The psychology of inherence is self-referential (and that is a good thing).
Cimpian & Salomon (C&S) appear to characterize the inherence heuristic and essentialism as unwise or childish aspects of human reasoning. But actually, these cognitive modes lie at the core of statistical analysis across all of the quantitative sciences, including the developmental cognitive psychology in which the argument here is couched. Their whole argument is as much an example of its topic as an analysis of it.
Department of Statistics,University of Washington,Seattle,WA 98195; andFaculty of Life Sciences,University of Vienna,1010 Vienna,Austria.flb@stat.washington.edufred.bookstein@univie.ac.at.
Fred L
FL
Bookstein
D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008128:Logic