RESPONSE Cognition Without Concepts

There is an intellectual unease in our article and in the commentaries on it. Although the article and the commentaries are all about the role of perception in children's concepts, the subtext concerns the validity of our most fundamental assumptions about cognition. All of the articles how the tension. For us, and for Mervis, Johnson, and Scott (1993), the strain is evident in data showing dramatic changes and context sensitivity in categories that are neither explained by, nor of interest o, current theory. Mandler's (1993) and Gelman and Medin's (1993) commentaries show the strain in acknowledging interactions between perception, task, and various knowledge sources, yet at the same time also arguing that some kinds of knowledge--intensions, or essences, or functions, or ontological beliefs--are more fundamental than others and, indeed, are the explanation of why behavior is the way it is. Barsalou (1993) explicitly recognizes that the tension derives from discontent with the founding assumptions of a structural approach to cognition: "'We have no accounts of how propositional representa-tions arise in the cognitive system, either innately or through experience. W