Annie Paul and Alison Gopnik discuss Gopnik’s book, the Philosophical Baby.

This is the first entry in a dialogue about Alison Gopnik's new book, The Philosophical Baby, between Gopnik and Annie Murphy Paul. Read the second entry here.

Dear Alison,

I was halfway through your new book, The Philosophical Baby, when I heard a strange noise on the monitor that keeps me apprised of the doings of my own five-month-old baby, Gus. I hurried down the hallway and burst into Gus’s room to find that the worrisome sound was . . . laughing. Following his gaze, I saw that the source of his chortling mirth was the rotating fan on the ceiling.

My first reaction was to wonder at how sweetly strange children are, how different these little creatures seem from adults. So many of the things we find appealing or adorable about them—the way they mispronounce words, or misunderstand situations—have to do with the ways they’re unlike us. And it’s a good thing, too: If they were more like grownups, we’d be far less willing to cook their meals and clean up their messes and generally turn our perfectly fine pre-child lives upside down for them.

My second thought upon discovering the reason for Gus’s laugh riot was less generous: I wondered, briefly, about his intelligence. Children are so easily entertained by things that adults find mundane (except, of course, on long car trips) that it’s easy to condescend to their mental capacities, to assume that their understanding and even their perceptions of the world are far inferior to our own.

This has been the traditional view of children from the disciplines of psychology and philosophy, you tell us, when these fields have bothered to consider children at all. But this state of affairs is changing. “In the last thirty years, there’s been a revolution in our scientific understanding of babies and young children,” you write. “We used to think that babies and young children were irrational, egocentric, and amoral. Their thinking and experience were concrete, immediate, and limited. In fact, psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered that babies not only learn more, but imagine more, care more, and experience more than we would ever have thought possible.”

Experiments carried out by your lab at the University of California, Berkeley, and by other developmental psychologists all over the world are providing intriguing new insights into the minds of these little people, and also into the answers to some classic big questions—about, as your subtitle puts it, “truth, love, and the meaning of life.” The research shows that my first response to Gus’s giggle fit was right on: Children are different from adults, so different that we might well think of the two age groups as “different forms of Homo sapiens.” One such difference you describe helps me make sense of the humor Gus found in the ceiling fan.

By the time people reach adulthood, you say, they are experts at focusing their attention on a single task and suppressing (or “inhibiting”) distractions that might prevent them from getting that task done. We decide to put on our shoes, and we do it. Children, however, are driven less by such internal agendas and more by the stimuli that their environments provide at every turn. My older son, three-year-old Teddy, may well start out with the idea of putting on his shoes—but then he notices the really cool sound that the Velcro straps make when he opens and closes them a few dozen times, and now that he’s down here on the floor, he sees that plastic dinosaur he’s been looking for, under the bed...

Tags: alison gopnik, annie paul, babies, peter singer, philosophy, psychology, the philosophical baby

Annie Murphy Paul is at work on a book about changing social and scientific notions of pregnancy.

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