In Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, Frank C. Keil provides a coherent account of how concepts and word meanings develop in children, adding to our understanding of the representational nature of concepts and word meanings at all ages. Keil argues that it is impossible to adequately understand the nature of conceptual representation without also considering the issue of learning. Weaving together issues in cognitive development, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, he reconciles numerous theories, backed by empirical evidence from nominal kinds (...) studies, natural-kinds studies, and studies of fundamental categorical distinctions. He shows that all this evidence, when put together, leads to a better understanding of semantic and conceptual development. The book opens with an analysis of the problems of modeling qualitative changes in conceptual development, investigating how concepts of natural kinds, nominal kinds, and artifacts evolve. The studies on nominal kinds document a powerful and unambiguous developmental pattern indicating a shift from a reliance on global tabulations of characteristic features to what appears to be a small set of defining ones. The studies on natural kinds document an analogous shift toward a core theory instead of simple definition. Both sets of studies are strongly supported by cross cultural data. While these patterns seem to suggest that the young child organizes concepts according to characteristic features, Keil argues that there is a framework of conceptual categories and causal beliefs that enables even very young children to understand kinds at a deeper, theoretically guided, level. This account suggests a new way of understanding qualitative change and carries strong implications for how concepts are represented at any point in development. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Does the practice of psychology make a significant and positive contribution to human welfare and the struggle for a good society? This book presents a reinvigorating look at psychology and its societal purpose, offering a bold new philosophical foundation from which professionals in the field can deeply examine their work.

These essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual..

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline‐based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5‐year‐olds could cluster knowledge (...) in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline‐based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined. (shrink)

Research on corporate social responsibility has traditionally focused on managerial discretion and stakeholders’ influence. This study extends current research by addressing the effect of family firms and institutional owners on CSR performance, namely, CSR strengths and concerns. Based on stewardship theory and the socioemotional wealth perspective, we propose that family firms are more likely to value CSR performance. Next, drawing from multiple agency theory, we predict that institutional owners, unlike family owners, will influence a firm’s CSR performance differently. We tested (...) our hypotheses using a sample of 153 firms from 1994 to 2006 and found general support for our hypotheses. A higher percentage of family owned equity and the presence of a family CEO are found to increase CSR strengths, whereas transient institutional owners have an opposite effect. The presence of a family CEO and founding family are found to reduce CSR concerns. Contrary to our predictions, dedicated institutional owners are positively associated with CSR concerns. (shrink)

The rise of appeals to intuitive theories in many areas of cognitive science must cope with a powerful fact. People understand the workings of the world around them in far less detail than they think. This illusion of knowledge depth has been uncovered in a series of recent studies and is caused by several distinctive properties of explanatory understanding not found in other forms of knowledge. Other experimental work has shown that people do have skeletal frameworks of expectations that constrain (...) richer ad hoc theory construction on the fly. These frameworks are supplemented by an ability to evaluate and rely on the division of cognitive labour in one's culture, an ability shown to be present even in young children. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Nature of Schopenhauer's Platonic Ideas and Their Relation to Individuals The Exclusion of Mathematical Ideas The Exclusion of Value Ideas Schopenhauer's Justification of His Restriction of Ideas to Ideas in Nature Schopenhauer's Theory of Art Considered in Itself Irresoluble Conflicts between Plato and Schopenhauer Notes References Further Reading.

Several studies demonstrate that an intuitive link between agents and order emerges within the first year of life. This appreciation seems importantly related to similar forms of inference, such as the Argument from Design. We suggest, however, that infants and young children may be more accurate in their tendencies to infer agents from order than older children and adults, who often infer intentional agents when there are none. Thus, the earliest inferences about intentional agents based on order may be quite (...) accurate and resistant to non-intentional foils, but with further cognitive development and overgeneralization, links between order and agents may emerge that, with the right socio-cultural prompts, can lead to the Argument from Design. (shrink)

If folk science means individuals having well worked out mechanistic theories of the workings of the world, then it is not feasible. Laypeople’s explanatory understandings are remarkably coarse, full of gaps, and often full of inconsistencies. Even worse, most people overestimate their own understandings. Yet recent views suggest that formal scientists may not be so different. In spite of these limitations, science somehow works and its success offers hope for the feasibility of folk science as well. The success of science (...) arises from the ways in which scientists learn to leverage understandings in other minds and to outsource explanatory work through sophisticated methods of deference and simplification of complex systems. Three studies ask whether analogous processes might be present not only in laypeople but also in young children and thereby form a foundation for supplementing explanatory understandings almost from the start of our first attempts to make sense of the world. (shrink)

This article describes the important structural characteristics of a recently developed game-theoretic model of deterrence, summarizes the major deductions drown from it, and discusses its implications for both the theory of deterrence and the current strategic relationship of the superpowers. The model shows that a credible threat and a power advantage are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for stable deterrence. It also suggests that, even under ideal conditions, deterrence is an intricate and fundamentally fragile relationship that rests, ultimately, upon the (...) preferences and perceptions of key decision-makers rather than upon the nature and composition of each side’s strategic arsenal. (shrink)

Philip E. Tetlock's finding that "hedgehog" experts are worse predictors than "foxes" offers fertile ground for future research. Are experts as likely to exhibit hedgehog- or fox-like tendencies in areas that call for explanatory, diagnostic, and skill-based expertise-as they did when Tetlock called on experts to make predictions? Do particular domains of expertise curtail or encourage different styles of expertise? Can we trace these different styles to childhood? Finally, can we nudge hedgehogs to be more like foxes? Current research can (...) only grope at the answers to these questions, but they are essential to gauging the health of expert political judgment. (shrink)

Rochel Gelman University of California, Los Angeles..

Psychology may have to get seriously political as human aims in living and selfhood itself are increasingly influenced in a deleterious manner by the vicissitudes of living in a neoliberal political economy and one-sided “enterprise culture” (Martin & McLellan, 2013; Sugarman, 2015). This article reviews recent writings of several social critics, including Jackson Lears (2015), Sebastion Junger (2015), Philip Blond (2010), and Christopher Lasch (1995), who richly flesh out the picture of this detrimental state of affairs. We note that many (...) of these critics have little to say about credible alternatives to neoliberalism. The article then seeks to identify resources within theoretical and philosophical psychology, including hermeneutic philosophy and interpretive social science, for helping to overcome neoliberalism. They might help clarify and nurture a renewed democratic populism or engaged democratic politics and contribute to gaining what Lasch termed a much-needed “wisdom of limits” in today’s society. (shrink)

domains as rareiied as a cardiologistRi7;s knowledge of arrhythmia to those as commonplace as everyday folk psychology. Domains can vary from the highly concrete causally rich relations in a naive mechanics of physical objects to the highly abstract noncausal relations of mathematics or natural language syntax. Lumping together all of these different sorts of domains so as to have similar effects on cognitive development is likely to be misleading and un· informative. In this chapter, I consider some distinctions and their (...) implications.. (shrink)

We investigate how people use causal knowledge to design interventions to affect the outcomes of causal systems. We propose that in addition to using content or mechanism knowledge to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions, people are also influenced by the abstract structural properties of a causal system. In particular, we investigated two factors that influence whether people tend to intervene proximally (on the immediate cause of an outcome of interest) or distally (on the root cause of a chain leading to (...) the outcome). We presented people with causal chains describing a variety of real-world and artificial causal systems and asked them where they would intervene to affect the outcome. In Experiment 1, participants who were asked to choose the best long-term intervention intervened more distally than participants asked to choose the best short-term intervention. In Experiment 2, participants presented with a branching structure in which there were two distinct causal pathways from the root cause to the outcome were more likely to intervene on the root cause than participants presented with only one of the pathways. Our findings demonstrate two ways in which people integrate content knowledge and knowledge of a system’s causal structure to design effective interventions. (shrink)

Philip E. Tetlock's finding that "hedgehog" experts (those with one big theory) are worse predictors than "foxes" (those with multiple, less comprehensive theories) offers fertile ground for future research. Are experts as likely to exhibit hedgehog- or fox-like tendencies in areas that call for explanatory, diagnostic, and skill-based expertise-as they did when Tetlock called on experts to make predictions? Do particular domains of expertise curtail or encourage different styles of expertise? Can we trace these different styles to childhood? Finally, can (...) we nudge hedgehogs to be more like foxes? Current research can only grope at the answers to these questions, but they are essential to gauging the health of expert political judgment. (shrink)

Personal life events of a chief executive officer can generate tensions between the CEO’s right to personal privacy and the desire of shareholders for information. Such circumstances can create information asymmetry between the executive management and the shareholders of a firm, a situation likely to produce unfavorable pressures on an organization’s stock price. Failure to fully disclose material personal life events can impact the decision-making actions of the CEO, causing the stock price of the firm to vacillate as a result (...) of rumors and other informational uncertainties. These vacillations in stock price may impact a firm’s liquidity, increase the cost of capital, and affect long term returns to shareholders. We draw upon the ethical leadership and signaling theory literatures to demonstrate how a firm can reduce stock price volatility through a CEO making non-required disclosures that reduce information asymmetry. (shrink)

Yanchar, Slife, and their colleagues have described how mainstream psychology's notion of critical thinking has largely been conceived of as “scientific analytic reasoning” or “method-centered critical thinking.” We extend here their analysis and critique, arguing that some version of the one-sided instrumentalism and confusion about tacit values that characterize scientistic approaches to inquiry also color phenomenological, critical theoretical, and social constructionist viewpoints. We suggest that hermeneutic/dialogical conceptions of inquiry, including the idea of social theory as itself a form of ethically (...) motivated human practice, give a fuller account of critical thinking in the social disciplines. (shrink)

A key to the shortcomings and confusions afflicting 20th century social science seems to be problematic moral underpinnings or "disguised ideologies" that drive much of its research and theory. Philosophical hermeneutics shows great promise for diagnosing this condition and reorienting human science inquiry in helpful ways. However, it has been suggested by a number of thoughtful critics that hermeneutics has not yet taken the full measure of the kinds of "power" that can imbue and distort human communication, including social theory (...) and research. This paper addresses several of these critiques, finds merit in them, but argues that such concerns about power may be able to be addressed more adequately by a hermeneutic approach than by the viewpoints from which they are raised. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

"Amongst the human mind's proudest accomplishments is the invention of a science dedicated to understanding itself: cognitive science. ... This volume is an authoritative guide to this exhilarating new body of knowledge, written by the experts, edited with skill and good judment. If we were to leave a time capsule for the next millennium with records of the great achievements of civilization, this volume would have to be in it."--Steven Pinker.

Virtue and Psychology: Pursuing Excellence in Ordinary Practices by Fowers represents the most extensive effort to date to mine the resources of virtue ethics for theory and practice in psychology. Building on this work, I explore some of the implications of the virtue ethics perspective for the fields of psychology and psychotherapy, including helping to overcome individualism and instrumentalism, elaborating a conception of “internal” as opposed to merely “external” goods, clarifying the nature of “character strengths,” developing further the idea of (...) “strong relationality” in the sphere of human action, and aiding psychology in general in the effort to characterize a good or successful life. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Stakeholder theory is widely recognized as a management theory, yet very little research has considered its implications for individual managerial decision-making. In the two studies reported here, we used stakeholder theory to examine managerial decisions about balancing stakeholder interests. Results of Study 1 suggest that indivisible resources and unequal levels of stakeholder saliency constrain managers’ efforts to balance stakeholder interests. Resource divisibility also influenced whether managers used a within-decision or an across-decision approach to balance stakeholder interests. In Study 2 we (...) examined instrumental and normative implications of these two approaches. We conclude by considering the contributions of this research. (shrink)

Although risk and uncertainty are inevitable aspects of the sustainability problem, they are often neglected in the sustainability discourse, especially in the economic analysis of sustainable development. We argue that this deprives the sustainability discourse of interesting connections to risk management. We show that defining sustainability as the obligation to limit the risk of harming future individuals provides a framework in which tools from risk management, like mean-variance analysis, can be employed to analyze planning decisions and to calculate a risk-minimizing (...) policy mix. Furthermore, we discuss whether such a notion of sustainability can be an ethically tenable sustainability concept and how a positive probability of harming future individuals might be defended. (shrink)

y arguments about the intrinsically interactional nature of development (e.g. Johnston, 1988; Lehrman, 1953; Lemeri983O te learning takes place and an environment to be learned. The use of the term Cngnz`rii*e Psyc/10/0g_v.· An Inrerrzational Review. Edited by Michael W. Eysenck @1990 by John Wiley & Sons Ld..

Bloom makes a strong case that word meaning acquisition does not require a dedicated word learning system. This conclusion, however, does not argue against a dedicated language acquisition system for syntax, morphology, and aspects of semantics. Critical questions are raised as to why word meaning should be so different from other aspects of language in the course of acquisition.

The more carefully we look, the more impressive the repertoire of infant concepts seems to be. Across a wide range of tasks, infants seem to be using concepts corresponding to surprisingly high-level and abstract categories and relations. It is tempting to try to explain these abilities in terms of a core capacity in spatial cognition that emerges very early in development and then gets extended beyond reasoning about direct spatial arrays and events. Although such a spatial cognitive capacity may indeed (...) form one valuable basis for later cognitive growth, it seems unlikely that it can be the sole or even primary explanation for either the impressive conceptual capacities of infants or the ways in which concepts develop. (shrink)

Critical discussion of Jerry Fodor's Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (1998).

The present studies investigated children’s and adults’ intuitive beliefs about the physical nature of essences. Adults and children (ranging in age from 6 to 10 years old) were asked to reason about two different ways of determining an unknown object’s category: taking a tiny internal sample from any part of the object (distributed view of essence), or taking a sample from one specific region (localized view of essence). Results from three studies indicated that adults strongly endorsed the distributed view, and (...) children showed a developmental shift from a localized to distributed view with increasing age. These results suggest that even children go beyond mere placeholder notions of essence, committing to conceptual frameworks of how essences might be physically instantiated. (shrink)

It is not a particularly hard thing to want or seek explanations. In fact, explanations seem to be a large and natural part of our cognitive lives. Children ask why and how questions very early in development and seem genuinely to want some sort of answer, despite our often being poorly equipped to provide them at the appropriate level of sophistication and detail. We seek and receive explanations in every sphere of our adult lives, whether it be to understand why (...) a friendship has foundered, why a car will not start, or why ice expands when it freezes. Moreover, correctly or incorrectly, most of the time we think we know when we have or have not received a good explanation. There is a sense both that a given, successful explanation satisfies a cognitive need, and that a questionable or dubious explanation does not. There are also compelling intuitions about what make good explanations in terms of their form, that is, a sense of when they are structured correctly. (shrink)