The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
by Alison Gopnik
10 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life:
Toddlers turn everything from blocks to shoes to bowls of cereal into means of transportation by the simple expedient of saying “brrmbrrm” and pushing them along the floor.
All these differences between children and adults
There is another possibly apocryphal story about the philosopher Jerry Fodor (he’s the Yogi Berra of philosophy). Someone asked what his stream of consciousness was like as he wrote philosophy. His reply was that it mostly said, “Come on, Jerry, you can do it, Jerry, keep going, Jerry.
Our brains are designed to arrive at an accurate picture of the world, and to use that accurate picture to act on the world effectively, at least overall and in the long run. The same computational and neurological capacities that let us make discoveries about physics or biology also let us make discoveries about love.
those abilities lead children to create imaginary friends—and lead grown-ups to create plays and novels. Imagining how they could be different actually lets children, and adults, become different. We can turn ourselves into our imaginary alter egos.
raising children is one of the most significant, meaningful, and profound experiences of their lives. Is this just an evolutionary illusion, a trick to make us keep on reproducing? I’ll argue that it’s the real thing, that children really do put us in touch with truth, beauty, and meaning.
I’ll show that babies, like scientists, use statistics and experiments to learn about the world.
In developmental psychology we talk breezily about the big differences between nine-month-olds’ and twelve-month-olds’ conceptions of objects, or three-year-olds’ and four-year-olds’ understanding of minds. But what this means is that in just a few months, these children have completely changed their minds about what the world is like. Imagine that your world-view in September was totally different from what it was in June, and then completely changed again by Christmas. Or imagine that your most basic beliefs would be entirely transformed between 2009 and 2010, and then again by 2012. Really flexible and innovative adults might change their minds this way two or three times in a lifetime.
Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia discovered a database of very poor twins. All the earlier twin studies involved middle-class children. It turns out that IQ is far more heritable for rich children than for poor children. In fact, for poor children the effect of genes on IQ almost disappears—there is little correlation between how smart parents are and how smart their children are, and identical twins’ IQ is no more similar than that of fraternal twins. So it seems that poor children’s IQ is less affected by their genes than rich children’s IQ. But how can that be? Surely poverty can’t change your DNA? The answer is that small variations in a poor child’s environment—going to a better or worse school, for example—make a big difference to their IQ. Those differences swamp any genetic differences. Rich children are generally already going to good schools, so the differences between them are more likely to reflect genetic variation. Notoriously, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve suggested that the heritability of IQ meant that programs such as Head Start were futile. But, in fact, the new heritability results lead to just the opposite conclusion: changing a poor child’s environment can have enormous effects.
In a groundbreaking study, Judith Smetana presented children as young as two and a half with simple, everyday scenarios. In some of the stories children broke a preschool rule—they didn’t put their clothes in the cubby or they talked at naptime. In others, they caused real physical or psychological harm to another child, by hitting, teasing, or stealing a snack. Smetana asked the children how bad the transgressions were, and whether they deserved punishment. But, most important, she asked whether the actions would be OK if the rules were different or if they took place in a school with different rules. Would it be OK to talk at naptime if the teachers all said so? Would it be OK to hit another child if the teachers all said so? Even the youngest children differentiated between rules and harm. Children thought that breaking rules and causing harm were both bad, but that causing harm was a lot worse. They also said that the rules could be changed or might not apply at a different school, but they insisted that causing harm would always be wrong, no matter what the rules said or where you were. Children made similar judgments about actual incidents that had happened in the preschool, not just hypothetical cases. And when you looked at the natural interactions in the playground you saw much the same pattern. Children reacted differently to harm and rulebreaking. Children in the Virgin Islands, South Korea, and Colombia behaved like American children. Poignantly, even abused children thought that hurting someone was intrinsically wrong. These children had seen their own parents cause harm, but they knew how much it hurt, and thought it was wrong.
