Atran’s thesis has strong implications for the doctrine of externalism in concepts (Fodor 1994). Beliefs about biological kinds may involve a degree of deference to scientific categories, but these categories are not truly scientific. They involve instead a folk view of science itself

Hampton, J. A.

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Hampton, J. A. (1998). Folk biology and external definitions. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21(4), 574 - 574.City Research OnlineOriginal citation: Hampton, J. A. (1998). Folk biology and external definitions. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21(4), 574 - 574.Permanent City Research Online URL: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/944/ Copyright & reuseCity  University  London has developed City  Research Online  so that  its  users  may access the research outputs of City University London's staff. Copyright © and Moral Rights for this paper are retained by the individual author(s) and/ or other copyright holders. Users may download and/ or print one  copy  of  any  article(s)  in  City  Research  Online  to  facilitate  their  private  study  or  for  non-commercial research. Users may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. All material in City Research Online is checked for eligibility for copyright before being made available in the live archive. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to from other web pages. Versions of researchThe version in City Research Online may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check the Permanent City Research Online URL above for the status of the paper.EnquiriesIf you have any enquiries about any aspect of City Research Online, or if you wish to make contact  with the author(s) of this paper, please email the team at publications@city.ac.uk.ple are perfectly aware of the fact that animals procreate much aswe do, and that they often live in family groups having some anal-ogy with our own.The hypothesis that we have an innate disposition to classify ac-cording to the sort of hierarchy that Atran describes ought to betaken very seriously indeed. Our ancestral environments were cer-tainly such that they provided strong selection pressures in favorof being able to classify animals and plants. But how much detailhas been bred into us, in other words, how much the oxymoronicnotion of a “synthetic a priori” is to be taken seriously, is open toserious doubt. As a fall-back position we can suggest that the sys-tem in question is the product of capacities and dispositions thatare widely used and that folk taxonomies are the product of some-thing that is more of a “general purpose” adaptation. How aboutfolk anatomies and folk sociologies?Another point that bothers me is Atran’s emphasis on inductionas the basis of classification. Naive inductionism as a basis for ex-plaining the goals and methods of scientific classification has longbeen discredited, but it seems to be a part of the folk epistemol-ogy that naive scientists are inclined to apply. Scientists identifythe underlying causes of the order that they make out of nature,and restructure their classifications accordingly. The reasons forpreferring a classification that is etiological, rather than phenom-enal or symptomatic, should be obvious to every scientist. In folk,and pre-Darwinian taxonomy the underlying causes are perhapsassumed to exist, but the groups are treated for the most part as ifthey were natural kinds. Nonetheless, it would seem that howevermuch folk taxonomies distinguish between sows and boars, theyput them together with piglets, much as they associate men,women, and children. One might wish to take a harder look at folktaxonomy, and how it interacts with scientific, with the hypothesisin mind that we have some sort of “module” for causality.Folk biology and external definitionsJames A. HamptonDepartment of Psychology, City University, London, EC1V 0HB UnitedKingdom. j.a.hampton@city.ac.uk. www.city.ac.uk/psychologyAbstract: Atran’s thesis has strong implications for the doctrine of exter-nalism in concepts (Fodor 1994). Beliefs about biological kinds may in-volve a degree of deference to scientific categories, but these categoriesare not truly scientific. They involve instead a folk view of science itself.The way people understand and categorize the natural kinds of thebiological world has been the subject of much heated debate inpsychology. There have been those such as Keil (1989), and Atranhimself, who have argued for a specialized conceptual module de-signed specifically to attend to theoretically relevant informationin the stimulus input to identify categories of living things. Hencethe evidence for very early differentiation of living and nonlivingkinds by infants, and of the later use of deep causal structurerather than surface similarity in making inductive generalizations.Equally influential has been the notion of psychological essen-tialism introduced by Medin and Ortony (1989), which is the hy-pothesis that people believe folk-biological kinds to have essencesthat have a causal role in producing the similar physical pheno-typic appearance and structure of the organisms of a particulartype. Belief in such essences appears to be much stronger for bi-ological kinds and inorganic substances than for other natural lan-guage terms such as artifacts. (The evidence for how tightly peo-ple may hold such beliefs has recently been challenged, seeHampton 1995; 1998.)Both of these psychological approaches lend themselves to analliance with the philosophical doctrine of external definitions, ex-pressed in the recent BBS target article by Millikan [A CommonStructure for Concepts of Individuals, Stuffs, and Real Kinds21(1) 1998]. The human mind/brain is assumed to have evolvedto be able to “track” externally defined types. Put simply, our cog-nitive representation of a class has to be specified independentlyof what it is that the representation represents. Cognitive sciencemust first determine the real nature of kinds in the world and thendescribe the ways in which people represent those kinds psycho-logically and how they come to acquire such representations. Defin-ing the kinds purely in terms of internal conceptual representa-tions can lead to a multitude of problems (Fodor 1994).Atran makes the excellent point that neither of these theoriesof concepts may take for granted that there is a real world of sci-entifically respectable categories such as species that can be usedby the theorist to ground our conceptual categories of biologicalkinds. First, to provide an account of evolution of different formsfrom a common ancestor, it is clearly not possible for a biologicalkind to have a fixed essence. Second, folk-biological terms such astree, sparrow, or fish often do not correspond to monovalent termsin any scientific account. Third, different scientific purposes mayrequire different taxonomic structures. Whatever it is that exter-nal definitions are intended to offer to a theory of concepts, it isclear from Atran’s arguments that it is not a grounding in the realnature of the world – at least not as it is understood by current sci-ence.Atran’s comparison of Mayan and American folk biology is in-teresting, but ultimately frustratingly difficult to interpret. The re-search described here (sect. 1.2.2.1) is perhaps illustrative of thedifficulties of cross-cultural research in general. To make the in-ductive task meaningful for the two cultures, it was apparentlynecessary to ask the Itzaj about susceptibility to diseases of threeessential parts of animals or plants, whereas the Americans wereasked about the likelihood of a type having a particular disease,protein, or enzyme labelled by a letter. Materials clearly have tobe made comparably meaningful for the two groups, but there isa danger of circularity here, if by rendering the materials equallymeaningful one also renders their inductive power the same. Inthis research, there were notable differences in responding be-tween the groups, which Atran tends to ignore in favor of outlin-ing the similarities.In Western culture, it appears that there is an important in-fluence of what we might call “folk science” on the use of folk-biological terminology. One owes some deference to what onemay believe (or may have been taught) science has to say aboutliving kinds. Children are taught in school that whales are not fish(although they are not taught that there is no such category asfish). At the same time, individuals must defer to the naming prac-tices of their linguistic community, which will themselves fre-quently vary from context to context.It is interesting that, with the ready availability of wild life filmson television, it is no longer necessary for people to accept manyof these categorizations on trust. To see whales caring for theircalves, surfacing for air, and singing to each other is to understandin a direct way about their important difference from other crea-tures of the deep. We no longer need to defer to science; we canbase our knowledge on evidence that we ourselves can also un-derstand. Kalish (1995) asked people to say whether a disputeabout the class (e.g., “elephant”) to which some animal belongedwas one that could always be settled as a matter of fact, or whetherit was a matter of a difference of opinion that could not be re-solved. He found that more than 25% of the judgments about an-imals were considered unresolvable by fact. Language use there-fore has an uneasy relation with science. We may be prepared toalter our categories when science directs us to knowledge that isincompatible with our existing usage, but only in cases where thatknowledge is seen as relevant. By and large, language users retainthe right to use terms in ways that are subject to social negotiationwithin a much broader society, in which the scientific communityis but one small voice.Commentary/Atran: Folk biology574 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (1998) 21:4

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