Generics designate kinds but not always essences

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Noyes ◽  
Frank Keil
Keyword(s):  
Causal Structure ◽  
Biological Properties ◽  
Causal Beliefs ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Spontaneous Production ◽  
Adult Participants ◽  
Cultural Properties ◽  
Generic Language ◽  
Causal Structures ◽  
Inductive Potential

People believe that some categories are kinds with reliable causal structure and high inductive potential (e.g., Tigers). Widely endorsed theories propose that people are biased to assume kinds are essential, and so naturally determined by internal causal properties. Generic language (e.g., “Men like sports”) is one mechanism thought to evoke this bias. We propose instead that generics principally designate that categories are kinds. Participants can entertain diverse causal structures in the presence of generics: Hearing that biological properties generalize to a category (e.g., “Men grow beards”) prompts participants to infer essential structure, but hearing neutral or social properties (“Women are underpaid”) generalize prompts other causal beliefs. Thus, generics induce essentialism only in in interaction with cues that reasonably prompt essentialist explanation. We tested our model with adult participants (N = 739 total), using measures that disentangle essentialist beliefs from kind beliefs. In Study 1, we replicate prior methods with our new measures, and find that generics influence kind beliefs more than essentialism. In Study 2, we vary property content (biological vs. cultural properties), and show that generics only increase essentialism when paired with biological properties. In Study 3, we show that generics designate kinds but not essentialism when neutral properties are used across animals, tools, and people. In Study 4, we show that believing a category is a kind increases the spontaneous production of generic statements, regardless of whether the kind is essential or socially constructed. Generics do not necessitate essentialist beliefs. Participants were flexible in their reasoning about kinds.

scholarly journals Generics designate kinds but not always essences

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (41) ◽  
pp. 20354-20359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Noyes ◽  
Frank C. Keil
Keyword(s):  
Causal Structure ◽  
Biological Properties ◽  
Causal Beliefs ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Spontaneous Production ◽  
Adult Participants ◽  
Cultural Properties ◽  
Generic Language ◽  
Causal Structures ◽  
Inductive Potential

People believe that some categories are kinds with reliable causal structure and high inductive potential (e.g., tigers). Widely endorsed theories propose that people are biased to assume kinds are essential, and so naturally determined by internal causal properties. Generic language (e.g., “men like sports”) is 1 mechanism thought to evoke this bias. We propose instead that generics principally designate that categories are kinds. Participants can entertain diverse causal structures in the presence of generics: Hearing that biological properties generalize to a category (e.g., “men grow beards”) prompts participants to infer essential structure, but hearing neutral or social properties (“women are underpaid”) generalized prompts other causal beliefs. Thus, generics induce essentialism only in interaction with cues that reasonably prompt essentialist explanation. We tested our model with adult participants (n = 739 total), using measures that disentangle essentialist beliefs from kind beliefs. In study 1, we replicate prior methods with our new measures, and find that generics influence kind beliefs more than essentialism. In study 2, we vary property content (biological vs. cultural properties), and show that generics only increase essentialism when paired with biological properties. In study 3, we show that generics designate kinds but not essentialism when neutral properties are used across animals, tools, and people. In study 4, we show that believing a category is a kind increases the spontaneous production of generic statements, regardless of whether the kind is essential or socially constructed. Generics do not necessitate essentialist beliefs. Participants were flexible in their reasoning about kinds.

There is no privileged link between kinds and essences early in development

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Noyes ◽  
Frank Keil
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Biological Properties ◽  
Social Category ◽  
Category Representation ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Cultural Properties ◽  
Generic Language ◽  
American Children ◽  
Causal Structures

[Please note the Y-axis for Figure 1 is incorrect. It should read: "Percent endorsing formal explanations."] According to the dominant view of category representation, people preferentially infer that kinds (richly structured categories) reflect essences. Generic language (“Boys like blue”) often occupies the central role in accounts of the formation of essentialist interpretations – especially in the context of social categories. In a pre-registered study (N = 240 American children, ages 4-9), we tested whether children assume essences in the presence of generic language or whether they flexibly assume diverse causal structures. Children learned about a novel social category described with generic statements containing either biological properties or cultural properties. Although generic language always led children to believe that properties were non-accidental, young children (4-5) in this sample inferred the non-accidental structure was socialization. Older children (6-9) flexibly interpreted the category as essential or socialized depending on the type of properties that generalized. We uncovered early-emerging flexibility and no privileged link between kinds and essences.

scholarly journals There is no privileged link between kinds and essences early in development

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (20) ◽  
pp. 10633-10635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Noyes ◽  
Frank C. Keil
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Biological Properties ◽  
Social Category ◽  
Category Representation ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Cultural Properties ◽  
Generic Language ◽  
American Children ◽  
Causal Structures

According to the dominant view of category representation, people preferentially infer that kinds (richly structured categories) reflect essences. Generic language (“Boys like blue”) often occupies the central role in accounts of the formation of essentialist interpretations—especially in the context of social categories. In a preregistered study (n = 240 American children, ages 4 to 9 y), we tested whether children assume essences in the presence of generic language or whether they flexibly assume diverse causal structures. Children learned about a novel social category described with generic statements containing either biological properties or cultural properties. Although generic language always led children to believe that properties were nonaccidental, young children (4 or 5 y) in this sample inferred the nonaccidental structure was socialization. Older children (6 to 9 y) flexibly interpreted the category as essential or socialized depending on the type of properties that generalized. We uncovered early-emerging flexibility and no privileged link between kinds and essences.

scholarly journals Cyclic quantum causal models

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Barrett ◽  
Robin Lorenz ◽  
Ognyan Oreshkov
Keyword(s):  
Causal Reasoning ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Bell Inequalities ◽  
Quantum Correlations ◽  
Quantum Systems ◽  
Causal Models ◽  
Causal Order ◽  
Quantum Processes ◽  
Causal Explanations ◽  
Causal Structures

AbstractCausal reasoning is essential to science, yet quantum theory challenges it. Quantum correlations violating Bell inequalities defy satisfactory causal explanations within the framework of classical causal models. What is more, a theory encompassing quantum systems and gravity is expected to allow causally nonseparable processes featuring operations in indefinite causal order, defying that events be causally ordered at all. The first challenge has been addressed through the recent development of intrinsically quantum causal models, allowing causal explanations of quantum processes – provided they admit a definite causal order, i.e. have an acyclic causal structure. This work addresses causally nonseparable processes and offers a causal perspective on them through extending quantum causal models to cyclic causal structures. Among other applications of the approach, it is shown that all unitarily extendible bipartite processes are causally separable and that for unitary processes, causal nonseparability and cyclicity of their causal structure are equivalent.

scholarly journals The Inflation Technique Completely Solves the Causal Compatibility Problem

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Navascués ◽  
Elie Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
Linear Programming ◽  
Latent Variables ◽  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Categorical Variables ◽  
False Negatives ◽  
The Given ◽  
Causal Structures ◽  
Compatibility Question ◽  
Structure Graph

AbstractThe causal compatibility question asks whether a given causal structure graph — possibly involving latent variables — constitutes a genuinely plausible causal explanation for a given probability distribution over the graph’s observed categorical variables. Algorithms predicated on merely necessary constraints for causal compatibility typically suffer from false negatives, i.e. they admit incompatible distributions as apparently compatible with the given graph. In 10.1515/jci-2017-0020, one of us introduced the inflation technique for formulating useful relaxations of the causal compatibility problem in terms of linear programming. In this work, we develop a formal hierarchy of such causal compatibility relaxations. We prove that inflation is asymptotically tight, i.e., that the hierarchy converges to a zero-error test for causal compatibility. In this sense, the inflation technique fulfills a longstanding desideratum in the field of causal inference. We quantify the rate of convergence by showing that any distribution which passes the nth-order inflation test must be $\begin{array}{} \displaystyle {O}{\left(n^{{{-}{1}}/{2}}\right)} \end{array}$-close in Euclidean norm to some distribution genuinely compatible with the given causal structure. Furthermore, we show that for many causal structures, the (unrelaxed) causal compatibility problem is faithfully formulated already by either the first or second order inflation test.

scholarly journals Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain?

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Romain Brette
Keyword(s):  
Brain Function ◽  
Neural Coding ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Linear Chain ◽  
Neural Codes ◽  
Experimental Parameters ◽  
Representational Power ◽  
Causal Structures ◽  
Perceptual Systems ◽  
The Brain

Abstract “Neural coding” is a popular metaphor in neuroscience, where objective properties of the world are communicated to the brain in the form of spikes. Here I argue that this metaphor is often inappropriate and misleading. First, when neurons are said to encode experimental parameters, the neural code depends on experimental details that are not carried by the coding variable (e.g., the spike count). Thus, the representational power of neural codes is much more limited than generally implied. Second, neural codes carry information only by reference to things with known meaning. In contrast, perceptual systems must build information from relations between sensory signals and actions, forming an internal model. Neural codes are inadequate for this purpose because they are unstructured and therefore unable to represent relations. Third, coding variables are observables tied to the temporality of experiments, whereas spikes are timed actions that mediate coupling in a distributed dynamical system. The coding metaphor tries to fit the dynamic, circular, and distributed causal structure of the brain into a linear chain of transformations between observables, but the two causal structures are incongruent. I conclude that the neural coding metaphor cannot provide a valid basis for theories of brain function, because it is incompatible with both the causal structure of the brain and the representational requirements of cognition.

What kinds of things are psychiatric disorders?

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (6) ◽  
pp. 1143-1150 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. S. Kendler ◽  
P. Zachar ◽  
C. Craver
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Disorders ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Biological Species ◽  
Physiological Mechanisms ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Causal Processes ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Different Cultures

This essay explores four answers to the question ‘What kinds of things are psychiatric disorders?’Essentialist kindsare classes whose members share an essence from which their defining features arise. Although elegant and appropriate for some physical (e.g. atomic elements) and medical (e.g. Mendelian disorders) phenomena, this model is inappropriate for psychiatric disorders, which are multi-factorial and ‘fuzzy’.Socially constructed kindsare classes whose members are defined by the cultural context in which they arise. This model excludes the importance of shared physiological mechanisms by which the same disorder could be identified across different cultures. Advocates ofpractical kindsput off metaphysical questions about ‘reality’ and focus on defining classes that are useful. Practical kinds models for psychiatric disorders, implicit in the DSM nosologies, do not require that diagnoses be grounded in shared causal processes. If psychiatry seeks to tie disorders to etiology and underlying mechanisms, a model first proposed for biological species,mechanistic property cluster(MPC)kinds, can provide a useful framework. MPC kinds are defined not in terms of essences but in terms of complex, mutually reinforcing networks of causal mechanisms. We argue that psychiatric disorders are objectively grounded features of the causal structure of the mind/brain. MPC kinds are fuzzy sets defined by mechanisms at multiple levels that act and interact to produce the key features of the kind. Like species, psychiatric disorders are populations with central paradigmatic and more marginal members. The MPC view is the best current answer to ‘What kinds of things are psychiatric disorders?’

scholarly journals The Impact of the Oil Sector on Commodity Prices: Correlation or Causation?

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sayed H. Saghaian
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Graph Theory ◽  
Causal Structure ◽  
Commodity Prices ◽  
Oil Prices ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
Energy Markets ◽  
Oil Sector ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Causal Structures

The interconnections of agriculture and energy markets have increased through the rise in the new biofuel agribusinesses and the oil-ethanol-corn linkages. The question is whether these linkages have a causal structure by which oil prices affect commodity prices and through these links, instability is transferred from energy markets to already volatile agricultural markets. In this article, we present empirical results using contemporary time-series analysis and Granger causality supplemented by a directed graph theory modeling approach to identify the links and plausible contemporaneous causal structures among energy and commodity variables. The results show that although there is a strong correlation among oil and commodity prices, the evidence for a causal link from oil to commodity prices is mixed.

scholarly journals Causal Discovery with Multi-Domain LiNGAM for Latent Factors

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Zeng ◽  
Shohei Shimizu ◽  
Ruichu Cai ◽  
Feng Xie ◽  
Michio Yamamoto ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Causal Structure ◽  
Score Function ◽  
Factor Loading ◽  
Real World Data ◽  
Latent Factors ◽  
Two Phase ◽  
Loading Matrix ◽  
Non Gaussian ◽  
Causal Structures

Discovering causal structures among latent factors from observed data is a particularly challenging problem. Despite some efforts for this problem, existing methods focus on the single-domain data only. In this paper, we propose Multi-Domain Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Models for LAtent Factors (MD-LiNA), where the causal structure among latent factors of interest is shared for all domains, and we provide its identification results. The model enriches the causal representation for multi-domain data. We propose an integrated two-phase algorithm to estimate the model. In particular, we first locate the latent factors and estimate the factor loading matrix. Then to uncover the causal structure among shared latent factors of interest, we derive a score function based on the characterization of independence relations between external influences and the dependence relations between multi-domain latent factors and latent factors of interest. We show that the proposed method provides locally consistent estimators. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our approach.

On the Conceptual Mismatch Argument

2020 ◽  
pp. 190-212
Author(s):  
E. Díaz-León
Keyword(s):  
Biological Properties ◽  
Sort It ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Normative Considerations

According to ‘conceptual mismatch’ arguments, if there is a conceptual mismatch between the descriptions associated with an ordinary concept and some features of the alleged referent, then that entity cannot be the referent. This idea has been used in the metaphysics of race in order to develop arguments against realist theories of race. In particular, K. Anthony Appiah and Joshua Glasgow, among others, have argued that there are no real properties in the vicinity of our talk about race that can satisfy the descriptions that we associate with the term ‘race’, and therefore the most plausible candidates, such as certain biological properties or certain socially constructed properties, cannot be the referent of ‘race’, so we must conclude that the term ‘race’ is empty. This chapter examines the structure and prospects of conceptual mismatch arguments of this sort. It opines that these arguments point to some crucial methodological questions, such as how much divergence between our descriptions and the nature of the referent can be allowed, and suggests a new answer to this question, in terms of an appeal to normative considerations, which can be very helpful and even indispensable in order to settle matters of reference.

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