Sublime

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

Piaget wanted to find a link between Kant and the mollusks, between epistemology and biology. His great insight was that studying the development of human children was one way to do this.

The new developmental research tells us that Baby 0.0 must have some pretty special features. First, it must already have a great deal of knowledge about the world built into its original program. The experiments we will describe show that even newborns already know a great deal about people and objects and language. But more significant, babies an

So in the first few months of life, babies already seem to have solved a number of deep philosophical conundrums. They know how to use edges and patterns of movement to segregate the world into separate objects. They know something about how those objects characteristically move. They know that those objects are part of a three-dimensional space. A

We’ll summarize this big picture by elaborating on the three ideas we’ve presented in previous chapters. Foundations. Babies begin by translating information from the world into rich, complex, abstract, coherent representations. Those representations allow babies to interpret their experience in particular ways and to make predictions about new eve

One-year-old babies know that they will see something by looking where other people point; they know what they should do to something by watching what other people do; they know how they should feel about something by seeing how other people feel. The babies can use other people to figure out the world. In a very simple way, these one-year-olds are

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.

Children create and revise theories in the same way that scientists create and revise theories. This idea seems to explain at least some types of cognitive development very well. We call it the theory theory. (The theory is that children have theories of the world.) We think there are very strong similarities between some particular types of early