Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Certain generalizations are teleological, e.g., forks are foreating. But not all properties relevant to a particular conceptpermit teleological generalization. For instance, forks getwashed roughly as often as they’re used for eating, yet thegeneralization, forks are for washing, might strike reasoners asunacceptable. What explains the discrepancy? A recenttaxonomic theory of conceptual generalization (Prasada, 2017;Prasada & Dillingham, 2006; Prasada et al., 2013) argues thatcertain kinds of conceptual connections – known as“principled” connections – license generalizations, whereasassociative, “statistical” connections license only probabilisticexpectations. We apply this taxonomy to explain teleologicalgeneralization: it predicts that acceptable teleologicalgeneralizations concern concept-property pairs in which theconcept bears a principled connection to a property. Under thisanalysis, the concept fork bears a principled connection toeating and a statistical connection to washing. Twoexperiments and a regression analysis tested and corroboratedthe predictions of the theory.