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Beyond the building blocks model1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2011

Eric Margolis  and
Stephen Laurence
Eric Margolis
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1, Canada. margolis@interchange.ubc.ca http://web.mac.com/ericmargolis/primary_site/home.html
Stephen Laurence
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7QB, United Kingdom. s.laurence@shef.ac.uk http://www.shef.ac.uk/philosophy/staff/profiles/slaurence.html
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Abstract

Carey rightly rejects the building blocks model of concept acquisition on the grounds that new primitive concepts can be learned via the process of bootstrapping. But new primitives can be learned by other acquisition processes that do not involve bootstrapping, and bootstrapping itself is not a unitary process. Nonetheless, the processes associated with bootstrapping provide important insights into conceptual change.

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , June 2011 , pp. 139 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

1.

This article was fully collaborative; the order of the authors' names is arbitrary.

References

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