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Does the inherence heuristic take us to psychological essentialism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2014

Anna Marmodoro ,
Robin A. Murphy  and
A. G. Baker
Anna Marmodoro
Affiliation:
Faculty of Philosophy, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 4JF, United Kingdom. [email protected]://www.power-structuralism.ox.ac.uk/home
Robin A. Murphy
Affiliation:
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3UD, United Kingdom. [email protected]://psy.medsci.ox.ac.uk/research/associative-learning-laboratory
A. G. Baker
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 1B1, Canada. [email protected]
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Abstract

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.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , October 2014 , pp. 494 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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