{"pk":27818,"title":"These boots are made for walking: Teleogical generalizations from principled connections","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Certain generalizations are teleological, e.g., forks are foreating. But not all properties relevant to a particular conceptpermit teleological generalization. For instance, forks getwashed roughly as often as they’re used for eating, yet thegeneralization, forks are for washing, might strike reasoners asunacceptable. What explains the discrepancy? A recenttaxonomic theory of conceptual generalization (Prasada, 2017;Prasada & Dillingham, 2006; Prasada et al., 2013) argues thatcertain kinds of conceptual connections – known as“principled” connections – license generalizations, whereasassociative, “statistical” connections license only probabilisticexpectations. We apply this taxonomy to explain teleologicalgeneralization: it predicts that acceptable teleologicalgeneralizations concern concept-property pairs in which theconcept bears a principled connection to a property. Under thisanalysis, the concept fork bears a principled connection toeating and a statistical connection to washing. Twoexperiments and a regression analysis tested and corroboratedthe predictions of the theory.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Teleogical generalization"},{"word":"generics"},{"word":"principled connections"},{"word":"statistical connections"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nq120cj","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Joanna","middle_name":"","last_name":"Korman","name_suffix":"","institution":"US Naval Research Laboratory","department":""},{"first_name":"Sangeet","middle_name":"","last_name":"Khemlani","name_suffix":"","institution":"US Naval Research Laboratory","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27818/galley/17457/download/"}]}