Reports from Twin Earth: Both deep structure and appearance determine the reference of natural kind terms

Haukioja, Jussi; Nyquist, Mons Andreas; Jylkkä, Jussi

doi:10.31234/osf.io/vkzps

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(51 reference statements)

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“…In one experiment, Haukioja et al. (2020) imagine a planet where something with the H2O structure of water “for some mysterious reason” is solid and looks like a greenish mineral. As we pointed out: “The problem lies in the mystery” (2021: Postscript).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Two sorts of biological kind terms: The cases of ‘rice’ and ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’

Devitt

Porter

2023

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Experiments have led some philosophers to conclude that the reference determination of natural kind terms is neither simply descriptive nor simply causal‐historical. Various theories have been aired to account for this, including ambiguity, hybrid, and different‐idiolects theories. Devitt and Porter (2021) hypothesized that some terms are covered by one theory, some another, with a place for all the proposed theories. The present paper tests hypotheses that the term ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’ is simply causal‐historical but the term ‘rice’ is hybrid. For, whereas the former term is of scientific but little practical interest, the latter is not: rice is a significant part of the human diet. So, we predicted there would be two factors to the reference determination of ‘rice’: a superficial‐descriptive one and a deep‐causal one. Our experiments confirmed these hypotheses using the methods of elicited production and truth value judgments. We take our results to support the hybrid Theory of ‘rice’ rather than the ambiguity or different‐idiolects theory. We were not testing ‘myrtle’ but, surprisingly, our results implied that ‘myrtle’ was partly descriptive and so like ‘rice’ but not ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’. A follow‐up experiment confirmed these puzzling results. More investigation is needed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1996; Experiments 1 and 2 by Tobia et al. 2020; Haukioja et al 2020). Where the situation raised in the test vignette is complex and fantastical, folk participants may do little more than guess at what the term means or how to use it.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Two sorts of biological kind terms: The cases of ‘rice’ and ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’

Devitt

Porter

2023

Philos Phenomenol Research

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“…After our paper was submitted, our attention was drawn to a very interesting recent paper by Haukioja, Nyquist, and Jylkkä (2020). They used EP and TVJ on Twin Earth (TE) but also ingenious “reverse Twin Earth scenarios, where deep structure, but not appearance, was shared with the standard samples” (p. 2).…”

Section: Postscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing the Reference of Biological Kind Terms

Devitt

Porter

2021

Cognitive Science

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Recent experimental work on "natural" kind terms has shown evidence of both descriptive and nondescriptive reference determination. This has led some to propose ambiguity or hybrid theories, as opposed to traditional description and causal-historical theories of reference. Many of those experiments tested theories against referential intuitions. We reject this method, urging that reference should be tested against usage, preferably by elicited production. Our tests of the usage of a biological kind term confirm that there are indeed both descriptive and causal-historical elements to the reference determination of some natural kind terms. We argue that to accommodate our results and earlier ones, we should abandon the common assumption that any one theory of reference fits all natural kind terms. Rather, it is likely that some terms are descriptive, some causal-historical, some ambiguous, and some hybrid. This substantive conclusion is accompanied by a methodological one. Our experiments, like some earlier ones, found participants contradicting both each other and themselves. We argue that these contradictions indicate a lack of linguistic competence with the term. We conclude that these experiments have been faulty, because they test terms that are novel to participants and/or use fantastical vignettes. We provide some suggestions for future research.

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“…The DLL has been studied mainly in philosophical circles, but, to our knowledge, not from an empirical perspective. (Some empirical works [8,20] get close to it but do not directly study DLL.) We have developed an exploratory experiment in which the conditions for the emergence of division in a cognitive task, mediated by language, are instantiated in an image classification task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The division of linguistic labour for offloading conceptual understanding

Andrade-Lotero

Ortiz-Duque

Velasco-García

et al. 2022

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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The division of linguistic labour (DLL), initially theorized by philosophers, has gained the attention of cognitive scientists in the last decade. Contrary to some controversial philosophical accounts of DLL, we propose that it is an extended mind strategy of offloading conceptual understanding onto other people. In this article, we empirically explore this proposal by providing an exploratory experimental paradigm to search for the mechanisms underwriting DLL and how they may work in practice. We developed a between-subjects experiment in which participants had to categorize two pairs of highly confusable dog breeds after receiving categorization training on just one pair of breeds. In the treatment group, participants were grouped in dyads and were allowed to interact with each other by means of the labels of these four dog breeds. In their queries to trained ‘experts’, novices frequently used labels to refer to breeds that they could not identify themselves. Experts were highly responsive to their paired novices' queries, and the rates of querying for the two members within a dyad were positively correlated. Independent categorization failure and offloading categorization success lead to subsequent increases in querying by novices, indicating adaptive use of offloading. Self-reports of breed knowledge were higher for experts within a dyad compared to isolated experts. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences’.

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Reports from Twin Earth: Both deep structure and appearance determine the reference of natural kind terms

Cited by 3 publications

References 22 publications

Two sorts of biological kind terms: The cases of ‘rice’ and ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’

Two sorts of biological kind terms: The cases of ‘rice’ and ‘Rio de Janeiro Myrtle’

Testing the Reference of Biological Kind Terms

The division of linguistic labour for offloading conceptual understanding

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