Generic Language for Social and Animal Kinds: An Examination of the Asymmetry Between Acceptance and Inferences.

Generics (e.g., "Ravens are black") express generalizations about categories or their members.

Formal explanations shape children's representations of animal kinds and social groups.

In certain domains, people represent some of an individual's properties (e.g., a tiger's ferocity), but not others (e.

Children's Understanding of Proper Names and Descriptions.

This research addressed the question of whether children understand proper names differently from descriptions. We examined how children extend these two types of expressions from an initial object (a truck) owned by the experimenter to two identical objects created by transforming the initial object, both owned by the experimenter. Adults and 5/6-year-olds extended a name ("Tommy") to only one post-transformation object, but extended a description ("my truck") to objects.

Iconic realism or representational blindness? How young children and adults reason about pictures and objects.

When reasoning about a representation (e.g., a toy lion), children often engage in "iconic realism," whereby representations are reported to have properties of their real-life referents.

Designators, descriptions, and artifact persistence.

Hobbes' (1672/1913) famous puzzle of the Ship of Theseus - in which a wooden ship's parts are replaced plank by plank, and the old planks are subsequently reassembled to create a second ship - has been the source of debate about the criteria that underlie human judgments of individual artifact persistence. This puzzle has led some philosophers to the paradoxical conclusion that an artifact observed at one time is the same persisting individual as two artifacts seen at a later time. We argue that prior discussions of the puzzle have conflated property persistence (judged in conjunction with a description, like "Theseus' ship") with individual persistence (judged in conjunction with a designator, like "X").