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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 envi - ronment, constructing essentialized representations of them, and constraining inductive infer - ences about kinds. Moreover, there are different kinds of kinds, ranging from nonliving sub - stances to biological taxa to within-species kinds such as sex, and the causal processes that render these categories coherent for the purposes of inductive generalization vary. If the evolved function of essentialism is to support inductive generalization under ignorance of true causes, and if kinds of kinds vary in the implicit assumptions that support valid inductive inferences about them, then we expect different, functionally incompatible modes of essen - tialist thinking for different kinds. In particular, there should be differences in how biological and nonbiological substances, biological taxa, and biological and social role kinds are essen - tialized. The functional differences between these kinds of essentialism are discussed.

Words, kinds and causal powers: A theory theory perspective on early naming and categorization. For some twenty-five years, the prevailing theories of categorization in philosophy have invoked the idea of “kinds ” (Putnam, 1975; Kripke, 1972). When we look at how adults use words to refer to categories of things we find that they only rarely categorize objects on the basis of their common properties. Instead, adults seem to categorize objects together when they believe that they belong to the same “kind”; that is, that they share some common, abstract “essence.” Psychological investigations of adults have largely confirmed these philosophical intuitions, adults do seem to group objects together based on “kinds ” rather than properties (Murphy &

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Linguistic labels, information about category memberships, have been found to be more important than perceptual information in guiding young children's inferences about animal kinds. However, perceptual information of static shape cues has often been stressed. A recent study has shown that young children tended to use dynamic perceptual cues, such as motion, more often than static shape cues to make categorical judgments. The overriding effects of linguistic labels over perceptual information in young children's inferences need to be re-examined. This paper was an attempt to examine how 3-year-old children use category labels and motion cues to draw inferences about animal kinds. Data showed that preschool children tended to use motion more often than labels when confronted with a choice between labels and motion. This provides support for our view that the role of category labels in young children's categorical judgments is not as important as what has been suggested in previous studies.

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Currently available empirical evidence is often insufficient to distinguish among developmental theories of word learning, categorization, and induction. This paper argues that theories of conceptual development should be evaluated not only on the basis of their ability to account for empirical findings, but also on the basis of their consistency with a broader body of knowledge, particularly with the known properties of developing selective attention. The paper presents a brief overview of the behavioral and neurophysiological findings on the development of selective attention. These findings are argued to be inconsistent with the approaches assuming that early in development learning is driven by conceptual knowledge and naïve theories, but provide support to the approaches arguing that early learning may be impervious to conceptual influences. KEYWORDS: cognitive development, categorization, induction, word learning, attention. Current theories of conceptual development can be broadly characterized as those arguing that early learning relies predominantly on the low-level domaingeneral mechanisms of perception, attention, and memory (Sloutsky & Fisher,

Prior research suggests young children understand that labels serve as category markers and that they can utilize this information to perform category-based induction with both identical and semantically-similar labels (Gelman & Markman, 1986). Recent research suggests that children’s ability to perform category-based induction is limited to a small subset of semantically-similar labels which co-occur in child-directed speech (Fisher, 2010; Fisher, Matlen, & Godwin, in press). However, most of the co-occurring labels used in prior research are not only semantically-similar but they also refer to baby-parent relationships (e.g., puppydog). Thus, children may be able to perform induction with these particular label-pairs, because they contain kinship information rather than because they co-occur. The present study aims to disentangle whether young children’s induction performance is driven by kinship information or co-occurrence probability. Results indicate that 4-year-olds’ (but not 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds, or adults) induction performance was influenced by co-occurrence probability; kinship information was found to be insufficient to promote young children’s induction performance.

Prior research had documented that semantically-similar labels that co-occur in child-directed speech promote generalization in young children. The present study examined whether co-occurrence probability – in the absence of semantic similarity – can influence children’s inferences. Four- and five-year-old children were exposed to an auditory speech stream consisting of trisyllabic nonsense words (e.g. “golabu”) that were concatenated into a continuous speech stream. After listening to the stream, children were given a label extension task where the first two syllables of a nonsense word were assigned to a novel target object (e.g. “gola”); children were asked to choose which of the three test items should be referred to by the remaining syllable of this nonsense word (e.g., “bu”; Experimental condition) or by a syllable from a different nonsense word (e.g., “ti”; Control condition). Children’s generalization performance in this task was similar to results of previous research that used natural rather than artificial language stimuli. These results are consistent with the notion that that low-level, automatic processes can influence performance on high-level reasoning tasks.