Abstract
Two separate research programs have revealed two different factors that feature in our judgments of whether some entity persists. One program—inspired by Knobe—has found that normative considerations affect persistence judgments. For instance, people are more inclined to view a thing as persisting when the changes it undergoes lead to improvements. The other program—inspired by Kelemen—has found that teleological considerations affect persistence judgments. For instance, people are more inclined to view a thing as persisting when it preserves its purpose. Our goal in this paper is to determine what causes persistence judgments. Across four studies, we pit normative considerations against teleological considerations. And using causal modeling procedures, we find a consistent, robust pattern with teleological and not normative considerations directly causing persistence judgments. Our findings put teleology in the driver’s seat, while at the same time shedding further light on our folk notion of an object.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
We say that a change is “on track” if it fits the apparent purpose of the object, and “off track” if it departs from the apparent purpose of the object. For instance, if the apparent purpose of a university is to educate students, then a change such as doubling student enrollments is still “on track” (the university can still educate students), while a change such as eliminating student enrollments is “off track” (the university can no longer educate students).
A wide range of studies show that people tend to weigh “superficial” features such as color less than “deep” and potentially unobservable features when assessing object identity (e.g., Blok et al. 2001; Hall et al. 2003; Blok et al. 2005; Newman et al. 2014). This is understood in terms of the deeper features being viewed as “essential.” More precisely, as De Freitas et al. (2017: pp. 382–833) clarify, essence judgments are understood as judgments as to the range of changes through which an object can and cannot persist.
The idea that people tend to have normatively laden conceptions of the purposes of objects fits the idea that folk teleology is tied into a folk theism, on which all objects are viewed as part of the divine plan. There is also the idea that folk teleology may stem from a natural Gaia hypothesis of a living earth or cosmos. We are not sure if that fits normatively laden purposes as neatly. See Kelemen et al. 2013 for discussion of these options. This idea also coheres with specific work on the “good true self” from Newman et al. 2015 (see also Strohminger et al. 2017). Also—as De Freitas (personal correspondence) points out—many of Kelemen’s examples are positively valenced, such as “The sun radiates heat because warmth nurtures life,” and “Earthworms tunnel underground to aerate the soil.”
Roughly, GES operates by considering the possible models available given the different variables. GES begins by assigning an information score to the null model (i.e., a disconnected graph). GES then considers various possible arrows (“edges”) between the different variables. It begins by adding the edge that yields the greatest improvement in the information score (if there is such an edge) and repeats the process until additional edges would not further improve the information score. GES then considers deletions that would yield the greatest improvement in the information score (if there is such an edge), repeating this procedure until no further deletions will improve the score. In all cases, the orientation of the edges is given by edge-orientation rules in Meek (1997). Chickering (2002) shows that, given enough data, GES will return the true causal model of the data. GES is often interpreted as returning the best fitting causal model, given the data. For further details and some applications, see Chickering (2002), Rose et al. (2011), Rose and Nichols (2013), Rose (2017) and Turri et al. (2016).
We constructed a directed acyclic graph with all edges the same as in the model returned by GES except we reversed the edge from Normativity to Identity. This model was rejected as a poor fit of the data (p < .05).
We thank an anonymous referee for helpful discussion.
We thank a second anonymous referee for raising this concern, and for encouraging us to report more of our statistical results (which we appeal to in response to this concern).
References
Alicke, M., Rose, D., & Bloom, D. (2011). Causation, norm violation and culpable control. Journal of Philosophy, 108, 670–696.
Beebe, J. R., & Buckwalter, W. (2010). The epistemic side-effect effect. Mind and Language, 25, 474–498.
Blok, S., Newman, G., Behr, J., & Rips, L. J. (2001). Inferences about personal identity. In J. D. Moore & K. Stenning (Eds.), Proceedings of the twenty-third annual conference of the cognitive science society (pp. 80–85). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Blok, S. V., Newman, G., & Rips, L. J. (2005). Individuals and their concepts. In W. K. Ahn, R. L. Goldstone, B. C. Love, A. B. Markman, & P. Wolff (Eds.), Categorization inside and outside the lab (pp. 127–149). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Bloom, P. (2007). Religion is natural. Developmental Science, 10, 147–151.
Chickering, D. (2002). Optimal structure identification with greedy search. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 507–554.
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Dawkins, R. (1995). River out of Eden: A Darwinian view of life. New York, NY: Basic Books.
De Freitas, J., Tobia, K., Newman, J. E., & Knobe, J. (2017). Normative judgments and individual essence. Cognitive Science, 41, 382–402.
Ellis, P. (2010). The Essential guide to effect sizes: Statistical power, meta-analysis and the interpretation of research results. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, D. G., Waxman, S. R., Bredart, S., & Nicolay, A. C. (2003). Preschoolers’ use of form class cues to learn descriptive proper names. Child Development, 74, 1547–1560.
Hitchcock, C., & Knobe, J. (2009). Cause and norm. Journal of Philosophy, 11, 587–612.
Kelemen, D. (1999). Why are rocks pointy? Children’s preference for teleological explanations of the natural world. Developmental Psychology, 35, 1440–1452.
Kelemen, D., & Rosset, E. (2009). The human function compunction: Teleological explanation in adults. Cognition, 111, 138–143.
Kelemen, D., Rottman, J., & Seston, R. (2013). Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies: Purpose-based reasoning as a cognitive default. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142, 1074–1083.
Knobe, J. (2003). Intentional action and side effects in ordinary language. Analysis, 63, 190–193.
Knobe, J. (2010). Person as scientist, person as moralist. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 315–365.
Lombrozo, T., Kelemen, D., & Zaitchik, D. (2007). Inferring design: Evidence for a preference for teleological explanation in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Psychological Science, 18, 999–1006.
Meek, C. (1997). Graphical models: Selecting causal and statistical models. Ph.D. Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University.
Newman, G. E., Bartels, D. M., & Smith, R. K. (2014). Are artworks more like people than artifacts? Individual concepts and their extensions. Topics in Cognitive Science, 6, 647–662.
Newman, G. E., De Freitas, J., & Knobe, J. (2015). Beliefs about the true self explain asymmetries based on moral judgment. Cognitive Science, 39, 96–125.
Pettit, D., & Knobe, J. (2009). The pervasive impact of moral judgment. Mind and Language, 24, 586–604.
Rips, L. (1989). Similarity, typicality and categorization. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 21–59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, D. (2015). Persistence through function preservation. Synthese, 192, 97–146.
Rose, D. (2017). Folk intuitions of actual causation: A two-pronged debunking explanation. Philosophical Studies, 174, 1323–1361.
Rose, D., Livengood, J., Sytsma, J., & Machery, E. (2011). Deep trouble for the deep self. Philosophical Psychology, 25, 629–646.
Rose, D., & Nichols, S. (2013). The lesson of bypassing. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4, 599–619.
Rose, D., & Schaffer, J. (2017). Folk mereology is teleological. Noûs, 51, 238–270.
Rosenthal, J. A. (1996). Qualitative descriptors of strength of association and effect size. Journal of Social Service Research, 21, 37–59.
Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals. London: Methuen.
Strohminger, N., Knobe, J., & Newman, G. (2017). The true self: A psychological concept distinct from the self. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12, 551–560.
Thomasson, A. (2007). Ordinary objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tobia, K. (2015). Personal identity and the Phineas Gage effect. Analysis, 75, 396–405.
Turri, J., Buckwalter, W., & Rose, D. (2016). Actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments. Thought, 5, 212–222.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Julian De Freitas, and especially to Joshua Knobe, who helped initiate this project. Thanks also to two anonymous referees for Synthese for insightful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rose, D., Schaffer, J. & Tobia, K. Folk teleology drives persistence judgments. Synthese 197, 5491–5509 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01974-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01974-0