Speaker: Susan Carey (Harvard)
The human conceptual repertoire poses a formidable challenge to the cognitive sciences. Humans are the only species who can ponder orders of infinity, the causes and cure of global warming, or any of literally billions of propositions formulated over the the hundreds of thousands of concepts no other animal represents. Susan Carey’s research concerns the development of concepts in the child and adult (i.e., over ontogenesis), and the cultural construction of concepts over history. Her research is informed by insights from philosophical analyses of concepts, historical analyses of conceptual change in science, and experimental studies of human infants, young children and adults, and of non-human primates. Understanding conceptual development requires characterizing the initial representational repertoire, what changes with development, and the learning mechanisms that underlie these changes. Dr. Carey’s research specifies the conceptually rich building blocks of human cognition and documents conceptual discontinuities, episodes of change that increase representational power or involve the construction of conceptual systems incommensurable with those they supplant. With respect to the mechanisms that underlie conceptual change, Carey has concentrated on a bootstrapping process first sketched by historians and philosophers of science that she calls “Quinian bootstrapping.” Current case studies include representations of abstract relations and logical connectives, and conceptual changes within intuitive theories of biology and physical reasoning. Susan Carey received her BA from Radcliffe College and her PhD in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University, studying with George Miller, Jerome Bruner and Roger Brown. She taught at MIT (Psychology Department, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences) from 1973-1996, at NYU (Psychology Department) from 1996 – 2001 and has been at Harvard (Psychology Department) since 2001, where she cofounded the Laboratory for Developmental Studies with Elizabeth Spelke. She was awarded the 1998 Nicod Prize, was named the William James Fellow of APS in 2002, was awarded the David Rumerhart Prize in 2009, and APA Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award in in 2009, and an APA Mentor Award in 2013. She is a member of the Society for Experimental Psychology, the American Association of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Title
Difficult Concepts: Hard Words to Learn
Abstract
Four decades of research has established rich innate, abstract representations in non-human animals and prelinguistic infants—so called systems of “core knowledge” in domains of number, intuitive physics, agency (intentional, causal, communicative), geometry, abstract relations (such as sameness/ difference), and logic. I begin with a puzzle: Given evidence for innate abstract representations in these domains, why are external symbols for the same content (words, formal notations) so hard to construct, requiring tens of thousands years of cultural construction (or more) and many years in individual child development to master? I will provide two answers: first, the content in non-linguistic thought is partial; the non-linguistic representations capture some of the target concepts’ meanings but not all. Second, the representational systems in core knowledge are different in kind from those in adult cognition. I will focus on differences in format, and will argue that core knowledge systems are systems of perception, not cognition. I will illustrate with two case studies of the representations in non-linguistic thought and those in language: number and the abstract relations same/different.
Everyone interested is welcome to attend.
The meeting will be held in English.
Participation is strongly recommended for students of the Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences and for students of the Doctoral School “The Human Mind and its Explanations: Language, Brain, and Reasoning”.
Where: Online
When: 29/04/2026 – 17:00 CEST/11:00 EDT
Attendance: Attendance is free and open to all, but registration is needed by email [angelica.kaufmann@unimi.it]