ABSTRACT
There has been increasing interest in uncovering how we represent the categories of existence. Our notions of what sorts of things there are,
that is, our ontological knowledge, may undergird in largely implicit ways much of how we categorize and make sense of the world (Sommers 1963; Keil 1979). The nature of ontological knowledge and its degree of distinctive-
ness from other forms of knowledge remains an active area of inquiry (Chi 1992); but one critical question rarely addressed asks how entities that do not conform to existing ontological knowledge are conceived by adults. Developmentally, it is often assumed that children learn how to incorporate such new entities by restructuring their ontological knowledge (ibid.); but there is much less consensus on how adults might conceive of a widely discussed entity that is nonetheless apparently not conforming to any other ontological kind. No entity poses the problem more clearly than God.
