to use water in order to extract a buoyant object from a narrow tube. When faced with the problem ‘cold’ without cues, nearly all children were unsuccessful. But when a solution-suggesting video was pedagogically delivered prior to the task, most children succeeded. Showing children the same video in a non-pedagogical manner did not lift their performance above baseline and was less effective than framing it pedagogically. The findings support ideas (...) |
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Sortal terms, such as table or horse, are count nouns (akin to a basic-level terms). According to some theories, the meaning of sortals provides conditions for telling objects apart (individuating objects, e.g., telling one table from a second) and for identifying objects over time (e.g., determining that a particular horse at one time is the same horse at another). A number of psychologists have proposed that sortal concepts likewise provide psychologically real conditions for individuating and identifying things. However, this paper (...) |
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The present study investigated 3-year-old children’s learning processes about object functions. We built on children’s tendency to commit scale errors with tools to explore whether they would selectively endorse object functions from a linguistic in-group over an out-group model. Participants ( n = 37) were presented with different object sets, and a model speaking either in their native or a foreign language demonstrated how to use the presented tools. In the test phase, children received the object sets with two modifications: (...) |
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Object individuation provides a test case for the claim that infants already have a prelinguistic language-of-thought (LOT). By 12 months, infants represent several sortal-kinds: Object, agent, animate, and perhaps artifact. Infants have also encountered many words for object kinds, animals, people, and artifacts, therefore it remains a viable hypothesis that language learning may play a causal role in the acquisition of sortal-kinds, contra Quilty-Dunn et al. |
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Carey focuses her theory on initial knowledge and Quinian bootstrapping. We reflect on developmental mechanisms, which can operate in between. Whereas most of the research aims at delimitating early cognitive mechanisms, we point at the need for studying their integration and mutual bootstrapping. We illustrate this call by referring to a current debate on infants' use of featural representations. |
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