Category essence or essentially pragmatic? Creator’s intention in naming and what’s really what

One or two dimensions in spontaneous classification: A simplicity approach

“…However, it would be incorrect to perceive the present formalism as applicable in the case of knowledgerich stimuli in general. Several investigators have illustrated the complexity of interactions between general knowledge and spontaneous categorization (e.g., Heit, 1997;Lewandowsky, Roberts, & Yang, 2006;Malt & Sloman, 2007;Wisniewski, 1995), and our formalism would require considerable revision before it can accommodate general knowledge effects.…”

What Is Art? A methodological framework for a pluridisciplinary investigation

“…The aim would be to connect the investigation of the intuitive use of the concept of art with the existing psychological literature on the concepts of artifacts (e.g. Bloom, 1997;Casler & Kelemen, 2005;Malt & Sloman, 2007) and to clarify the possible specificity of the intuitive concept of art. Here also, a possible close collaboration with traditional disciplines, such as analytic philosophy of art, has to be envisaged.…”

The real deal: What judgments of really reveal about how people think about artifacts

“…Instead, they may reflect the pragmatics of word use. Malt and Sloman (2007) provided some data on the nature of really judgments in experiments evaluating Bloom's (1996) proposal that the creator's intended kind membership serves as an essence for artifacts. They used scenarios in which an object was created under one intention and then given a new use, and a character in the story needed to talk about the object to someone else.…”

“…names-piano stool at one time and end table at another, bottle at one time and vase at another, and so on-depending on the current use (e.g., Labov, 1973;Malt & Sloman, 2007). This observation seems problematic for the essentialist possibility of artifact kinds defined by the creator's intended function or intended kind membership, because it suggests that an object's kind can change on the basis of the current use, regardless of its creator's original intention.…”

“…The naming and conceptualization of artifacts are both more pragmatic in nature. Malt and Sloman's (2007) experiments were designed to elicit considerations of the objects within naturalistic contexts. They therefore used scenarios that described specific uses of the objects and conversational interactions about them.…”