num_pages: 165
description: The results of a collaboration between an anthropologist (Astuti)and two developmental psychologists (Solomon and Carey),this monograph unites two literatures that make very differenttacit assumptions about the very nature of conceptual development.Anthropologists' focus on the cultural construction ofknowledge leads many of them (including Astuti) to expect radicallydifferent conceptual understandings across cultures. Incontrast, some cognitive developmental investigators (includingSolomon and Carey) work to discover innate representationalconstraints that channel cognitive development, thus expectingcross-cultural universality in representations of the world.The studies concern Malagasy children's and adults' conceptualrepresentations of human and animal kind, biologicalinheritance, innate potential and family relations. The Vezo ofMadagascar were chosen because the ethnographic literaturehas attributed to them folkbiological and folksociologicaltheories that are radically different, even incommensurable,with those of North American adults. Vezo therefore provide achallenging test for the innate conceptual constraints hypothesis.The results of the studies reported here have surprisesboth for anthropological claims of cross-cultural differencesand psychological claims for cross-cultural universality.
language: English
title: Constraints on Conceptual Development: A Case Study of the Acquisition of Folkbiological and Folksociological Knowledge in Madagascar
titlecomplete: Constraints on Conceptual Development: A Case Study of the Acquisition of Folkbiological and Folksociological Knowledge in Madagascar (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development)
publisher: Wiley-Blackwell