Date:
Thursday, March 8, 2018, 12:00pm to 1:15pm
Location:
Room 765 William James Hall
The machinery of kind formation: The generation of novel kind representations and their role in thought
Paul Haward
PhD Student, Department of Psychology
Human beings are alone in the animal kingdom in developing an extraordinary repertoire of intricate kind representations during the earliest stages of development—representations for kinds of things like dogs, watches, cities, and triangles. A normally developing young child takes as input experience with the particular things she encounters, sometimes only one or two particular things, and outputs a representation of an entire category that can then, in principle, apply to indefinitely many novel instances (Carey and Bartlett, 1978; Macnamara, 1986). These representations play a central role in human thought. For example, they underlie the meanings of most count and mass nouns in natural language, and as such, they provide an important interface between non-linguistic conceptual structure and combinatorial, hierarchical, unbounded linguistically expressible thought. This talk focuses on the formation of new kind concepts. It asks: what is the cognitive machinery that allows us to generate a novel kind representation?