The Reliability of Category-Related Projection

Category-related projection brings new knowledge to cognitive subjects about some as yet unobserved surface feature of an object. This essay investigates the reliability of such a cognitive mechanism, focusing on both psychological essentialism and the minimal hypothesis. Psychological essentialism explains the reliability of this cognitive mechanism by positing the representation that kinds have essences and the representation that such essences causally underlie the surface feature, whereas the minimal hypothesis explains it by positing only the latter causal belief. Both approaches think that the resemblance approach that explains the reliability of projection in terms of similarity is never adequate.In this essay, I argue first that there are serious difficulties with both psychological essentialism and minimalism, second that similarity-based projection is a reliable mechanism, and third that the resemblance approach is explanatorily parsimonious. I thus conclude that the resemblance approach is to be favored to the other two approaches in explaining the reliability of category-related projection.