Predicting how people will behave in the future is a critical social-cognitive task. In four studies (N 5 150, ages preschool to adult), young children (ages 4 – 5) used category information to guide their expectations about individual consistency. They predicted that psychological properties (preferences and fears) would remain consistent over time after hearing one example in which properties followed a category-linked distribution (e.g., children of different genders had different properties) but not when properties varied within a category (e.g., children of the same gender had different properties). The developmental course of these findings is examined. Results suggest the importance of considering how children’s emerging theories of behavior and of social groups operate together to inform their expectations about the social world. To an adult, hearing a child say that she ‘‘likes Winnie the Pooh’ ’ provides valuable information. For example, the adult may use this information to select birthday presents for this child or to choose books to offer to read to her. These inferences are possible because adults interpret the child’s statement as stemming from a stable disposition toward Winnie

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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Most speakers experience unclarity about the application of predicates like tall and red to liminal cases. We formulate alternative psychological hypotheses about the nature of this unclarity, and report experiments that provide a partial test of them. A psychologized version of the #vagueness-as-ignorance" theory is then advanced and defended. 1 Introduction If you examine monochromatic light from 650nm on down, the #rst hues will probably strikeyou as red and later ones as orange. Somewhere near 610nm, however, your judgment will become unstable, with neither the a#rmation #This hue is red" nor its denial aptly characterizing your belief. Such unclarity is called #vagueness," and as every amateur sophist knows, it infects virtually every predicate in natural language. Vagueness is more than an annoyance since it can obstruct the attempt to articulate valid principles of reasoning. A classic illustration concerns mathematical induction. #1# Principle of Mathematical Induction: ...

The paper compares predictions derived from the similaritybased and the theory-based accounts of young children's induction. The former predicts the primacy of induction from one single entity to another single entity (one-to-one induction), whereas the latter does not predict such primacy. Predictions were tested in three experiments where 4-5 yearolds and 11-12 year-olds were asked to perform inductive generalization of biological properties. Participants could generalize properties either from a single animal to another single animal (one-to-one induction) or from a group of animals to a single animal (many-to-one induction). Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that under various stimuli presentation conditions, young children exhibited a strong preference of one-to-one induction, performing generalizations in a similarity-based manner. At the same time, preadolescents exhibited a strong preference of manyto -one induction, performing generalizations in a theorybased manner. In Experiment 3, an alternative explanation that one-to-one induction stems from a tendency to match quantifiers or label endings was tested and eliminated. Results are discussed in relation to cognitive and developmental aspects of inductive inference.

The proposal that the concept of innateness expresses a ‘folk biological ’ theory of the ‘inner natures ’ of organisms was tested by examining the response of biologically naive participants to a series of realistic scenarios concerning the development of birdsong. Our results explain the intuitive appeal of many of the existing philosophical analyses of the innateness concept. They simultaneously explain why all such analyses are subject to compelling counterexamples. We argue that this explanation undermines the appeal of these analyses, whether understood as analyses of the vernacular concept or as explications of that concept for the purposes of science. 1.

Causal learning requires integrating constraints provided by domain-specific theories with domaingeneral statistical learning. In order to investigate the interaction between these factors, the authors presented preschoolers with stories pitting their existing theories against statistical evidence. Each child heard 2 stories in which 2 candidate causes co-occurred with an effect. Evidence was presented in the

One of the deepest and most ancient problems in philosophy is what we might call the problem of knowledge. There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between our abstract, complex, highly structured knowledge of the world, and the concrete, limited and confused information provided by our senses. Since the Meno, there have been two basic ways of approaching this problem, rationalism and empiricism. Each era seems to have its matched pair of advocates of each view, making their way through the centuries like couples in some eternal philosophical gavotte, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Locke, Leibniz and Berkeley, Kant and Mill. The rationalist approach says that although it looks as if we learn about the world from our experience, we don’t really. Actually, we knew about it all along. The most important things we know were there to begin with, planted innately in our minds by God or evolution (or chance). The empiricist approach says that although it looks as if our knowledge is far removed from our experience, it isn’t really. If we rearrange the elements of our experience in particular ways, by associating ideas, or putting together stimuli and responses, we’ll end up with our knowledge of the world. There is both a tension and a kind of complementarity between these two ideas,

this paper to answer." (p. 163)

Traditional approaches to causal attribution propose that information about covariation of factors is used to identify causes of events. In contrast, we present a series of studies showing that people seek out and prefer information about causal mechanisms rather than information about covariation. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 asked subjects to indicate the kind of information they would need for causal attribution. The subjects tended to seek out information that would provide evidence for or against hypotheses about underlying mechanisms. When asked to provide causes, the subjects' descriptions were also based on causal mechanisms. In Experiment 4, subjects received pieces of conflicting evidence matching in covariation values but differing in whether the evidence included some statement of a mechanism. The influence of evidence was significantly stronger when it included mechanism information. We conclude that people do not treat the task of causal attribution as one of identifying a novel causal relationship between arbitrary factors by relying solely on covariation information. Rather, people attempt to seek out causal mechanisms in developing a causal explanation for a specific event.