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Method: show to babies either one of two sets of events—the test or the control conditions. These two sets are identical but for one event, which, in the test but not in the control condition, is made to violate expectation. Will it actually violate the expectations of babies, wonders the experimenter? Evidence for a positive answer arises when babies put in the test condition look significantly longer at the stimuli than babies put in the control condition. The difference of looking time is interpreted as an effect of being surprised.
Method: show a sequence of events several times to a child until he habituates and stops paying so much attention (measured in looking times), make some changes to the sequence and analyse which ones boost interest anew (again, measured via looking times). This thus reveals what changes are perceived as significant changes and what are perceived as being more or less the same thing happening again.
This more recent method is enabled by eye tracking devices that enable to see precisely what the infant is looking at and when.
This example is taken from Wynn (1992), as presented in The Origin of Concepts, p. 47.
Note that, sometimes, Carey also appeals to experiments in comparative psychology—especially primate cognition and brain studies.
I find Carey less convincing when she argues that the concept of cause is innate yet not associated with a core domain.
Carey is committed to the existence of local rather radical incommensurability, as it has been described by Kitcher (1978): two conceptual systems C 1 and C 2 are locally incommensurable when the extension of some concepts in one system cannot be expressed in the other conceptual system. Nonetheless, most concepts are shared and communication is possible: someone endowed with C 1 can figure out what the other, endowed with C 2, is referring to in specific instances. Incommensurability is nonetheless nontrivial because concepts take part of their meaning through their conceptual role—the kind of inferences they warrant—rather than just with their referents. In other words, Carey understands conceptual incommensurability within the framework of Block’s dual factor theory of meaning (Block 1987).
References
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Carey, S. 2011. Précis of The Origin of Concepts. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34(3): 113–124; discussion 124–162.
Johnson, S., and S. Carey. 1998. Knowledge enrichment and conceptual change in folkbiology: Evidence from Williams syndrome* 1,* 2. Cognitive Psychology 37(2): 156–200.
Kitcher, P. 1978. Theories, theorists and theoretical change. The Philosophical Review 87(4): 519–547.
Nersessian, N. 1995. Opening the black box: cognitive science and history of science. Osiris 10: 194–211.
Nersessian, N. 1999. Model-based reasoning in conceptual change. In Model-based reasoning in scientific discovery, ed. L. Magnani, N.J. Nersessian, and P. Thagard, 5–22. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.
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Wynn, K. 1992. Addition and subtraction by human infants. Nature 358(6389): 749–750.
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Heintz, C. From core cognition to intuitive theories: A psychologist’s account of conceptual change. Metascience 21, 439–444 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-011-9605-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-011-9605-6