Xu Fei
Department of Psychology, 2136 West Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4, Canada.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2007 Sep;11(9):400-6. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2007.08.002. Epub 2007 Aug 16.
Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary enterprise. This review highlights how the philosophical notion of a 'sortal'--a concept that provides principles of individuation and principles of identity - has been introduced into cognitive developmental psychology. Although the notion 'sortal' originated in metaphysics, importing it into the cognitive sciences has bridged a gap between philosophical and psychological discussions of concepts and has generated a fruitful and productive research enterprise. As I review here, the sortal concept has inspired several lines of empirical work in the past decade, including the study of object individuation; object identification; the relationship between language and acquisition of kind concepts; the representational capacities of non-human primates; object-based attention and cognitive architecture; and the relationship between kind concepts and individual concepts.
认知科学是一个跨学科的领域。这篇综述强调了“类别”这一哲学概念——一个提供个体化原则和同一性原则的概念——是如何被引入认知发展心理学的。尽管“类别”概念起源于形而上学，但将其引入认知科学弥合了哲学和心理学对概念讨论之间的差距，并催生了一个富有成果且卓有成效的研究领域。正如我在此所综述的，类别概念在过去十年中激发了几条实证研究路线，包括对物体个体化的研究；物体识别；语言与种类概念习得之间的关系；非人类灵长类动物的表征能力；基于物体的注意力和认知结构；以及种类概念与个体概念之间的关系。
