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 (...) consists of episodes of qualitative change, resulting in systems of representation that are more powerful than, and sometimes incommensurable with, those from which they are built. With respect to a learning mechanism that achieves conceptual discontinuity, I offer Quinian bootstrapping. TOOC concludes with a discussion of how an understanding of conceptual development constrains a theory of concepts. (shrink)

To what extent general intelligence mechanisms are associated with causal thinking is unclear. There has been little work done experimentally to determine which developing cognitive capacities help to integrate causal knowledge into explicit systems. To investigate this neglected aspect of development, 138 children aged 5–11 studying at mainstream primary schools completed a battery of three intelligence tests: one investigating verbal ability (WASI vocabulary), another looking at verbal analogical (Verbal Analogies subset of the WRIT), and a third assessing non-verbal/fluid reasoning (WASI (...) block design). Children were also interviewed over the course of three causal tasks (sinking, absorption, and solution), with the results showing that the developmental paths exhibited uneven profiles across the three causal phenomena. Children consistently found that explaining solution, where substances disappeared toward the end of the process, was more challenging. The confirmatory factor analyses suggested that the impact of cognitive ability factor in explicitly identifying causal relations was large. The proportion of the direct effect of general intelligence was 66% and it subsumed the variances of both verbal measures. Of this, 37% was the indirect effect of age. Fluid reasoning explained a further 28% of the variance, playing a unique role in causal explanation. The results suggested that, overall, cognitive abilities are substantially related to causal reasoning, but not entirely due to developmental differences in “g” during the age periods studied. (shrink)

Mysterianism has become a popular stance in philosophy of consciousness and other philosophical subdisciplines. The aim of this paper is to show that mysterianism is not justified, mainly because its inclination to epistemic defeatism and the misunderstanding of the division of epistemic labour. In the first part, I will present the history of mysterianism in the 19th and 20th century philosophy. Then, in the second part, I will point out how epistemic defeatism is founded in the unwarranted philosophical futurology. The (...) third part will deal with the division of labour in society, language and knowledge. Because of the division of epistemic labour, the understanding is distributed among numerous agents without possibility of individual comprehension. Finally, I will coin the term “ignorance illusion” that plays the central role in the mysterians’ worldview. (shrink)

Active cultural transmission of fitness-enhancing behavior can be seen as a costly strategy: one for which its evolutionary stability poses a Darwinian puzzle. In this article, we offer a biological market model of cultural transmission that substitutes or complements existing kin selection-based proposals for the evolution of cultural capacities. We demonstrate how a biological market can account for the evolution of teaching when individual learners are the exclusive focus of social learning. We also show how this biological market can affect (...) the dynamics of cumulative culture. The model works best when it is difficult to have access to the observation of the behavior without the help of the actor. However, in contrast to previous non-mathematical hypotheses for the evolution of teaching, we show how teaching evolves, even when innovations are insufficiently opaque and therefore vulnerable to acquisition by emulators via inadvertent transmission. Furthermore, teaching in a biological market is an important precondition for enhancing individual learning abilities. (shrink)

The epistemic structure of society, with its division of epistemic and cognitive labour, can help us deal with the citizenry incompetence threat that many contemporary conceptions of democracy suffer as long as a certain intellectual character is possessed by the citizens. Keywords: expert testimony, collective deliberation, intellectual virtue, democracy.

Because modern societies are built on elaborate divisions of cognitive labor, individuals remain laypersons in most knowledge domains. Hence, they have to rely on others' expertise when deciding on many science-related issues in private and public life. Even children already locate and discern expertise in the minds of others. This study examines how far university students accurately judge experts' pertinence for science topics even when they lack proficient knowledge of the domain. Participants judged the pertinence of experts from diverse disciplines (...) based on the experts' assumed contributions to texts adapted from original articles from Science and Nature. Subjective pertinence judgments were calibrated by comparing them with bibliometrics of the original articles. Furthermore, participants' general science knowledge was controlled. Results showed that participants made well-calibrated pertinence judgments regardless of their level of general science knowledge. (shrink)

Children and adults may not realize how much they depend on external sources in understanding word meanings. Four experiments investigated the existence and developmental course of a “Misplaced Meaning” effect, wherein children and adults overestimate their knowledge about the meanings of various words by underestimating how much they rely on outside sources to determine precise reference. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that children and adults show a highly consistent MM effect, and that it is stronger in young children. Study 3 (...) demonstrates that adults are explicitly aware of the availability of outside knowledge, and that this awareness may be related to the strength of the MM effect. Study 4 rules out general overconfidence effects by examining a metalinguistic task in which adults are well calibrated. (shrink)

Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely on “mechanism metadata,” information about mechanism information. We argue that mechanism metadata is relatively consistent across individuals exposed to similar amounts of mechanism information, and it (...) is applicable to a wide range of causal systems. In three experiments, we show that adults and children as young as 5 years of age have a consistent sense of the causal complexity of different causal systems, and that this sense of complexity is related to decisions about when to seek expert knowledge, but over development there is a shift in focus from procedural information to internal mechanism information. (shrink)

If folk science means individuals having well worked out mechanistic theories of the workings of the world, then it is not feasible. Laypeople’s explanatory understandings are remarkably coarse, full of gaps, and often full of inconsistencies. Even worse, most people overestimate their own understandings. Yet recent views suggest that formal scientists may not be so different. In spite of these limitations, science somehow works and its success offers hope for the feasibility of folk science as well. The success of science (...) arises from the ways in which scientists learn to leverage understandings in other minds and to outsource explanatory work through sophisticated methods of deference and simplification of complex systems. Three studies ask whether analogous processes might be present not only in laypeople but also in young children and thereby form a foundation for supplementing explanatory understandings almost from the start of our first attempts to make sense of the world. (shrink)

Four experiments investigate the folk concept of “understanding,” in particular when and why it is deployed differently from the concept of knowledge. We argue for the positions that people have higher demands with respect to explanatory depth when it comes to attributing understanding, and that this is true, in part, because understanding attributions play a functional role in identifying experts who should be heeded with respect to the general field in question. These claims are supported by our findings that people (...) differentially withhold attributions of understanding when the object of attribution has minimal explanatory information. We also show that this tendency significantly correlates with people’s willingness to defer to others as potential experts. This work bears on a pressing issue in epistemology concerning the place and value of understanding. Our results also provide reason against positing a simple equation of knowledge and understanding. We contend that, because deference plays a crucial role in many aspects of everyday reasoning, the fact that we use understanding attributions to demarcate experts reveals a potential mechanism for achieving our epistemic aims in many domains. (shrink)

Are we gullible? Can we be easily influenced by what others tell us, even if they do not deserve our trust? Many strands of research, from social psychology to cultural evolution suggest that humans are by nature conformist and eager to follow prestigious leaders. By contrast, an evolutionary perspective suggests that humans should be vigilant towards communicated information, so as not to be misled too often. Work in experimental psychology shows that humans are equipped with sophisticated mechanisms that allow them (...) to carefully evaluate communicated information. These open vigilance mechanisms lead us to reject messages that clash with our prior beliefs, unless the source of the message has earned our trust, or provides good arguments, in which case we can adaptively change our minds. These mechanisms make us largely immune to mass persuasion, explaining why propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, and other attempts at persuading large groups nearly always fall in deaf ears. However, some false beliefs manage to spread through communication. I argue that most popular false beliefs are held reflectively, which means that they have little effect on our thoughts and behaviors, and that many false beliefs can be socially beneficial. Accepting such beliefs thus reflects a much weaker failure in our evaluation of communicated information than might at first appear. (shrink)

Chance-based gambling has been a recurrent cultural activity throughout history and across many diverse human societies. In this paper, I combine quantitative and qualitative data and present a cultural evolutionary framework to explain why the odds in games of chance in premodern China appeared “designed” to ensure a moderate yet favorable house advantage. This is especially intriguing since extensive research in the history of probability has shown that, prior to the development of probability theory, people had very limited understanding of (...) the nature of random events and were generally disinclined to think mathematically about the frequency of their occurrence. I argue that games of chance in the context of gambling may have culturally evolved into their documented forms via a process of selective imitation and retention, and neither the customers nor the gambling houses understood the probability calculus involved in these games. (shrink)

Kline argues for an expanded taxonomy of teaching focusing on the adaptive behaviors needed to solve learning problems. Absent from her analysis is an explicit definition of learning, or a discussion of the iterative nature of the relationship between teaching and learning. Including the learner in the discussion may help to distinguish among the adaptive values of different teaching behaviors.