Three experiments with preschool- and young school-aged children (N = 75 and 53) explored the kinds of relations children detect in samples of instances (descriptive problem) and how they generalize those relations to new instances (inferential problem). Each experiment initially presented a perfect biconditional relation between two features (e.g., all and only frogs are blue). Additional exam...

Several scholars, e.g. Sellars (1956), Meltzoff & Gopnik (1993), have construed the attribution of experiences as being governed by a folkpsychological theory in which experiences function as theoretical entities. However, so far this claim has not been convincingly supported by an account of how people infer the existence of experiences. In this paper I argue that the mechanisms that lead to t...

ion Concretion Association Disassociation Similization Dissimilization Selection Generation Agglomeration Decomposition Characterization Discrimination DEDUCTION INDUCTION Transmutation Inference Type