The Developing Mind

A Philosophical Introduction

Stephen Butterfill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781135016616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The development of children's minds raises fundamental questions, from how we are able to know about basic aspects of the world such as objects and actions, to how we come to grasp mental states. The Developing Mind is the first book to critically introduce and examine philosophical questions concerning children's cognitive development and to consider the implications of scientific breakthroughs for the philosophy of developmental psychology.

The book explores central topics in developmental psychology from a philosophical perspective:

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• children's awareness of objects and the question of 'object permanence'
• the nature and explanatory role of 'core knowledge'
• evidence for innate drivers of language
• children's knowledge of the relation between actions and goals
• puzzles about when infants first have awareness of other minds
• how social interaction explains the emergence of knowledge

Throughout the book, Stephen Butterfill draws on important case studies, including experiments with children on objects and their interactions, 'false belief tasks', and the process by which children come to see other people, not just themselves, as purposive agents. He shows how these questions can illuminate fundamental debates in philosophy of mind concerning the mind's architecture, the explanatory power of representation, the social character of knowledge, and the nature of metacognitive feelings.

Additional features, such as a glossary and extensive bibliographic references, provide helpful tools for those coming to the subject for the first time.

1

Introduction

At the outset, we humans know nothing, or not very much.

Some time later, if things go well, we do know some things.

How does the transition occur? How do humans come to know about objects, actions and minds?

This question belongs to a family of questions about the origins of mind that philosophers have been asking for a while. In a beautiful myth, Plato suggests that the answer is recollection. Before we are born, in another world, we become acquainted with all the truths we will ever know. Then we are involved in an unfortunate traffic accident and fall to Earth, forgetting everything. But as we grow, we are sometimes able to recall parts of what we once knew. So it is by recollection that humans come to know about objects, actions and minds.¹

How else could this happen? Since Plato, philosophers and psychologists have offered other stories. Some hold that knowledge is in some sense present at birth, or else that the concepts which make knowledge possible are already present at birth. Others suggest that concepts and knowledge are acquired through sensory experience, through learning to act, through training in language or through social interaction. None of these bold, seductive ideas is supported by much evidence. They are too difficult to test, or perhaps not even precise enough to test. And when we look at particular domains of knowledge in detail—for instance, when we look at how humans come to know about minds—we will discover complexities that seem to be incompatible with any one of the stories. While it would be fun to tour nativism, empiricism and other big ideas about the developmental origins of human knowledge, we are unlikely to make much progress if the last couple of millennia are any guide to the future. Let’s try a different approach.

Start with the details. Take one domain of knowledge—knowledge of objects, say. What has been discovered about infants’ abilities in this domain, and about how knowledge of simple facts in this domain emerges in development? Pursuing this question leads directly to puzzling patterns of evidence. These puzzles in turn point to theoretical challenges requiring, often enough, broadly philosophical solutions. Identify those puzzles and distinguish candidate solutions. In the best case, one of the candidate solution’s predictions will turn out to be largely correct, and we will all have taken a tiny step towards understanding the developmental emergence of knowledge.

This book is a philosophical introduction to how, from earliest infancy, human minds develop and acquire knowledge. Drawing on discoveries in developmental psychology, it aims to introduce readers to findings, concepts and theories needed to explain the developing mind. But it parts company from developmental psychology in that it is written from a philosophical standpoint. As such, we will focus on puzzles that arise in investigations of how knowledge of objects, minds and actions develops. Attempting to solve these puzzles will require us to consider fundamental questions in the study of the mind. These comprise both architectural questions about modularity, core systems and dual process theories, as well as questions about the role of practical and inferential reasoning, mental representation, metacognition, belief, perception, innateness, mindreading and joint action.

1.1 Two breakthroughs

Can developmental philosophical psychology take us further than Plato got? Maybe. Two relatively recent scientific breakthroughs promise to shift thinking away from myths and closer to the minds and actions of actual humans. The first breakthrough concerns social interaction. It is the discovery that preverbal infants enjoy surprisingly rich social abilities. These may well facilitate the subsequent acquisition of linguistic abilities and enable the emergence of knowledge (as variously argued by several people, including, for example, Tomasello et al. 2005; Meltzoff 2007; Csibra and Gergely 2009).

A second breakthrough involves the use of increasingly sensitive—and sometimes controversial—methods to detect expectations without relying on subjects’ abilities to talk or act. These methods have revealed that, from the early months of life on, infants have sophisticated abilities to track physical objects and their causal interactions, actions, mental states and more besides (for example, Spelke 1990; Baillargeon, Scott and He 2010). The mental states underpinning these abilities surely play a role in the emergence of knowledge.

Although each of these breakthroughs has been extensively discussed, they are rarely considered together. There may be an opportunity to make progress by combining the breakthroughs. My guess is that development is like climate change in one respect. Lots of different mechanisms are simultaneously at work, and many interact with each other. To make progress, we need to identify various mechanisms and understand their interactions. This book is an attempt to show, by closely following what has been discovered so far, that understanding the emergence in development of knowledge will eventually require somehow bringing together the abilities that infants manifest in the very first months of life concerning physical objects, minds and actions and their abilities to act jointly with those around them.

Before we get to the details, let me outline a little theoretical background.

1.2 Knowledge

The question we face—How do humans come to know about objects, actions and minds?—is a question about knowledge. Answering this question depends on discovering when humans come to know what. And making these discoveries in turn depends on being able to distinguish really knowing something from merely manifesting some symptoms associated with knowledge.

Imagine an infant who seems to want a toy and, when given the chance, immediately searches for it in exactly the place it was lost. She is acting as if she knew where it was lost, so exhibiting a symptom of knowledge. But does she really know? Maybe not. If the state underlying her searching actions were locked to an arbitrarily limited range of actions, say, then it would not be knowledge. So what is distinctive of really knowing something?

In what follows, I take for granted that knowledge is constitutively linked to practical reasoning and to inference. Let me explain. Knowledge is the kind of thing that can typically influence how you act when you act purposively, and it is the kind of thing that can influence purposive actions in any domain at all. Knowledge is also the kind of thing that you can sometimes arrive at by inference, and which can enable you to make new inferences in any domain at all. A state that is not linked to practical reasoning and to inference in these ways is not knowledge.

I also take for granted that knowledge states are inferentially integrated with other attitudes like beliefs, desires and intentions. This does not mean, of course, that people are invariably rational. Instead the idea is this. One striking fact about many humans is that, at times, they achieve a kind of harmony in what they know, believe, intend, desire and do. Sometimes, some of their thoughts and actions come to be approximately rationally related. Now it may be that this is rare, or even highly unusual, in humans. But however infrequent, since it is not an accidental occurrence, it stands in need of explanation. And the explanation, or part of it, involves processes of practical reasoning and inference. In saying that knowledge states are inferentially integrated with other attitudes like beliefs, desires and intentions, part of what I mean is that these they can (albeit perhaps rarely) come to be non-accidentally related in ways that are approximately rational thanks to processes of inference and practical reasoning.

But there is more to being inferentially integrated. When humans are functioning at their best, they characteristically bring thoughts and actions into harmony unless something prevents them. This is the other part of what I mean by saying that knowledge states, beliefs and the rest are inferentially integrated: in the absence of obstacles such as time pressure, distraction, motivations to be irrational, self-deception or exhaustion, approximately rational harmony will characteristically be maintained among currently active knowledge states, intentions and other attitudes.²

These facts about knowledge are almost too simple to mention. But they will turn out to be critical for distinguishing really knowing something from merely manifesting some symptoms associated with knowledge. The hypothesis that someone knows something generates the prediction that, in the absence of obstacles, she can manifest this knowledge in almost any situation.

If it is locked to an arbitrarily limited range of actions, or if it used in response to an arbitrarily limited range of events, then it is not knowledge.

1.3 A crude picture of the mind

Knowledge and the other attitudes contrast with perceptual representations. These are those postulated by scientific theories to explain processes such as edge detection or the computation of relative distances (see Palmer 1999, for an introduction).

Knowledge also contrasts with motor representation, which is less familiar but will be important later. Imagine being in a coffee shop where the servers use little round trays. You are watching the servers as they remove items from trays they are carrying around. As they lift a mug from a tray, the tray remains stable. How do the servers do this? They are not deliberating about the forces involved (or not usually). But nor is this a mindless physiological change. Instead it involves anticipation of the effects of their own actions, as you can discover by removing an item from the tray when a server is not looking—this can easily cause them to drop everything on the tray. Anticipatory control of action is one of things motor representations enable (see Rosenbaum 2010, for an introduction). They are those representations of actual, possible, imagined, or observed actions and their effects which are characteristically involved in preparing, performing and monitoring sequences of small actions such as grasping, transporting and placing a mug.

Unlike knowledge states, perceptual and motor representations are plausibly not inferentially integrated with beliefs, desires, intentions and other attitudes. You can have perceptual experiences of the relative sizes, colours or locations of objects which are incompatible with what you know and believe. Such cases—illusions—are not due to you simply failing to make an inference. Nor are they symptoms of self-deception or a divided mind. They are consequences of the fact that perceptual processes are, to an interesting extent, distinct from the inferential processes in which knowledge states feature. This is why there are illusions, and, more generally, why a single event can result in multiple incompatible representations.³

Let us take as our starting point a crude but quite standard picture of the adult mind. The mind comprises at least three kinds of states and processes:

1 epistemic (that is, knowledge-related);

2 motoric;

3 perceptual.

The three kinds of processes are to an interesting extent distinct from each other, and the three kinds of states are not inferentially integrated in the above sense.

When we explore recent discoveries about infants’ abilities, we will see that they do not fit neatly with this crude picture of the mind. They appear to be in states which are not epistemic, not motoric and not perceptual. This will be a key theme in the following chapters: understanding the developmental emergence of knowledge requires identifying states which do not fit neatly into the crude picture of the mind. One of the major unresolved challenges is finding a good way to revise the crude picture, one that can generate novel predictions.

1.4 Core knowledge

The need to identify states which do not fit neatly into the crude picture of the mind has been discussed by Davidson, although in his view the need arises for philosophical reasons rather than as a consequence of any scientific discoveries. He writes:

The difficulty in describing the emergence of mental phenomena is a conceptual problem … In … the evolution of thought in an individual, there is a stage at which there is no thought followed by a subsequent stage at which there is thought. To describe the emergence of thought would be to describe the process which leads from the first to the second of these stages. What we lack is a satisfactory vocabulary for describing the intermediate steps.

(Davidson 2001, 127)

Where Davidson uses the word ‘thought’, I am using ‘knowledge’. This difference is unimportant here (because of inferential integration).

Davidson goes on to say that the problem cannot be solved: ‘If you want to describe what is going on in the head of the child when it has a few words which it utters in appropriate situations, you will fail’ (2001: 127–8).

But will we fail? Since describing ‘what is going on in the head of the child’ is the focus of much developmental psychology, perhaps there are some ideas that will help.

One key idea from developmental psychology is that of core knowledge (Spelke et al. 1992; Carey and Spelke 1996; Spelke 2000). As Carey puts it, the central claim is this: ‘there is a third type of conceptual structure, dubbed “core knowledge” … that differs systematically from both sensory/perceptual representation[s] … and … knowledge’ (2009, 10; my emphasis). Core knowledge states feature in core systems, which are ‘largely innate, encapsulated, unchanging, arising from phylogenetically old systems, and built upon the output of innate perceptual analyzers’ (Carey and Spelke 1996, 520). For many domains of knowledge, the best-supported developmental theories postulate the existence of a core system as something more primitive than knowledge. These core systems are thought to provide a basis for the developmental emergence of knowledge.

I emphasized ‘third type’ in the quote just above because core knowledge is supposed to be a state distinct from knowledge (and belief). In terms of the abov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• PART I: Physical objects
• Interlude on innateness
• PART II: Minds and actions
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index