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A familiar adage in the philosophy of science is that general hypotheses are better supported by varied evidence than by uniform evidence. Several studies suggest that young children do not respect this principle, and thus su#er from a defect in their inductive methodology. We argue that the diversity principle does not have the normative status that psychologists attribute to it, and should be replaced by a simple rule of probability. We then report experiments designed to detect conformity to the latter rule in children's inductive judgment.

This study investigates the interaction between preschoolers ’ initial theories and their ability to learn causal relations from patterns of data. Children observed ambiguous evidence in which sets of two candidate causes co-occurred with an effect (e.g. A&B � E, A&C � E, A&D � E, etc). In one condition, all candidate causes were from the appropriate domain (a biological cause for a biological effect); in another condition, the recurring candidate cause, A, crossed domains (a psychological cause for a biological effect). When all causes were domainappropriate, children were able to use the data to identify A as a cause. When the recurring cause crossed domains, children were less likely to endorse A. However, preschoolers were significantly more willing to accept cross-domain causes after seeing the evidence than at baseline. A Bayesian model is proposed to explain this interaction. Very young children have remarkably sophisticated causal knowledge about the world. Children reason about the causes of mental states (e.g., Meltzoff, 1995), physical systems (e.g., Bullock, Gelman, & Baillargeon, 1982; Shultz, 1982), and biological events (e.g., Gelman & Wellman, 1991; Kalish, 1996). Preschoolers can even make predictions about hidden variables and explain events in terms of unobservable causes (Schulz & Sommerville, in press). Many researchers have suggested that children’s causal knowledge can be characterized as intuitive theories: abstract, coherent, defeasible representations of causal

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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

A familiar adage in the philosophy of science is that general hypotheses are better supported by varied evidence than by uniform evidence. Several studies suggest that young children do not respect this principle, and thus su#er from a defect in their inductive methodology. We argue that the diversity principle does not have the normative status that psychologists attribute to it, and should be replaced by a simple rule of probability. We then report an experiment designed to detect conformity to the latter rule in children's inductive judgment. Evidential Diversity 1 Introduction A central issue in cognitive development is whether children's scientific reasoning is methodologically sound (simply short on facts), or else neglectful of fundamental principles of inductive reasoning (Carey, 1985; Markman, 1989; Keil, 1989; Kuhn, 1996; Gopnik and Meltzo#, 1996; Koslowski, 1996). To address the issue, normative standards of inductive reasoning must be formulated, and children's thinking e...

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categories as absolute but membership in artifact categories as graded. In this study, we examined domain differences in beliefs about category boundaries among young children (5-year-olds). The results indicated that young children, like adults, were less likely to endorse graded category membership for animal than for artifact categories. These domain differences could not be attributed to domain differences in typicality. Implications for conceptual development and for models of domain specificity in adult cognition are discussed. Research on adult concepts indicates that category structure varies by domain of knowledge. These domain differences are thought to reflect systematic ontological commitments (S. A. Gelman & Coley, 1991). Particularly, adults’ belief that many animal categories are natural kinds (i.e., real categories that are discovered in nature) indicates that even atypical members (e.g., birds that cannot fly) are full category members by virtue of being included in the kind defined by nature. Thus, adults view animal categories as having discrete, objectively defined boundaries, and view

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