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Informal biology is a core domain, but its construction needs experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 1998

Giyoo Hatano
Giyoo Hatano
Affiliation:
Department of Human Relations, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan 108 [email protected]
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Abstract

Although humans are endowed with domain-specific constraints for acquiring informal biology, its construction requires considerable experience with living things and their cultural representations. Less experienced adults may not know what constitutes generic species, and young children may rely on personification rather than category-based inference. Atran's postulate of the living-kind module that promptly produces universal folk taxonomy does not seem tenable.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , August 1998 , pp. 575
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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