Does the inherence heuristic take us to psychological essentialism?
We argue that the claim that essence-based causal explanations emerge, hydra-like, from an inherence heuristic is incomplete. No plausible mechanism for the transition from concrete properties, or cues, to essences is provided. Moreover, the fundamental shotgun and storytelling mechanisms of the inherence heuristic are not clearly enough specified to distinguish them, developmentally, from associative or causal networks.
Faculty of Philosophy,Corpus Christi College,University of Oxford,Oxford OX1 4JF,United Kingdom.anna.marmodoro@philosophy.ox.ac.ukhttp://www.power-structuralism.ox.ac.uk/home.
Anna
A
Marmodoro
Department of Experimental Psychology,University of Oxford,Oxford OX1 3UD,United Kingdom.robin.murphy@psy.ox.ac.ukhttp://psy.medsci.ox.ac.uk/research/associative-learning-laboratory.
Robin A
RA
Murphy
Department of Psychology,McGill University,Montreal,QC H3A 1B1,Canada.andy.baker@mcgill.ca.
A G
AG
Baker
D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008128:Logic