Knowing and naming artifacts and natural kinds

 

Since the 1970s, psychologists as well as linguists, anthropologists, and philosophers have debated the fundamental nature of knowledge about concrete objects (human-made and naturally occurring) and the terms that refer to them. Central to the debates has been the possibility that non-linguistic and linguistic knowledge about artifacts and natural kinds are grounded in beliefs in category “essences” that determine judgments of kindhood and choice of names for such objects. Our research has argued that although beliefs in essences are part of object representations, these beliefs are not the key to understanding what things a person will judge to be of the same kind or the names they use for them. Rather, our research argues for an approach that takes non-linguistic knowledge to be grounded in an understanding of the causal relations among an entity’s properties, conceptual groupings of objects to be flexibly formed in the interest of task demands, and word choice to be a function of linguistic options shaped over the history of a language and of their pragmatic value in a specific communicative situation. 

Related publications:

Malt, B.C. (1990).  Features and beliefs in the mental representation of categories.  Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 289‑315.

Malt, B.C. and Johnson, E.C. (1992).  Do artifact concepts have cores? Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 195-217.

Malt, B.C. (1994).  Water is not H2O.  Cognitive Psychology, 27, 41-70.

Sloman, S.A. & Malt, B.C. (2003). Artifacts are not ascribed essences, nor are they treated as belonging to kinds.  Language and Cognitive Processes [Special Issue:  Conceptual Representation], 18, 563-582.

Malt, B. C. and Sloman, S. A.  (2007). Artifact categorization:  The good, the bad, and the ugly. In E. Margolis & S. Laurence (Ed.), Creations of the Mind:  Theories of Artifacts and Their Representation.  Oxford University Press.

Malt, B. C. and Sloman, S. A.  (in press).  Category essence or essentially pragmatic?  Creator's intention in naming and what's really what. Cognition.