Assessing the Generality and Stability of Ontological Confusions
Ontology is the study of how people classify entities in the
world. People use ontological categories to attribute properties
to the entities subsumed by those categories (Slotta et al.,
1995). For instance, entities like "dogs" and "flowers" are
subsumed by the ontological category "living things" and are
thus attributed properties true of living things (e.g., needs
food, needs air, grows, reproduces, dies) in addition to
properties true only of those entities. Empirical research on
ontological knowledge has only focused on one domain at a time,
such as factual knowledge about the physical sciences
(McCloskey, 1983; Reiner et al., 2000; Wiser, 2001),
superstition and rational thinking (Lindeman & Aarnio, 2007), or
religious beliefs (Barrett & Keil, 1996; Shtulman, 2008), with
each case using different materials and measures. The present
study attempted to shed light on the occurrence of ontological
confusion across multiple domains and two diff