Science and Core Knowledge

Abstract

While endorsing Gopnik's proposal that studies of the emergence and modification of scientific theories and studies of cognitive development in children are mutually illuminating, we offer a different picture of the beginning points of cognitive development from Gopnik's picture of “theories all the way down.” Human infants are endowed with several distinct core systems of knowledge which are theory-like in some, but not all, important ways. The existence of these core systems of knowledge has implications for the joint research program between philosophers and psychologists that Gopnik advocates and we endorse. A few lessons already gained from this program of research are sketched.

A tutorial introduction to Bayesian models of cognitive development

“…Babies believe that agents are distinct from objects in that they can move without contact (Spelke, Phillips, & Woodward, 1995) and act in certain ways in response to goals (Woodward, 1998;Gergely & Csibra, 2003). Confronted with evidence that children's behavior is restricted in predictable ways, the natural response is to hypothesize the existence of innate constraints, including the whole object constraint (Markman, 1990) core systems of object representation, psychology, physics, and biology (Carey & Spelke, 1996;Spelke & Kinzler, 2007;Carey, 2009), and so on. Given that they appear so early in development, it seems sensible to postulate that these constraints are innate rather than learned.…”

Konstruktywizm Jeana Piageta i koncepcja zmysłu liczby a edukacja matematyczna

“…Dzieci uczą się liczyć już w wieku trzech lat -zaczynają od odnoszenia liczebników do konkretnych przedmiotów lub działań (Blakemore i Frith, 2008). Carey i Spelke (1996) wskazały, że dzieci w tym wieku mają trudności z wykonaniem zadania, w którym muszą porównać dwa (lub więcej) zbiory przedmiotów, ale jeśli zadanie dotyczy jednego zbioru przedmiotów, to radzą sobie z jego wykonaniem i rozumieją, że liczenie ma stały porządek, a o wielkości zbioru decyduje ostatnia policzona wartość. Nie są to jednak zaawansowane zdolności liczenia.…”

The Importance of Origins: Why Cognitive Development is Central to a Mature Understanding of Social Cognition

“…To support this claim of innateness, emotion researchers, like researchers in cognitive development (e.g., [13]), demonstrate that very young infants have emotion concepts. For example, Izard and colleagues have demonstrated that children as young as 2.5 months express interest, joy, sadness and anger [59].…”

“…Many theorists would now argue that at least some mental structures are innate and largely invariant across the lifespan [12,13]. Generally, these 'core knowledge' faculties are thought of as supports for reasoning and knowledge acquisition in certain domains of knowledge; for example, both infants and adults have a core system for estimating how many objects are in a scene [14], as well as a core system for representing and tracking objects [15].…”