关键词: 朴素生物学理论, 朴素理论, 本体区分, 生物学的因果机制

Abstract: The studies of preschoolers’ development of theory of naïve biology have been the hot issues of children cognitive development in last 20 years. Carey claimed that young children’s conceptions of living things undergo radical conceptual change that intuitive biology emerges from an intuitive psychology and do not possess an integrated concept of living things that includes both animals and plants. An alternative view, a growing number of cognitive developmentalists argued that young children honor the biological ontological distinction and use coherent biological causal principles in reasoning about biological domain. So they possess the naïve theory of biology, and the child’s conceptual system may involve the gradual elaboration of a single system. Now, the integrated view claimed that naïve biology is separated from naïve psychology at early ages but is sometimes influenced by psychological understandings that were established even earlier.

Key words: theory of naï, ve biology, naï, ve theory, ontological distinction, biological causal mechanisms