cordially invites you to a talk
Departmental Colloquium series: Psychological Essentialism: The Origins of Representing Artifact Kinds
by Gyorgy Gergely (CEU)
‘Psychological Essentialism’ (Gelman 2003; Medin & Ortony, 1989) is a doctrine in current-day cognitive developmental science according to which - as a result of evolutionary adaptation - the human mind makes the basic innate assumption that individuals of a given kind have hidden essences with causal and rich inferential properties that determine the existence of the members of that kind, their suface properties and causal powers. The evolved essentialist interpretational and representational stance about kinds and their members clearly serves adaptive purposes in conceptual development, but it doesn’t depend on essentialism being true in a metaphysical sense about natural kind (Kripke/Putnam).
While many agree that natural kinds are conceptualized and represented by young children in an essentialist manner from very early on, there is a debate whether artifact kinds are also subject to an initial essentialist construal or not. Kelemen & Carey (2007) propose that the essentialist representation of artifact kinds in terms of derived intentionality of the creator is a function of the child’s construction of the Design Stance around 5 years, before which arifacts are not represented in terms of an inherent kind-defining proper function, but rather understood in terms of its context-dependent and changing episodic functional uses. I shall present new evidence from a series of object individuation studies demonstrating for the first time that 10-month-old preverbal infants can be induced in ostensive communicative contexts to assign the demonstrated functional use of a novel artifact object as the essential function of the artifact kind that the object is represented as a member of. Another important implication of the present studies is that they challenge the earlier proposal (Xu & Carey) that linguistic labeling is the ‘royal road’ for individuating sortal kind representations for referents. It is argued that it is ostensive communicative reference (rather than naming by verbal labels per se), which may trigger sortal kind assignment and the interpretation of the demonstrated properties of deictically identified particular referents as being enduring generic kind-relevant properties that identify the referent kind.