What's Beyond Looks? Reply to Gelman and Waxman

In our target article (Sloutsky, Kloos, & Fisher, 2007), we presented evidence that when category information is in conflict with appearance similarity, young children's induction is based on similarity and not on category information. These findings challenge a central tenet of the knowledge-based approach—the idea that even early in development, induction is category based. Gelman and Waxman (2007, this issue) argue that because we used arbitrary groupings, our findings tell little about induction with real natural kinds. In what follows, we first respond to Gelman and Waxman's arguments. We then return to a broader debate, arguing that the knowledge-based approach is underspecified and thus has too much flexibility when dealing with disconfirming evidence.