In her feature article, Mandler (this issue) suggests that before their first birthday, infants begin to redescribe perceptual information (i.e., to analyze and recode per- ceptual input into a new format), allowing them to discover the conceptual catego- ries  that  support  inductive  inference.  In  this  commentary,  I  accept  Mandler’s evidence indicating that infants detect some categories in which the exemplars do not share a perceptual resemblance, but I question her claim that these early emerg- ing categories indicate that infants understand the conceptual basis for these cate- gories. The presence of a shared response to a set of dissimilar events does not necessarily  imply  higher  order  cognition  about  those  events.  I  also  question Mandler’s claim that conceptual categories emerge primarily through a process of redescription.  Redescription  is  unlikely  to  reveal  underlying  similarity  unless something demarcates a group of objects or events as belonging together, a situa- tion I label established equivalence.

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