Why Not Just Features? Reconsidering Infants’ Behavior in Individuation Tasks

Abstract

It counts as empirically proven that infants can individuate objects. Object individuation is assumed to be fundamental in the development of infants' ontology within the objectfirst account. It crucially relies on an object-file (OF) system, representing both spatiotemporal ("where") and categorical ("what") information about objects as solid, cohesive bodies moving continuously in space and time. However, infants' performance in tasks requiring them to use featural information to detect individuation violations appears to be at odds with the object-first account. In such cases, infants do not appear to be able to develop correct expectations about the numerosity of objects. Recently, proponents of the objectfirst account proposed that these individuation failures result from integration errors between the OF system and an additional physical reasoning system. We are going to argue that the predictions of a feature-based physical-reasoning (PR) system are sufficient for explaining infants' behavior. The striking predictive power of the PR system calls into question the relevance of the OF system and, thereby, challenges the assumption that infants can individuate objects early on.

Rethinking how children individuate objects: spatial indexicals in early development

“…Let us introduce a distinction made by Hildebrandt et al (2020) to make this point. Cognitive systems describable by principles that we can understand as involving reference to physical objects without committing to an implicit or explicit grasp of these principles by the cognitive system itself can be said to refer de re to physical objects.…”

“…However, Stavans et al overlook that the explanatory burden is almost exclusively carried by only one of the hypothesised cognitive systems, namely the physical reasoning system, which processes featural information. Moreover, an alternative interpretation of the challenging data is available that is simpler, more parsimonious, and theoretically well-grounded (Hildebrandt et al, 2020.…”

Sortals, bodies, and variables. A critique of Quine’s theory of reference

“…The prominence of the direct-reference approach notwithstanding, Millian approaches to meaning are confronted with numerous objections Church, 1949;Carnap, 1947;Quine, 1974;Searle, 1958;Strawson, 1959;Wittgenstein, 1969;Tugendhat 1976;Evans, 1982;Montague, 1970Montague, , 1973Chomsky, 2000;Hinzen & Sheehan, 2015;Dickie, 2015;Glauer & Hildebrandt, 2021) and the currently dominant approaches to object individuation in developmental psychology have likewise come under attack (e.g., Cohen et al, 2002;Krøjgaard, 2000;Krøjgaard et al, 2013;Hildebrandt et al, 2020Hildebrandt et al, , 2022.…”

“…Burge, 2010;Stavans et al, 2019). We have argued elsewhere that these accounts are not successful(Hildebrandt et al, 2020(Hildebrandt et al, , 2022.1 3…”