We argue that Quilty-Dunn et al.'s commitment to representational pluralism undermines their case for the language-of-thought hypothesis as the evidence they present is consistent with the operation of the other representational formats that they are willing to accept.

Phillips and colleagues claim that the capacity to ascribe knowledge is a “basic” capacity, but most studies reporting linguistic data reviewed by Phillips et al. were conducted in English with American participants – one of more than 6,500 languages currently spoken. We highlight the importance of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research when one is theorizing about fundamental human representational capacities.

This article develops a new, general account of replication (the Resampling Account of replication). I argue that a replication is an experiment that resamples the experimental components of an original experiment that are treated as random factors and that the function of replications is, narrowly, to assess the reliability of the replicated experiments. On this basis, I argue that the common notion of conceptual replication is confused and that the ongoing controversy about the relative value of direct and conceptual replications should be dissolved.

Stanford argues that cooperators achieve and maintain correlated interaction through the objectification of moral norms. We first challenge the moral/non-moral distinction that frames Stanford's discussion. We then argue that to the extent that norms are objectified (and we hold that they are at most objectified in a very thin sense), it is not for the sake of achieving correlated interaction.

We argue that the exercise of agency is compatible with the presence of what Doris calls “defeaters.” In order to undermine reflectivist theories of agency and support his valuational alternative, Doris must not simply show that defeaters exist but rather establish that some agentive behaviors do express a person's values without involving reflection.

Anderson (2014) proposes a bottom-up approach to cognitive ontology revision: Neuroscientists should revise their taxonomies of cognitive constructs on the basis of brain activation patterns across many tasks. We argue that such bottom-up proposal is bound to commit a mistake of reification: It treats the abstract mathematical entities uncovered by dimension reduction techniques as if they were real psychological entities.

Recent evidence shows that psychological essentialism is neither a universal nor stable feature of human cognition. The extent to which people report essentialist intuitions varies enormously across cultures and education levels, and is also influenced by subtle, normatively irrelevant contextual manipulations. These results challenge the notion that the human mind is “fitted” with a built-in inherence heuristic that produces essentialist intuitions.

In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether members of the general public share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-barn cases do count as knowledge is negatively correlated with age; older participants are less likely than younger participants to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases. We also found that increasing the number of defeaters (fakes) does not decrease the inclination to attribute knowledge.

Baumard and colleagues put forward a new hypothesis about the nature and evolution of fairness. In this commentary, we discuss the relation between morality and their views about fairness.

The use of power to infer null hypotheses from negative results has recently come under severe attack. In this article, I show that the power of a test can justify accepting the null hypothesis. This argument also gives us a new powerful reason for not treating p-values and power as measures of the strength of evidence.

In this article, I compare the epistemic standing of the function-to-structure inferences found in cognitive neuroscience and of the inferences based on dissociations in neuropsychology. I argue that the former have a poorer epistemic standing than the latter.

Carey holds that the study of conceptual development bears on the theories of concepts developed by philosophers and psychologists. In this commentary, I scrutinize her claims about the significance of the study of conceptual development.

Although cognitive scientists have learned a lot about concepts, their findings have yet to be organized in a coherent theoretical framework. In addition, after twenty years of controversy, there is little sign that philosophers and psychologists are converging toward an agreement about the very nature of concepts. Doing without Concepts (Machery 2009) attempts to remedy this state of affairs. In this article, I review the main points and arguments developed at greater length in Doing without Concepts.

In this response, I begin by defending and clarifying the notion of concept proposed in Doing without Concepts (Machery 2009) against the alternatives proposed by several commentators. I then discuss whether psychologists and philosophers who theorize about concepts are talking about distinct phenomena or about different aspects of the same phenomenon, as argued in some commentaries. Next, I criticize the idea that the cognitive-scientific findings about induction, categorization, concept combination, and so on, could be explained by positing a single kind of concept, and I insist that many categories (substances, types of events, etc.) are represented by distinct coreferential concepts that belong to very different kinds of concept. This is followed by an assessment of the hybrid theories of concepts offered by commentators, according to which categories, substances, and types of events are represented by hybrid concepts made of several parts. Finally, I defend the proposal that it may be useful to eliminate concept from the theoretical vocabulary of psychology.

In this commentary, I argue that to properly assess the significance of the cross-cultural findings reviewed by Henrich et al., one needs to understand better the causes of the variation in performance in experimental tasks across cultures.