The Philosophical Baby - Alison Gopnik

[The Magic Pudding]

Alison Gopnik: Right. Well one of the things that we know is that literally from the time they're born, infants have capacities to empathise with the emotions and internal states of other people, and by the time they're 18 months old, perhaps even a bit younger, children show signs of altruism. So that they'll actively act to help another person achieve their ends or achieve their goals.

By the time they're 2-1/2, a really striking set of studies, young children seem to be able to discriminate between purely conventional roles and genuinely moral ones. So for example, you can ask a 3-year-old something this, 'Suppose everyone in the daycare agreed that you could drop the clothes on the floor. Would it be OK to do that?' versus 'Suppose everyone in the daycare, all the teachers and the other children, agreed that it was OK to hit people. Would it be OK to hit people' And 3-year-olds say 'If everyone agreed you could change the rule about dropping your clothes on the floor, but if everyone agreed you still couldn't change the rule about hitting people.'

So there seems to be a link between this early empathic ability, this ability to read and identify with the internal emotions of another person, and then this impulse to say, presumably partly because of that empathic ability, 'Well if this is going to hurt someone else, you shouldn't do it.' It's a sort of fundamental - if you think about morality I think underpinned by versions of the Golden Rule 'Do unto others as you would have others do unto you', that piece at least seems to be in place from the time that the children are very young.

Alison Gopnik: Well the like to summarise is that modern science tells us that babies are very far from being blank slates. There's a great deal there to begin with. But it also tells us that what they know is not written in stone either. So what happens is that babies seem to start out being born into the world with certain kinds of assumptions or ideas about what the world is like, what objects are like, what people are like. But they also seem to be born in a world with very powerful capacities for revising, changing, altering what they think on the basis of new experience. And new work that we've done shows that those are the same kind of capacities that we use for instance in science to revise and change our ideas about the world.

So the picture that we have now is that babies start out with hypotheses about what the world is like. They start out with ideas about how the world could be. But they also have the capacity to actually revise and change and alter those views, and even end up with hypotheses that are quite different as a result of their experience. And this is quite different from, say, the picture that someone like Noam Chomsky or Stephen Pinker had of an innate set of ideas that are constraints on what we can think or understand later on, that we're sort of forced to be back in the world that we evolved in in the Pleistocene. And the developmental work, so it has a very different picture. We're not blank slates, we start out knowing a lot but we're not stuck, we're not constrained by what we start out knowing, that's just the jumping-off point for our ability to revise and learn and understand new things about the world.

Alan Saunders: You make babies sound as though they've all read the work of Karl Popper, that they approach the world making conjectures and being open to refutation.

Alison Gopnik: Well in fact what we've discovered in that - and this has been a great, exciting discovery over the last ten years, is that if you look at philosophers of science since Popper, philosophers of science have developed more and more ideas about how it's actually possible for this process of theory change, reputation and confirmation to take place. One of the big ideas in the philosophy of science is an idea called Bayesian Inference, based on the work of the Reverend Thomas Bayes, back in the 18th century.

Alan Saunders: This is a theory in probability theory.

Alison Gopnik: Exactly. So what philosophers have discovered, and this was something that Popper didn't appreciate I think, is that if you integrate the idea of probability theory into your ideas about scientific change, you can make tremendous progress. So rather than thinking that you simply have a hypothesis, either say it's true or throw it out, what you can say is, Well as you get more evidence, what you do is say OK, that hypothesis is getting a higher probability, and this one is getting a lower probability, and eventually they could swap round so that one of them actually sort of wins, and temporarily that becomes the one that you'll accept.

But you always know that in fact there's all sorts of other things that could be true as well. And that's a much closer picture, it turns out to be a much better picture, of what even very young babies have been doing, and the dramatic work that we've been doing in the last ten years has shown that, for example, 8-month-olds already understand probabilistic notions like the idea about the relationship between a sample and a population, and 3 and 4 year olds can use quite complicated patterns of correlation and dependence to make causal inferences about the world. To do something that, for example, David Hume thought was a very difficult thing for adults to do.

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I'll stop quoting now.  I would quote that thing about preferring a society where the military has to sell cup cakes to buy bombers and pre schools are swimming in money, but I only recall the sentiment, not the wording.

[ThinkAnarchy]

Thanks for the link. I added it to itunes and will listen to it later. I read the first quote and am interested.

[xSilverPhinx]

Thanks for the link, I'll be definitely listening to it later.