Gil Diesendruck
Five year olds concur with Locke's distinction between Real and Nominal essences: they believe that animal categories are natural kinds defined by their inner substances and thus independently of people's interests, but artifact categories are defined by how people label them.
Gil Diesendruck is an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology and the Director of the Language and Cognitive Development Laboratory at the Gonda Brain Research Center, both at Bar-Ilan University. He received his BA in Psychology and Economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan. He worked as a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Arizona, and was a visiting professor at the Department of Psychology at Yale University. His work focuses on children's development of social-pragmatic capacities, and on the interface between language and conceptual development especially within the realm of categorization. He has published over 40 chapters and empirical articles in journals such as Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Cognition, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Psychological Science, among others. His work has been funded primarily by the Israel Science Foundation. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of the journal Child Development, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Cognition and Development.
