 Developmental issues with regard to our concepts of “artifact” and specific kinds of artifacts also loom large in cognitive psychology. As philosophers might anticipate, the underlying general issue is between empiricist and nativist approaches to concept acquisition. But the now vast experimental literature on child development means that theories in this area are both numerous and highly sophisticated. An empiricist-oriented theory that stands out is Jean Mandler’s (2004; 2007) comprehensive perceptual meaning analysis view, according to which children construct abstract image schemas on the basis of their perceptual experience, especially their experience of motion. Since artifacts and animals move in characteristically different ways, the first level of differentiation these image schemas provide is vague, global concepts of these two types of objects. Mandler holds that there is no good reason to think these concepts are innate, nor is there any good reason to think that the perceptual meaning analysis mechanisms that produce them are domain specific. All that is innate, on her view, is a domain-general mechanism that enables the child to analyze her perceptual input. Mandler’s work also indicates that artifacts may be first differentiated into indoor and outdoor, and only then into more specific kinds such as furniture and kitchen utensils, on the one hand, and vehicles and buildings, on the other. The nativist alternative to Mandler’s theory is best represented by Susan Carey’s equally comprehensive “core cognition” theory. Carey (2009, 194–196) has a characteristically nativist critique of Mandler. On the face of it, Mandler’s image schemas represent features of motion and the paths motions describe through space. However, Carey argues, there is no explanation of how the child gets from these representations to a representation of agency, for example. No matter how distinctive the motions of animals, they do not by themselves yield concepts of intention, attention, or goal-directedness. On Carey’s view, these concepts must be innate in the form of “core knowledge” (Spelke 2000), or “core cognition”, as Carey prefers to call it in her more recent work. Core cognition is characterized by innate, domain-specific mechanisms for the analysis of perceptual input, designed by natural selection to construct domain-specific representations of the world, such as intention in the agent domain, or causality in the object domain. Both of these domains of core cognition are essential for the development of artifact concepts, because on Carey’s view (Kelemen &amp; Carey 2007) we conceptualize artifacts as objects that have been intentionally designed to carry out a specific function. The developmental issue, then, boils down to the question of whether we can construct artifact concepts with only a single, domain-general mechanism for analyzing perceptual input, or whether we need at least two domain-specific mechanisms with quite different output.