ABSTRACT
It is proposed that children’s knowledge that any existing object is either natural or artificial constitutes a rudimentary ontological theory of the world. The significance of such a theory is in being the result of everyday causal reasoning about the world as a whole rather than its particular objects or phenomena. The natural–artificial ontological dichotomy is thus a metaphysical theory, albeit one that is congruent with scientific knowledge. The chapter discusses some of the reasons why this dichotomy has not received sufficient attention in developmental research given that natural–artificial is conceptually simpler than the more extensively studied animate–inanimate dichotomy. Data from four studies with British and Japanese children and adults are consistent with the hypothesis that the greater simplicity of the natural–artificial than animate–inanimate dichotomy is owed to the use of a single causal criterion, which is object-extrinsic rather than object-intrinsic. In contrast, categorising entities as animate or inanimate typically involves multiple intrinsic criteria, many of which children can only acquire through formal education.
