How to Do Things With Words

Category based induction

Although psychologists have paid scant attention to the sense of obligation as a distinctly human motivation, moral philosophers have identified two of its key features: First, it has a peremptory, demanding force, with a kind of coercive quality, and second, it is often tied to agreement-like social interactions (e.g., promises) in which breaches prompt normative protest, on the one side, and apologies, excuses, justifications, and guilt on the other. Drawing on empirical research in comparative and developmental psychology, I provide here a psychological foundation for these unique features by showing that the human sense of obligation is intimately connected developmentally with the formation of a shared agent “we,” which not only directs collaborative efforts but also self-regulates them. Thus, children's sense of obligation is first evident inside, but not outside, of collaborative activities structured by joint agency with a partner, and it is later evident in attitudes toward in-group, but not out-group, members connected by collective agency. When you and I voluntarily place our fate in one another's hands in interdependent collaboration – scaled up to our lives together in an interdependent cultural group – this transforms the instrumental pressure that individuals feel when pursuing individual goals into the pressure that “we” put on me (who needs to preserve my cooperative identity in this “we”) to live up to our shared expectations: a we > me self-regulation. The human sense of obligation may therefore be seen as a kind of self-conscious motivation.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/32001D22714B9F8ED00D9F1AB2BF254D/S0140525X19001742a.pdf/div-class-title-the-moral-psychology-of-obligation-div.pdf

The moral psychology of obligation.

Understanding Institutions proposes a new unified theory of social institutions that combines the best insights of philosophers and social scientists who have written on this topic. Francesco Guala presents a theory that combines the features of three influential views of institutions: as equilibria of strategic games, as regulative rules, and as constitutive rules. Guala explains key institutions like money, private property, and marriage, and develops a much-needed unification of equilibrium- and rules-based approaches. Although he uses game theory concepts, the theory is presented in a simple, clear style that is accessible to a wide audience of scholars working in different fields. Outlining and discussing various implications of the unified theory, Guala addresses venerable issues such as reflexivity, realism, Verstehen, and fallibilism in the social sciences. He also critically analyses the theory of "looping effects" and "interactive kinds" defended by Ian Hacking, and asks whether it is possible to draw a demarcation between social and natural science using the criteria of causal and ontological dependence. Focusing on current debates about the definition of marriage, Guala shows how these abstract philosophical issues have important practical and political consequences. Moving beyond specific cases to general models and principles, Understanding Institutions offers new perspectives on what institutions are, how they work, and what they can do for us.

Understanding Institutions: The Science and Philosophy of Living Together

This article introduces an accessible approach to implementing unmoderated remote research in developmental science – research in which children and families participate in studies remotely and ind...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15248372.2020.1797751

Advancing Developmental Science via Unmoderated Remote Research with Children

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.

Generics designate kinds but not always essences.

Mutual intentions as a causal framework for social groups.

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.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/04/28/2003627117.full.pdf

Alexander Noyes

Papers

Generics designate kinds but not always essences.

Mutual intentions as a causal framework for social groups.

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

The emerging causal understanding of institutional objects.

Groups as institutions: The use of constitutive rules to attribute group membership