Sortal concepts, object individuation, and language.
Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary enterprise. This review highlights how the philosophical notion of a 'sortal'--a concept that provides principles of individuation and principles of identity - has been introduced into cognitive developmental psychology. Although the notion 'sortal' originated in metaphysics, importing it into the cognitive sciences has bridged a gap between philosophical and psychological discussions of concepts and has generated a fruitful and productive research enterprise. As I review here, the sortal concept has inspired several lines of empirical work in the past decade, including the study of object individuation; object identification; the relationship between language and acquisition of kind concepts; the representational capacities of non-human primates; object-based attention and cognitive architecture; and the relationship between kind concepts and individual concepts.
Xu
Fei
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Department of Psychology, 2136 West Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada. fei@psych.ubc.ca
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007207:Individuation; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D008960:Models, Psychological