Abstract for Sandeep Prasada's talk

Thinking and talking about kinds of things and classes of things
Sandeep Prasada (Hunter College & Graduate Center, CUNY)
April 17, 2007 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Though we encounter only instances of kinds, we often think and talk about kinds of things as such. This raises the question of how kinds are represented within our conceptual systems. It is common to think of kinds as a special subset of classes with certain special properties (e.g., similarity between members, causal connections among properties, inductive potential, nameability) that provide kinds with a greater degree of coherence than is required of an arbitrary class. In this talk, I will (i) argue that kinds cannot be represented as special classes because classes have formal properties that kinds lack, (ii) present a proposal concerning the form of kind representations that is based on a series of experiments investigating certain kinds of generic knowledge, and (iii) some new data which suggests that there are systematic ways in which we can use language to engage either class- or kind-based reasoning.