Sublime

In this book we tell the story of the new science of children’s minds.

Understanding children has led us to understand ourselves in a new way.

And they begin to understand that knowing an object’s category lets you predict specific new things about the object.

One thing that science tells us is that nature has designed us to teach babies, as much as it has designed babies to learn.

Like adults, babies had systematic ideas about other people, the world, and language, but their ideas were different from ours and often very peculiar. Babies seemed to think, for example, that objects just stopped existing when they were hidden and that there were no boundaries between themselves and others.

Just as it’s important to infer the nature of other people’s minds in order to survive, it’s also important to infer the nature of the physical world.

In other words, the brain seems to love to learn from other people.

Our own view is that children’s whole conception of people, objects, and words changes radically in the first three years of life. And it changes because of what children find out about the world. We already said that babies start out with complex, abstract, coherent representations of the world and rules for manipulating them. They use those repre

We draw these sorts of causal conclusions all the time, and they play an absolutely essential role in what we actually do.