Announcements

1
Announcements

• Papers due May 2nd (extensions should be asked
  for in advance)
• No class April 14 (1 week from Thursday).
• Next reading is Boyer (with Keil today).

2
Frank KeilThe birth and nurturance of concepts
by domains the origins of concepts of living
things

• PHIIL 3440
• Cognitive Science

3
A collection of programs extending modularity
into central systems

• Sperber Epidemiology of representations
• Fodor Folk psychology
• Leslie Force description and Theory of Mind
• Keil Folk biology

4
A brief history of theories of concepts

• What are Concepts?
• Word meanings?
• Constituents of thought?
• Concepts as definitions
• Reading Plato
• Concepts as stereotypes/prototypes
• Rosch (reading Wittgenstein)
• The theory theory of concepts
• Keil (reading Kripke/Putnam)

5
Keil on the shift to theory theory

• Stereotype/Prototype concepts fail to be
  empirically adequate
• Mere tabulations of feature frequencies and
  correlations grossly underdetermine concept
  structure (234).
• Shift to causal/explanatory thinking
• Curvedness is equally typical of a banana and a
  boomerang but is considered much more
  explanatorily central to the boomerang.
  (234-235).

6
Biological reasoning

• Late emergence (6-7 years old)

Empiricist view Results from general
learning/hypothesis testing

• Primal Theory view
• Results from domain specific reasoning
• Extension of another domain (e.g.
  psychological)?

7
Distinctive properties of living things (not a
definition)

• Reproduction
• Complexity
• Canonical and irreversible patterns of change
• Intrinsic features features determine phenotypic
  properties phenomenal
• Typical properties are diagnostic of underlying
  ones.
• Properties have purposes.
• Homeostatic operation.

8
Empiricist view

• Problem biology - the similarity space is not
  used. Seem to have preconceptions about
  essential properties.
• Animal/plant transformation
• Horse/zebra transformation
• Costume transformations
• Operation transformations

9
Problem not infants

• Keil one doesnt have to run newborns to cast
  doubt on the empiricist program instead it
  suffices to show that relevant developmental
  trends do not extrapolate backward in a way that
  supports such a view. There is no positive
  evidence that even very young children structure
  their concepts in terms of raw similarity spaces
  structured only by perceptual principles and
  associative laws. (240)

10
Primal Theories view

• Innate, domain specific knowledge
• theory form? Modular form?
• the primal theory model predicts that early
  biological thought is not a separate domain but
  is instead absorbed largely into an intuitive
  theory of mind and behavior (241)
• How to evaluate? Look at lots of domains

11
Biological transmission of properties

• Cross-cultural universal living things transmit
  properties to offspring.
• Which properties are believed transmissible?
• Not frequent/salient properites
• Not based on psychological similarity
• Properties that have functional/physiological
  roles.

12
Kinship vs. similarity
C
A
Similar
Related
B
13
Results

• More likely to use inheritance than similarity as
  a basis of induction

14
Biological contagion

• What will catch
• Older children and cooties
• Check to see what judgments children make on the
  basis of
• psychological/biological dimension
• Congenital/acquired dimension
• Good/bad dimension

15
Result

• children assumed that psychological and
  biological causes could not mix. They were
  wholly separate. (243)

16
Disease Causes and Symptoms

• Provided three descriptions of sources of
  disease
• Teleological/functional
• Mechanical
• Intentional
• Asked about biological properties
• Asked about knowledge

17
Findings

• Distinguished mechanical from intentional and
  teleological on the living questions.
• Distinguished intentional from mechanical and
  teleological on the knowledge questions.

18
Other evidence for folk biological/teleological
endowments

• Children prefer teleological explanations for
  living things, but not for nonliving
  (non-artifactual objects)
• Insides studies
• Artifactual vs. Nonartifactual change
  experiments.

19
Structure of most of these studies

• Depend on getting a child to induce - projecting
  a concept onto new instances
• This allows one to study which properties the
  child thinks are important in this process.
• Lots of people call the findings a confirmation
  of folk essentialism

20
Some conclusions

• No reason to think that empiricist is correct.
• No reason to think the primal theory is right
  I.e. no reason to think folk biology emerges from
  folk psychology.