Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Does the acquisition of words like “dog”, “table”, and “sand” require the support of sortal concepts? In arguing forand against sortals, theorists typically contrast representations of unsorted individuals (bare particulars) and sortal representa-tions. As such, bare particular and sortal representations are presented as alternative means of representing concepts like “dog”,“table” and “tree”. Arguments for and against sortals typically proceed in the absence of an explicit characterization of the formof sortal representations. I present an explicit theory of the form of sortal representations. It turns out that, for sortals to dothe work they need to do, they must incorporate bare particular representations into the sortal representation. Two experimentsprovide evidence for the predicted by the proposed theory of sortal representations. I also show how the proposed theory ofsortal representation is consistent with recent findings by Rips and colleagues that seem to provide empirical evidence againstsortals.