Agency and Vitalism: conflicting theories in a single mind

• In Event: 3-185 - New Approaches to Animism across Cultures and Development

Integrative Statement

Our work explores the conflict of two successive theories of living things. The first is the preschooler's enriched agency theory, which views people and animals as causal and intentional agents. Here 'alive' is associated with active and moving, leading to animist attributions of life to inanimate objects. Several years will pass before a vitalist biology is constructed. Here being alive is understood as involving a bodily machine whose internal parts subserve specific functions (a heart for moving blood to every part of the body, a stomach to grind up food and pass it downstream, etc.) Life is attributed to plants and animals only, and animism disappears. Vitalist biology is difficult to learn, we believe, because it is incommensurable with the earlier agency theory. Our studies ask: Does vitalism overwrite the earlier theory, or does the agency theory remain in the conceptual system, generating interference during the construction and expression of the later theory? If so, how is the interference resolved? What are the learning mechanisms involved in acquiring and using the vitalist theory, and what central cognitive processes underlie these learning mechanisms? We have investigated these questions in children, young adults, elderly adults, and patients with Alzheimer's disease. Our recent work proposes an analytic strategy for investigating theory change in different conceptual domains with different populations.

Authors

• Deborah Zaitchik, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Susan Carey, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author