3. Domain Specificity and Intuitive Ontology

Traditionally, psychologists have assumed that people come equipped only with a set of relatively domain-general faculties, such as “memory” and “reasoning,” which are applied in equal fashion to diverse problems. Recent research has begun to suggest that human expertise about the natural and social environment, including what is often called “semantic knowledge”, is best construed as consisting of different domains of competence. Each of these corresponds to recurrent evolutionary problems, is organised along specific principles, is the outcome of a specific developmental pathway and is based on specific neural structures. What we call a “human evolved intuitive ontology” comprises a catalogue of broad domains of information, different sets of principles applied to these different domains as well as different learning rules to acquire more information about those objects. All this is intuitive in the sense that it is not the product of deliberate reflection on what the world is like. This notion of an intuitive ontology as a motley of different domains informed by different principles was first popularised by developmental psychologists (R. Gelman, 1978; R. Gelman & Baillargeon, 1983) who proposed distinctions between physical-mechanical, biological, social and numerical competencies as based on different learning principles (Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994). In the following decades, this way of slicing up semantic knowledge received considerable support both in developmental and neuro-psychology. For example, patients with focal brain damage were found to display selective impairment of one of these domains of knowledge to the exclusion of others (Caramazza, 1998). Neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience are now adding to the picture of a