Young philosophers
By Anthony Gottlieb |
August 9, 2009, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IT'S always gratifying to hear a new twist on an old joke. In the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup," Rufus T. Firefly, played by Groucho, is handed the Freedonia cabinet's treasury report: "Why, a child of four could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child -- I can't make head or tail of it." Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has run out and found plenty of four-year-old children.
In her new book, she announces that they are in some ways "smarter, more imaginative, more caring and even more conscious than adults are."
Gopnik does not go so far as to propose that we fire Timothy Geithner and march in a phalanx of pre-schoolers to fix the credit crunch. She does, however, make the bold suggestion that thinking about small children can shed new light on ancient philosophical problems.
Whether or not this is true, her account of what the science of recent decades has had to say about infants' minds tells a fascinating story of how we become the grown-ups that we are.
Early childhood is both familiar and mysterious. Everyone was a baby once, and most adults have spent plenty of time talking to small children. But we simply can't remember what it was like to be younger than five or six, and conversation between an adult and a pre-school child is far from a dialogue between equals.
Our mental development is, Gopnik argues, more like a metamorphosis than an incremental process of growth, so we butterflies can boast precious little understanding of the caterpillars in our strollers.
To see what is really happening in their heads, we need grown-up science, in the form of cunningly designed and rigorously executed experiments -- supplemented, where possible, with brain scans.
Thanks to such work, it seems we can now get over some of the false or misleading ideas about childhood inherited from Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget, the pioneer of developmental psychology.
They maintained, for example, that small children cannot discriminate between truth and fiction -- a verdict with which it is all too easy to concur when you have just been informed by a pint-size superhero in a cape that there is a fire-breathing dinosaur in the laundry basket. But it turns out that even two- and three-year-olds are very good at telling pretence from reality.
The experiments described by Gopnik are pretty convincing on this point (though here and elsewhere in her book it would have been interesting to hear more about how exactly Freud and Piaget managed to go so wrong).
When children are playing, they know they are just playing. Yet play is a very serious business, as Montaigne recognized: without the luxury of a uniquely long period of dependence on adults, in which we can afford to explore the world with unfettered imaginations, we would never learn how to be the most knowledgeable and powerful creatures on the planet.
A recurring theme of Gopnik's is the idea that playful immersion in freely conjured hypothetical worlds is what teaches us to make sense of the real one.
She describes, for instance, how small children's grasp of "counterfactual" situations enables them to calculate the probabilities of alternative courses of action.
She also discusses the invisible friends -- most often found in the imaginations of children between the ages of two and six -- who seem to help youngsters learn how to interpret the actions of others. Children who have imaginary friends tend to be better at predicting the thoughts and feelings of actual people. Autistic children almost never create imaginary friends or engage in any kind of pretend play.
It used to be held that small children are not only irrational but also immoral and egotistical.
Again, we may have been doing them an injustice. The notion that moral ideas develop only in adolescence -- as Piaget, for one, claimed -- appears to be wrong.
Even children as young as two can grasp the difference between moral rules, which are intended to avoid harm ("Don't hurt other kids"), and merely convenient regulations ("Take off your dirty shoes at the door").
Tellingly, small children recognize that it would not be OK to hurt another child even if a teacher said it was.
This does not, of course, prevent the little devils from lashing out on occasion, but such bad behavior seems to be a matter of undeveloped self-control rather than a psychopathic lack of moral concepts.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Gareth Matthews, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, made a strong case for regarding young children as natural-born philosophers.
Gopnik's surprising claim about the importance of children to philosophy is not that they ask the same questions as grown-up professors, but that thinking about children can somehow provide the answers the professors want.
In her new book, she announces that they are in some ways "smarter, more imaginative, more caring and even more conscious than adults are."
Gopnik does not go so far as to propose that we fire Timothy Geithner and march in a phalanx of pre-schoolers to fix the credit crunch. She does, however, make the bold suggestion that thinking about small children can shed new light on ancient philosophical problems.
Whether or not this is true, her account of what the science of recent decades has had to say about infants' minds tells a fascinating story of how we become the grown-ups that we are.
Early childhood is both familiar and mysterious. Everyone was a baby once, and most adults have spent plenty of time talking to small children. But we simply can't remember what it was like to be younger than five or six, and conversation between an adult and a pre-school child is far from a dialogue between equals.
Our mental development is, Gopnik argues, more like a metamorphosis than an incremental process of growth, so we butterflies can boast precious little understanding of the caterpillars in our strollers.
To see what is really happening in their heads, we need grown-up science, in the form of cunningly designed and rigorously executed experiments -- supplemented, where possible, with brain scans.
Thanks to such work, it seems we can now get over some of the false or misleading ideas about childhood inherited from Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget, the pioneer of developmental psychology.
They maintained, for example, that small children cannot discriminate between truth and fiction -- a verdict with which it is all too easy to concur when you have just been informed by a pint-size superhero in a cape that there is a fire-breathing dinosaur in the laundry basket. But it turns out that even two- and three-year-olds are very good at telling pretence from reality.
The experiments described by Gopnik are pretty convincing on this point (though here and elsewhere in her book it would have been interesting to hear more about how exactly Freud and Piaget managed to go so wrong).
When children are playing, they know they are just playing. Yet play is a very serious business, as Montaigne recognized: without the luxury of a uniquely long period of dependence on adults, in which we can afford to explore the world with unfettered imaginations, we would never learn how to be the most knowledgeable and powerful creatures on the planet.
A recurring theme of Gopnik's is the idea that playful immersion in freely conjured hypothetical worlds is what teaches us to make sense of the real one.
She describes, for instance, how small children's grasp of "counterfactual" situations enables them to calculate the probabilities of alternative courses of action.
She also discusses the invisible friends -- most often found in the imaginations of children between the ages of two and six -- who seem to help youngsters learn how to interpret the actions of others. Children who have imaginary friends tend to be better at predicting the thoughts and feelings of actual people. Autistic children almost never create imaginary friends or engage in any kind of pretend play.
It used to be held that small children are not only irrational but also immoral and egotistical.
Again, we may have been doing them an injustice. The notion that moral ideas develop only in adolescence -- as Piaget, for one, claimed -- appears to be wrong.
Even children as young as two can grasp the difference between moral rules, which are intended to avoid harm ("Don't hurt other kids"), and merely convenient regulations ("Take off your dirty shoes at the door").
Tellingly, small children recognize that it would not be OK to hurt another child even if a teacher said it was.
This does not, of course, prevent the little devils from lashing out on occasion, but such bad behavior seems to be a matter of undeveloped self-control rather than a psychopathic lack of moral concepts.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Gareth Matthews, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, made a strong case for regarding young children as natural-born philosophers.
Gopnik's surprising claim about the importance of children to philosophy is not that they ask the same questions as grown-up professors, but that thinking about children can somehow provide the answers the professors want.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
