What do you think?
Rate this book
The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
In the last decade there has been a revolution in our understanding of the minds of infants and young children. We used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Now Alison Gopnik ― a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother ― explains the cutting-edge scientific and psychological research that has revealed that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined. And there is good reason to believe that babies are actually smarter, more thoughtful, and more conscious than adults. In a lively and accessible tour of the groundbreaking new psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical developments, Gopnik offers new insight into how babies see the world, and in turn promotes a deeper appreciation for the role of parents in shaping the lives of their children.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
291 people are currently reading
4447 people want to read
About the author
Alison Gopnik
16 books218 followersAlison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. Her honors include a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada University Research Fellowship, an Osher Visiting Scientist Fellowship at the Exploratorium, a Center for the Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship, and a Moore Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children’s learning and development and was the first to argue that children’s minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. She was one of the founders of the study of "theory of mind", illuminating how children come to understand the minds of others, and she formulated the "theory theory", the idea that children’s learn in the same way that scientists do.
She is the author of over 100 articles and several books including "Words, thoughts and theories" (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff), MIT Press, 1997, "The Scientist in the Crib" (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl) William Morrow, 1999, and the just published "The Philosophical Baby; What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life" Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009. "The Scientist in the Crib" was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, was translated into 20 languages and was enthusiastically reviewed in Science, The New Yorker, the Washington Post and The New York Review of Books (among others). She has also written for Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, and Slate.
She has spoken extensively on children’s minds including keynote speeches to political organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Development, children’s advocacy organizations including Parents as Teachers and Zero to Three, museums including The Exploratorium, The Chicago Children’s Museum, and the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and science organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The American Psychological Association, the Association of Psychological Science, and the American Philosophical Association. She has also appeared on Charlie Rose, Nova, and many NPR radio programs. She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California.
She is the author of over 100 articles and several books including "Words, thoughts and theories" (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff), MIT Press, 1997, "The Scientist in the Crib" (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl) William Morrow, 1999, and the just published "The Philosophical Baby; What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life" Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009. "The Scientist in the Crib" was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, was translated into 20 languages and was enthusiastically reviewed in Science, The New Yorker, the Washington Post and The New York Review of Books (among others). She has also written for Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, and Slate.
She has spoken extensively on children’s minds including keynote speeches to political organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Development, children’s advocacy organizations including Parents as Teachers and Zero to Three, museums including The Exploratorium, The Chicago Children’s Museum, and the Bay Area Discovery Museum, and science organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The American Psychological Association, the Association of Psychological Science, and the American Philosophical Association. She has also appeared on Charlie Rose, Nova, and many NPR radio programs. She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 183 reviews
July 15, 2013
I gave this two stars, though three might have been ok. Gopnik's book is a collection of some of the latest science on cognition; some involving children, some adults, some non-human primates, and some other animals. What the book fails to do is deliver on the title; the book should be titled, "Summary of current cognition studies" and include the following warning: "Note that chapters are padded and 75% of the writing is superfluous." This could have been edited down into something much more concise and informative.
December 4, 2009
The title makes this sound a lot squishier than what it is, which is a actually a behavioral and psychological look at early child-hood development and thinking. The last chapter, about ethics, is a bit less interesting, as Gopnik drifts into her own personal musings, but when she sticks to the science and studies, its fascinating.
October 5, 2015
Subtitle: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. Believe it or not, despite that somewhat saccharine subtitle, this is a book filled with a lot of hard science.
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley, and she has done her share of non-saccharine work. For example, she has published results on Bayesian networks. So, while she clearly finds babies interesting for all the normal adult-woman-and-mother kinds of reasons (and is not above using examples from her own experience as a mother where it helps to clarify the concepts she's discussing), she has also managed to find a way to engage the more analytical part of her brain. Most of us wonder, at some time or another, what is really going on in the minds of babies. Dr. Gopnik is one of those researchers who has actually worked on finding out.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in this book. One is the idea that children aren't just more innovative, exploratory, and experimental than adults as a stage on the way to growing up, but rather that our species has achieved a division of labor between the generations. In other words, children are our species' R&D department. The extended dependency of our species allows us to spend years trying out new (and mostly rubbish) ideas, before we settle down to being productive and relatively predictable. Seen in this light, the inability of children to remain focused and productive is not a bug (that they grow out of), it's a feature (that they lose when they change from R&D to production), and if you did find a way to take it away you would achieve the same result as any short-term CEO who cuts funding for the R&D department: more productive in the short term, but an inability to innovate in the long term. So, when your kid cannot concentrate on getting the chores done without getting distracted, even when it's to their advantage to just do it and get it over with, relax. Getting distracted and trying other things not in the plan is what children are supposed to be doing.
Gopnik is also one of those researchers who has worked her way into a position where she is able to confuse babies for a living. This, I think, has got to be a great gig. Essentially, it all began when a researcher (I am not sure exactly who) came upon the idea of timing exactly how long babies look at something, as a measure of how unexpected it was to them. If things disappear, or if stuffed animals act nice towards something that's mean to them, do babies find that odd, and stare at it longer? This is a way of finding out what babies' expectations are about the world, when they are far too young to allow the method of just asking them (and one wonders if with adults it might even be a preferable method since we often aren't very honest about what our beliefs and expectations are).
So, some of the things which researchers (or, more accurately, theorists) in 19th and early 20th century psychology said about the minds of babies, turns out to be demonstrably false. For example, they do have expectations about how physics works (things get from here to there by moving through all the points in between, for example, not by teleporting), how living things work (if a stuffed animal or animated blob is helpful now, it is more likely to be helpful, not mean, later), and even a theory of mind (other living things have goals, and it is surprising to a baby if the hand which was trying to get the teddy bear, after the teddy bear and the block switch places, continues to reach towards the old spot rather than reaching towards the new spot with the teddy bear in it). I picture researchers like Gopnik brainstorming new ways to confuse babies, and then timing exactly how long the babies look confusedly at whatever just happened. I find confused babies hilarious, which perhaps means I am a bad person, so this sounds to me like something one would pay to do, rather than something you could get paid for. But, I'm glad Gopnik and others have found a way to do it, as the results they come back with have reinforced in many ways that we are not born blank slates, but rather come into the world with certain expectations about it and certain pre-installed algorithms for figuring out the parts that will be different from one culture to another.
Gopnik also makes an interesting point about travel: it is, in her educated opinion, the closest thing we can get to re-experiencing the consciousness of an infant. I have noticed myself that simple acts such as going to the grocery store are exciting and sometimes almost overstimulating when you're in a foreign country. If Gopnik is right, then this is an approximation of what life is like as a baby (for whom, after all, every country is a new country).
This and more is the reason why Gopnik's book is an intriguing read, even if you're not really interested in babies at all. Babies can function for us as an interesting counter-example, when we try to figure out how our own minds work. If you're interested in that, you should be interested in this book.
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley, and she has done her share of non-saccharine work. For example, she has published results on Bayesian networks. So, while she clearly finds babies interesting for all the normal adult-woman-and-mother kinds of reasons (and is not above using examples from her own experience as a mother where it helps to clarify the concepts she's discussing), she has also managed to find a way to engage the more analytical part of her brain. Most of us wonder, at some time or another, what is really going on in the minds of babies. Dr. Gopnik is one of those researchers who has actually worked on finding out.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in this book. One is the idea that children aren't just more innovative, exploratory, and experimental than adults as a stage on the way to growing up, but rather that our species has achieved a division of labor between the generations. In other words, children are our species' R&D department. The extended dependency of our species allows us to spend years trying out new (and mostly rubbish) ideas, before we settle down to being productive and relatively predictable. Seen in this light, the inability of children to remain focused and productive is not a bug (that they grow out of), it's a feature (that they lose when they change from R&D to production), and if you did find a way to take it away you would achieve the same result as any short-term CEO who cuts funding for the R&D department: more productive in the short term, but an inability to innovate in the long term. So, when your kid cannot concentrate on getting the chores done without getting distracted, even when it's to their advantage to just do it and get it over with, relax. Getting distracted and trying other things not in the plan is what children are supposed to be doing.
Gopnik is also one of those researchers who has worked her way into a position where she is able to confuse babies for a living. This, I think, has got to be a great gig. Essentially, it all began when a researcher (I am not sure exactly who) came upon the idea of timing exactly how long babies look at something, as a measure of how unexpected it was to them. If things disappear, or if stuffed animals act nice towards something that's mean to them, do babies find that odd, and stare at it longer? This is a way of finding out what babies' expectations are about the world, when they are far too young to allow the method of just asking them (and one wonders if with adults it might even be a preferable method since we often aren't very honest about what our beliefs and expectations are).
So, some of the things which researchers (or, more accurately, theorists) in 19th and early 20th century psychology said about the minds of babies, turns out to be demonstrably false. For example, they do have expectations about how physics works (things get from here to there by moving through all the points in between, for example, not by teleporting), how living things work (if a stuffed animal or animated blob is helpful now, it is more likely to be helpful, not mean, later), and even a theory of mind (other living things have goals, and it is surprising to a baby if the hand which was trying to get the teddy bear, after the teddy bear and the block switch places, continues to reach towards the old spot rather than reaching towards the new spot with the teddy bear in it). I picture researchers like Gopnik brainstorming new ways to confuse babies, and then timing exactly how long the babies look confusedly at whatever just happened. I find confused babies hilarious, which perhaps means I am a bad person, so this sounds to me like something one would pay to do, rather than something you could get paid for. But, I'm glad Gopnik and others have found a way to do it, as the results they come back with have reinforced in many ways that we are not born blank slates, but rather come into the world with certain expectations about it and certain pre-installed algorithms for figuring out the parts that will be different from one culture to another.
Gopnik also makes an interesting point about travel: it is, in her educated opinion, the closest thing we can get to re-experiencing the consciousness of an infant. I have noticed myself that simple acts such as going to the grocery store are exciting and sometimes almost overstimulating when you're in a foreign country. If Gopnik is right, then this is an approximation of what life is like as a baby (for whom, after all, every country is a new country).
This and more is the reason why Gopnik's book is an intriguing read, even if you're not really interested in babies at all. Babies can function for us as an interesting counter-example, when we try to figure out how our own minds work. If you're interested in that, you should be interested in this book.
October 12, 2009
MCL. I enjoyed reading about how studies on babies are done. Having read statements like "babies prefer red" I always wanted to know how they came to that conclusion. In this case, babies look for a longer length of time at things that are unfamiliar or novel.
Good reminder that baby brains are different from those of adults. Little ones have what Gopnik calls "lantern consciousness" rather than the spotlight attention adults have. Everything is new and interesting and worth paying attention to, which makes focus and completion of a task so difficult.
My mystifying quote from the author that has just spent 200 pages arguing that babies are so much more complex than we give them credit for:
"Still, historically, most moral advances widen the circle of our moral concern. Within the United States the legal system has gradually evolved to give full moral status to women, African Americans, and most recently gays and lesbians. Internationally, the human rights movement attempts to widen the legal circle to everyone in the world. The animal rights movement is on the current cutting edge of this widening of concern, arguing that moral status should be extended beyond human beings themselves." And yet, we refrain from giving full moral status to helpless babies. Might the unborn have more to them that we realize?
Good reminder that baby brains are different from those of adults. Little ones have what Gopnik calls "lantern consciousness" rather than the spotlight attention adults have. Everything is new and interesting and worth paying attention to, which makes focus and completion of a task so difficult.
My mystifying quote from the author that has just spent 200 pages arguing that babies are so much more complex than we give them credit for:
"Still, historically, most moral advances widen the circle of our moral concern. Within the United States the legal system has gradually evolved to give full moral status to women, African Americans, and most recently gays and lesbians. Internationally, the human rights movement attempts to widen the legal circle to everyone in the world. The animal rights movement is on the current cutting edge of this widening of concern, arguing that moral status should be extended beyond human beings themselves." And yet, we refrain from giving full moral status to helpless babies. Might the unborn have more to them that we realize?
April 27, 2024
"A ONE-MONTH-OLD STARES at her mother’s face with fixed, brow-wrinkling concentration, and suddenly produces a beatific smile. Surely she must see her mother and feel love, but what are seeing and feeling like for her?"
The Philosophical Baby was an interesting look into the development and lives of babies as well as young children. Unfortunately, I felt that the the overall presentation of the book was a bit flat. More below. The book is my second from the author, after her 1999 book The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind.
Author Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alison Gopnik:
As anyone who's had kids can tell you; young children and babies see the world in complex ways. They develop preferences, proclivities, and even their own little personality traits from quite a young age. In this book, Gopnik examines what is known scientifically about this transformative period.
The book opens with a decent introduction that was fairly interesting and engaging. Unfortunately, I did not find the writing style in the rest of the book to be on par with the intro. Although there is a quite a lot of interesting info here, the writing takes too many long-winded tangents for my tastes. I am admittedly very picky about how readable my books are, and this one fell a bit short for me...
The quote from the start of this review continues below:
In this short quote, she mentions how much of the previous orthodoxy around childhood cognition is being reexamined:
Some more of what Gopnik covers here includes:
• Counterfactuals
• Imaginary companions
• Escaping Plato’s Cave: HOW CHILDREN, SCIENTISTS, AND COMPUTERS DISCOVER THE TRUTH
• What Is It Like to Be a Baby?
• Who Am I? MEMORY, SELF, AND THE BABBLING STREAM
• Heraclitus’ River and the Romanian Orphans: HOW DOES OUR EARLY LIFE SHAPE OUR LATER LIFE?
• Learning to Love: ATTACHMENT AND IDENTITY
• Love and Law: THE ORIGINS OF MORALITY
• Mirror neurons
• Babies and the Meaning of Life
********************
The Philosophical Baby was an interesting book, but I felt the writing was a bit slow for my finicky tastes. Your mileage may vary, so I would still recommend it.
3 stars.
The Philosophical Baby was an interesting look into the development and lives of babies as well as young children. Unfortunately, I felt that the the overall presentation of the book was a bit flat. More below. The book is my second from the author, after her 1999 book The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind.
Author Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Alison Gopnik:
As anyone who's had kids can tell you; young children and babies see the world in complex ways. They develop preferences, proclivities, and even their own little personality traits from quite a young age. In this book, Gopnik examines what is known scientifically about this transformative period.
The book opens with a decent introduction that was fairly interesting and engaging. Unfortunately, I did not find the writing style in the rest of the book to be on par with the intro. Although there is a quite a lot of interesting info here, the writing takes too many long-winded tangents for my tastes. I am admittedly very picky about how readable my books are, and this one fell a bit short for me...
The quote from the start of this review continues below:
"...What is it like to be a baby? A two-year-old offers a hungry-looking stranger a half-chewed lollipop. Could a child this young already feel empathy and be altruistic? A three-year-old announces that she will come to dinner only if a place is laid for the Babies, the tiny purple-haired twins who live in her pocket and eat flowers for breakfast. How could she believe so profoundly in something that is just a figment of her own imagination? And how could she dream up such remarkable creatures? A five-year-old discovers, with the help of a goldfish, that death is irreversible. How could a child who can’t yet read or add uncover deep, hard truths about mortality? The one month- old turns into the two-year-old and then the three-year-old and the five-year-old and eventually, miraculously, turns into a mother with children of her own. How could all these utterly different creatures be the same person? All of us once were children and most of us will become parents— we have all asked these sorts of questions."
In this short quote, she mentions how much of the previous orthodoxy around childhood cognition is being reexamined:
"New scientific research and philosophical thinking have both illuminated and deepened the mystery. In the last thirty years, there’s been a revolution in our scientific understanding of babies and young children. 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. In some ways, young children are actually smarter, more imaginative, more caring, and even more conscious than adults are..."
Some more of what Gopnik covers here includes:
• Counterfactuals
• Imaginary companions
• Escaping Plato’s Cave: HOW CHILDREN, SCIENTISTS, AND COMPUTERS DISCOVER THE TRUTH
• What Is It Like to Be a Baby?
• Who Am I? MEMORY, SELF, AND THE BABBLING STREAM
• Heraclitus’ River and the Romanian Orphans: HOW DOES OUR EARLY LIFE SHAPE OUR LATER LIFE?
• Learning to Love: ATTACHMENT AND IDENTITY
• Love and Law: THE ORIGINS OF MORALITY
• Mirror neurons
• Babies and the Meaning of Life
********************
The Philosophical Baby was an interesting book, but I felt the writing was a bit slow for my finicky tastes. Your mileage may vary, so I would still recommend it.
3 stars.
August 18, 2009
I was excited to read this - but found it not as engaging as I hoped. Besides the obvious interest I have because of my 5.5 month old - there were only a few chapters that really felt alive. Made me think of Malcolm Gladwell and how his writing is so inviting and stimulating. Gopnik has a very interesting topic - but doesn't bring it home the way she could have. Of course some good info though on young children and consciousness - lantern vs. flashlight and how they learn.
November 3, 2023
kannski smá on the nose að ég hafi verið að lesa bók sem heitir þetta en hey. whatcha gonna do about it. mjög forvitnileg bók – geggjaðar sögur, dæmi um tilraunir – situr endalaust í mér kaflinn um ímyndaða vini. mæli eindregið með. ætla í meira eftir gopnik.
September 14, 2024
Upper year lit course with Costco pop psych as assigned reading, you say?
July 25, 2025
Quite good, with a lot of interesting ideas around what makes you human.
November 29, 2022
I am glad I read this book. The childhood period for humans is quite unique and the book describes the incredible richness of behavior exhibited by young children and how it affects their metamorphosis into adults. Babies can pick up statistical correlations between words, learn causal models of the world, learn to interact with people and things, etc.
The book also outlines the change in our outlook on human childhood. Early research considered it a long unproductive time, especially compared with other animal children, who, within minutes of being born, are running around or, within days, are helping their parents hunt. AG tries to make a case that this protracted period of immaturity is intimately tied to what sets humans apart---the ability to learn to do anything. And learning takes time. It is enabled by a societal culture of extended care of young children till their mental models are developed enough to take on the world by themselves.
Alison Gopnik's passion for child development psychology shows in her writing. Her concern and care for children, both the ones she works with and her own, is also apparent. Despite AG repeatedly denying giving any parenting advice in the book, I took multiple action items from the book. And thanks to the book, my appreciation of my parents increased for the environment they created for me growing up (I turned out quite well, don't you think :P).
I wish the name was different, though. It's too grandiose and cannot be satisfactorily tested scientifically. Aside from that, I liked the book and would highly recommend it.
The book also outlines the change in our outlook on human childhood. Early research considered it a long unproductive time, especially compared with other animal children, who, within minutes of being born, are running around or, within days, are helping their parents hunt. AG tries to make a case that this protracted period of immaturity is intimately tied to what sets humans apart---the ability to learn to do anything. And learning takes time. It is enabled by a societal culture of extended care of young children till their mental models are developed enough to take on the world by themselves.
Alison Gopnik's passion for child development psychology shows in her writing. Her concern and care for children, both the ones she works with and her own, is also apparent. Despite AG repeatedly denying giving any parenting advice in the book, I took multiple action items from the book. And thanks to the book, my appreciation of my parents increased for the environment they created for me growing up (I turned out quite well, don't you think :P).
Nothing in this book will help parents get their children to sleep or send them to a good college or guarantee them a happy adult life. But I hope it will help parents, and people who aren't parents too, to appreciate the richness and significance of childhood in a new way."The book fulfilled its objective for me!
I wish the name was different, though. It's too grandiose and cannot be satisfactorily tested scientifically. Aside from that, I liked the book and would highly recommend it.
July 25, 2023
Saggio di grande portata grazie all'utilizzazione del metodo scientifico e alle nuove metodiche d'indagine dell'attività cerebrale per capire e approfondire le fasi dell'infanzia. Gradevole e alla portata anche dei non-addetti ai lavori. L'umanità impara a rigenerarsi e progredire dalla propria prole. "The sense of magical possibility that is so vivid in children is also at the root of much that is real and important about our lives."
January 18, 2020
Good insights that are based on academic findings. Gopnik's work helped me consider the unique stages of consciousness that children pass through. Interactions with children will not be the same for me.
June 9, 2018
As a book that proclaims to offer a new view of philosophical ideas about consciousness, identity, morality, and meaning using new baby research, Alison Gopnick’s The Philosophical Baby fails to deliver on its promise. Disappointingly, this book offers only a cursory treatment of these philosophical ideas. What Gopnick does offer, however, is a window into exciting new research on baby cognition, learning, and socialization. The best parts are those that use research findings to paint a detailed picture of what it’s like to be a baby. (“What it’s Like to be a Baby”, reminiscent of the famous 1974 paper on consciousness by Thomas Nagel, would have been a more apt title for this book than its current one.) As such, parents hoping to better understand the inner lives of their little ones may find The Philosophical Baby a worthwhile read. Those looking for a highbrow academic work that successfully extrapolates these findings into the philosophical realm, on the other hand, are likely to be disappointed.
April 14, 2010
I was intrigued -- and skeptical -- of Gopnik's book when I read the reviews. Babies are "more conscious" than adults?! Gopnik's actual treaties is more nuanced and valid than the reviews led me to believe: rather than equate "consciousness" with whatever appears in the spotlight of attention, as many people implicitly theorize, Gopnik outlines how consciousness itself is a variegated, nuanced phenomenon that evolves, perhaps (but not necessarily) inversely, with the tandem development of focused attention. The philosophical baby is fascinating and impeccably researched and written. The discussion of counterfactual thought is particularly notable, not only in terms of child development but also as a means of understanding the "mature" cognitive arena.
May 5, 2011
Delightful. I read it because I heard Gopnik on the radio and she said that her research leads her to think that "Raising children isn't jus something women do in their spare time. It's what makes us human." I couldn't agree more.
November 5, 2016
The book fails to answer its title.
October 5, 2024
A common angle for scientific books about human nature is to show how we have been shaped by the world over evolutionary time periods. For example, it is thought that the development of uniquely human nature was heavily influenced by the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle we maintained throughout the Pleistocene. Humans living several tens of thousands of years in the past were thus likely very similar to modern humans in all the fundamentals (such as in their capacities to feel and learn in specific ways, their basic personalities, their phenomenological experiences, etc.). However, Alison Gopnik doesn’t appear to care about any of that. Rather than focusing on how the world has shaped human nature, the author here flips the question to ask how human nature allows us to shape the world (and by “shape the world”, she appears to be referring to the impressive developments in human culture and technology). While this could certainly be an intriguing question, I don’t feel that the data she goes on to present are really getting at the answer, except in a very general, unsatisfying way: e.g., babies learn about the world using x (where “x” stands for some particular mental capacity that babies possess), and thus x is what helps allow humans to formulate new ideas that can change the world. Given her supplied thesis, I guess that I was expecting the author to discuss more specifically the nature of human creativity (using babies of course) and how this can help us understand the origin of novel ideas or the transformation of human culture. But, alas.
I also found some of her claims within this overall theme to be a bit platitudinous and hollow, particularly given that they are not exactly addressed by the data she later presents. For example, the part about children being the creative “brainstormers” and “discoverers” while adults are merely the unimaginative “implementers” of those discoveries - what is she talking about? As far as I know, the vast majority of human “advances” are invented by grownups. She also claims that Peter Singer’s arguments (i.e., that the granting of personhood to babies to the exclusion of some other animals, e.g., apes and whales, is untenable given the richer mental life of these animals) can be put to rest by research showing that babies are in some ways even more conscious than adult humans! She’s obviously equating very different types of consciousness. Sentience (i.e., awareness of the external world) possessed by babies and many other animals is very different from the sort of self-consciousness that Singer was talking about. And when discussing ethics, although she begins by arguing that human morality is principally learned as children observe the morality of others (as opposed to being innate), the data she then presents on the subject only speak to the young age at which mainstays of human morality (empathy, fairness, etc.) appear, not to the role of the environment in moral sense development. I’m all for celebrating the suppleness of human brain tissue, but I think Gopnik’s lofty ideals about the vast potential of the human mind to change (and thus be a force for change in the world) are here sometimes an awkward fit to the data she presents.
But to land on a more positive note, by far the most interesting parts of the book are in chapters 4-5, where she tones down some of the inspiration philosophy and focuses on how subjective conscious experience changes from early childhood into adulthood and why this shift might exist. The picture she paints (citing several clever studies) is one where babies (children < 3) are in the total enthrallment of that which is positioned right in front of them, in the present moment. There is no yesterday or tomorrow, no sense of a chronological self that ties together one’s past, present, and future, no inner dialogue or ceaseless mental cross-talk, no sense of an executive making plans (as illusory as that sense may be), no “me”. Although babies possess a memory, it is not intertwined with the sensation of being a traveler through life, and thus is not really “theirs” (babies appear not to distinguish their memories from someone else’s). Nor do they seem able to imagine a distinct future state with them in it. Much like other animals, babies possess a mind in which simply one idea after another pops in and then pops out (Gopnik suggests that this type of mental experience might be simulated by being in between states of waking and sleeping). However, unlike (most?) other animals, baby human minds are equipped to use these observations as the basis for mapping out causal relationships in the particular physical and social world they find themselves in. And because babies are not sidetracked from the present world by focused learning, goal execution, and streams of mental commentary (“spotlight” consciousness), they are remarkably effective at making impartial and diffuse observations concerning whatever is in their field of vision (“lantern” consciousness). For example, although three-year-olds were much worse at recalling focal objects shown to them than older children, they actually performed better than older children at recalling non-focal objects that were peripherally shown at the same time.
The evolution (or retention) of a distinct baby consciousness may have resulted from the fact that a certain level of basic knowledge about the local environment must be mastered before one can be expected to effectively establish a life strategy or self-concept that will be most advantageous within the physical and cultural situation one happens to have landed in. Another possibility is that fully developed self-consciousness requires language, which takes a few years to learn. Either way, there is a real (if gradual) metamorphosis in the fundamental nature of consciousness experienced by babies and adults. And these different types of consciousness accompany distinct divisions of labor between the two life stages. Babies are generalist observers with the capacity for learning the basic workings of the physical and social infrastructure of the local environment. Once this world is mapped out, they are then able to construct a “self” who can navigate and manipulate the environment “effectively” (I use quotes because some of us achieve this ideal better than others). Hyper-awareness of our daily surroundings is dialed down in adulthood so that we can often “autopilot” through the physical world, thus reserving limited mental resources for “important” functions such as planning and judging, second-guessing and self-loathing.
You would think that because we have all experienced baby consciousness, that this would supply us with some sort of deep appreciation for the mental life of other sentient animals whose conscious experiences are probably qualitatively similar to those of our past selves. That the very nature of that conscious experience precludes our ability to remember and process it is one of life’s bitter pills. Thus, baby consciousness remains a phenomenological mystery. When I recently saw a photograph of my two-year-old self looking up at me with a curious expression, my one thought was, “who the hell was that person?” I suppose I must forever wonder, but in fundamental ways, I'm not sure he was really “me”, not yet. But of course it’s still very interesting to speculate about. It is unfortunate that a lot of the mushy, bait-and-switch context and grandiose implications that Alison Gopnik employs in most of these chapters ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Oh well! With all the love, magic, and babies in the world, it doesn’t especially matter what I think anyway :)
I also found some of her claims within this overall theme to be a bit platitudinous and hollow, particularly given that they are not exactly addressed by the data she later presents. For example, the part about children being the creative “brainstormers” and “discoverers” while adults are merely the unimaginative “implementers” of those discoveries - what is she talking about? As far as I know, the vast majority of human “advances” are invented by grownups. She also claims that Peter Singer’s arguments (i.e., that the granting of personhood to babies to the exclusion of some other animals, e.g., apes and whales, is untenable given the richer mental life of these animals) can be put to rest by research showing that babies are in some ways even more conscious than adult humans! She’s obviously equating very different types of consciousness. Sentience (i.e., awareness of the external world) possessed by babies and many other animals is very different from the sort of self-consciousness that Singer was talking about. And when discussing ethics, although she begins by arguing that human morality is principally learned as children observe the morality of others (as opposed to being innate), the data she then presents on the subject only speak to the young age at which mainstays of human morality (empathy, fairness, etc.) appear, not to the role of the environment in moral sense development. I’m all for celebrating the suppleness of human brain tissue, but I think Gopnik’s lofty ideals about the vast potential of the human mind to change (and thus be a force for change in the world) are here sometimes an awkward fit to the data she presents.
But to land on a more positive note, by far the most interesting parts of the book are in chapters 4-5, where she tones down some of the inspiration philosophy and focuses on how subjective conscious experience changes from early childhood into adulthood and why this shift might exist. The picture she paints (citing several clever studies) is one where babies (children < 3) are in the total enthrallment of that which is positioned right in front of them, in the present moment. There is no yesterday or tomorrow, no sense of a chronological self that ties together one’s past, present, and future, no inner dialogue or ceaseless mental cross-talk, no sense of an executive making plans (as illusory as that sense may be), no “me”. Although babies possess a memory, it is not intertwined with the sensation of being a traveler through life, and thus is not really “theirs” (babies appear not to distinguish their memories from someone else’s). Nor do they seem able to imagine a distinct future state with them in it. Much like other animals, babies possess a mind in which simply one idea after another pops in and then pops out (Gopnik suggests that this type of mental experience might be simulated by being in between states of waking and sleeping). However, unlike (most?) other animals, baby human minds are equipped to use these observations as the basis for mapping out causal relationships in the particular physical and social world they find themselves in. And because babies are not sidetracked from the present world by focused learning, goal execution, and streams of mental commentary (“spotlight” consciousness), they are remarkably effective at making impartial and diffuse observations concerning whatever is in their field of vision (“lantern” consciousness). For example, although three-year-olds were much worse at recalling focal objects shown to them than older children, they actually performed better than older children at recalling non-focal objects that were peripherally shown at the same time.
The evolution (or retention) of a distinct baby consciousness may have resulted from the fact that a certain level of basic knowledge about the local environment must be mastered before one can be expected to effectively establish a life strategy or self-concept that will be most advantageous within the physical and cultural situation one happens to have landed in. Another possibility is that fully developed self-consciousness requires language, which takes a few years to learn. Either way, there is a real (if gradual) metamorphosis in the fundamental nature of consciousness experienced by babies and adults. And these different types of consciousness accompany distinct divisions of labor between the two life stages. Babies are generalist observers with the capacity for learning the basic workings of the physical and social infrastructure of the local environment. Once this world is mapped out, they are then able to construct a “self” who can navigate and manipulate the environment “effectively” (I use quotes because some of us achieve this ideal better than others). Hyper-awareness of our daily surroundings is dialed down in adulthood so that we can often “autopilot” through the physical world, thus reserving limited mental resources for “important” functions such as planning and judging, second-guessing and self-loathing.
You would think that because we have all experienced baby consciousness, that this would supply us with some sort of deep appreciation for the mental life of other sentient animals whose conscious experiences are probably qualitatively similar to those of our past selves. That the very nature of that conscious experience precludes our ability to remember and process it is one of life’s bitter pills. Thus, baby consciousness remains a phenomenological mystery. When I recently saw a photograph of my two-year-old self looking up at me with a curious expression, my one thought was, “who the hell was that person?” I suppose I must forever wonder, but in fundamental ways, I'm not sure he was really “me”, not yet. But of course it’s still very interesting to speculate about. It is unfortunate that a lot of the mushy, bait-and-switch context and grandiose implications that Alison Gopnik employs in most of these chapters ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Oh well! With all the love, magic, and babies in the world, it doesn’t especially matter what I think anyway :)
November 25, 2023
Lots of interesting ideas about the brains, minds and consciousness of infants and children in comparison to adults. Generally finding ways in which children's minds are different from and not just immature versions of adults' minds.
She suggests that philosophers have never paid any attention to children. This is an interesting charge. When she briefly discusses immortality (pp. 235-6), she gives an incoherent account of Plato's argument in the Phaedo, and then suggests (as an atheist herself) that children may be the (and the only) form immortality could take for us--living on in our offspring. But Plato's character Diotima makes this very point in the Symposium (207d): “Mortal nature seeks as far as possible to live forever and be immortal. And this is possible in one way only: by reproduction, because it always leaves behind a new young one in place of the old.”
In general she is a psychologist and not really a philosopher. But she does see how psychology can contribute to thinking about some philosophical issues.
She suggests that philosophers have never paid any attention to children. This is an interesting charge. When she briefly discusses immortality (pp. 235-6), she gives an incoherent account of Plato's argument in the Phaedo, and then suggests (as an atheist herself) that children may be the (and the only) form immortality could take for us--living on in our offspring. But Plato's character Diotima makes this very point in the Symposium (207d): “Mortal nature seeks as far as possible to live forever and be immortal. And this is possible in one way only: by reproduction, because it always leaves behind a new young one in place of the old.”
In general she is a psychologist and not really a philosopher. But she does see how psychology can contribute to thinking about some philosophical issues.
July 27, 2019
A wonderful book that shows how understanding of babies and philosophy are intimately connected. Studies on infants help us to learn a lot about the nature of human thought and experience. About how learning and development occur, and about different types of consciousness and the implications of those different consciousness. It even helps us get closer to answering the question of: what is consciousness.
March 18, 2023
so funny that my parents paid hundreds of dollars for me to take a course on a book i could've read and understood without the course AND IT DIDNT EVEN HELP WITH MY BREADTH REQUIREMENTS. LMAO I could've been taking english :( but like maybe its a good book for people who want to have kids or whatever. My dad would approve of me taking this course actually bc its like how to raise kids MRS degree course yuck
Read
August 30, 2023This is a really cool book to read as a soon-to-be parent. I think understanding the things Gopnik communicates about how baby brains work will enrich the experience of interacting with one a lot! (And hopefully help the difficult parts feel a little less so.) I tended to skim over the detailed descriptions of experiments to some degree, but overall I think she's a pretty accessible writer for a general interest reader.
December 2, 2021
An interesting read pondering what children aged 5 and under can understand and how, when it comes to concepts of self, others, and interpretation.
Worth a read if you are in an early childhood education field or wondering what your own child perceives of the world.
Worth a read if you are in an early childhood education field or wondering what your own child perceives of the world.
July 28, 2024
trying to learn how to be more baby
October 18, 2018
An interesting review of psychological research examining babies consciousness, learning, and understanding. I preferred the second half of the book that talked more about the applications/relevance of the research studies.
May 24, 2019
I got onto this title after listening to an episode of the Making Sense podcast that featured John Brockman's "Possible Minds" collection. Sam Harris interviewed George Dyson, Alison Gopnik and Stuart Russell, three of the contributors. Gopnik brought arresting depth, breadth and balance of perspective relative to the flanking interviews, which I found a bit shallow and breathless.
It took a while for me to get into the book. The title byline, "What children's minds tell us about truth, love and the meaning of life", had me worried that the text might drift into psychology and pseudoscience and it took me while to grow comfortable that this concern was misplaced. Gopnik's location of theory in biology is consistent and refreshing and she is precise even in locating the human ability to overcome primordial drives in biology itself. This is a point missed by the great many who fear that biological explanation of human behaviour will translate into destructive normative prescriptions.
My initial misgivings might partly explain why I found the later chapters (5 to 9) best, but on reflection, I suspect this is also testament to the book's sound structure. It's certainly not the case that the earlier chapters are uninteresting. Their descriptions of ingenious experiments designed to tease out the features of childhood apprehension are intriguing. Several novel concepts--novel to me, at least--are also delineated; in particular, the notion that a frugal prefrontal cortex spurs creative learning and imagination. Gopnik's discussions of the apprehension of the self and other minds, temporal continuity of the self, development of counterfactuals, the extraction of causal maps and the nature of childhood conscious experience and attention are all fascinating. As a bonus, I found it easy to relate Gopnik's explanations to personal observation of my own children.
Throughout, Gopnik's mappings of observed behaviours to evolutionary antecedents proceed in appropriately cautious fashion, steering clear of the flakey "just-so" stories that plague popular works of evolutionary psychology.
However, Chapter 3's excursion into Bayesian analysis is unsatisfyingly loose--the only blot on an otherwise pristine epistemological canvas. For people who correctly perceive that knowledge is only ever created through evolutionary processes, the appeal of Bayesianism is understandable, but it's a trap. Bayesian priors are a "turtles all the way down" concept. Upon close inspection, none of the phenomena Gopnik categorizes as Bayesian really are so. Fortunately, none of her other explanations hang on this architecture.
After a distinct rise in temperature in Chapter 5's discourse on consciousness, Chapter 6, "Heraclitus' river and the Romanian orphans", gets positively hot, containing a fascinating elaboration of the intricate relation between childhood and adulthood and the first intellectually satisfying analysis of the impact of parents on children that I've come across. Chapter 7's exploration of pair-bonding and allomothering is similarly revelatory, and the importance of the groundwork of the earlier chapters becomes clear.
Then comes Chapter 8, which is ultimately my reason for assigning a fifth star. "Love and law: The origins of morality" is packed with fine reasoning, presenting a fascinating take on nativism, empathy, the golden rule, rules and conventions, utilitarianism, deontology and out-groups. The architecture of the book becomes clear as lightbulbs go on and the cathedral is seen for the bricks.
Chapter 9 harkens back to the title byline, rounding off an edifying read.
The overall impression is of a deeply considered scientist always mindful of the border between fact and speculation, able to acknowledge when we are short an explanation, and careful to flag and motivate conjecture in the context of data contradicting extant theories. She is no wimp in this regard. While Sigmund Freud is something of an easy target, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Noam Chomsky are not. It takes courage and organized argument to assail Piaget, the lionized founder of developmental psychology, whose work Jordan Peterson popularized of late. Gopnik takes him on in a respectful yet firm style that should be imitated.
I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in epistemology, moral philosophy, evolutionary psychology or, of course, children. You close this book knowing that you are not done thinking about it. No doubt I will find cause to revisit and edit this review.
It took a while for me to get into the book. The title byline, "What children's minds tell us about truth, love and the meaning of life", had me worried that the text might drift into psychology and pseudoscience and it took me while to grow comfortable that this concern was misplaced. Gopnik's location of theory in biology is consistent and refreshing and she is precise even in locating the human ability to overcome primordial drives in biology itself. This is a point missed by the great many who fear that biological explanation of human behaviour will translate into destructive normative prescriptions.
My initial misgivings might partly explain why I found the later chapters (5 to 9) best, but on reflection, I suspect this is also testament to the book's sound structure. It's certainly not the case that the earlier chapters are uninteresting. Their descriptions of ingenious experiments designed to tease out the features of childhood apprehension are intriguing. Several novel concepts--novel to me, at least--are also delineated; in particular, the notion that a frugal prefrontal cortex spurs creative learning and imagination. Gopnik's discussions of the apprehension of the self and other minds, temporal continuity of the self, development of counterfactuals, the extraction of causal maps and the nature of childhood conscious experience and attention are all fascinating. As a bonus, I found it easy to relate Gopnik's explanations to personal observation of my own children.
Throughout, Gopnik's mappings of observed behaviours to evolutionary antecedents proceed in appropriately cautious fashion, steering clear of the flakey "just-so" stories that plague popular works of evolutionary psychology.
However, Chapter 3's excursion into Bayesian analysis is unsatisfyingly loose--the only blot on an otherwise pristine epistemological canvas. For people who correctly perceive that knowledge is only ever created through evolutionary processes, the appeal of Bayesianism is understandable, but it's a trap. Bayesian priors are a "turtles all the way down" concept. Upon close inspection, none of the phenomena Gopnik categorizes as Bayesian really are so. Fortunately, none of her other explanations hang on this architecture.
After a distinct rise in temperature in Chapter 5's discourse on consciousness, Chapter 6, "Heraclitus' river and the Romanian orphans", gets positively hot, containing a fascinating elaboration of the intricate relation between childhood and adulthood and the first intellectually satisfying analysis of the impact of parents on children that I've come across. Chapter 7's exploration of pair-bonding and allomothering is similarly revelatory, and the importance of the groundwork of the earlier chapters becomes clear.
Then comes Chapter 8, which is ultimately my reason for assigning a fifth star. "Love and law: The origins of morality" is packed with fine reasoning, presenting a fascinating take on nativism, empathy, the golden rule, rules and conventions, utilitarianism, deontology and out-groups. The architecture of the book becomes clear as lightbulbs go on and the cathedral is seen for the bricks.
Chapter 9 harkens back to the title byline, rounding off an edifying read.
The overall impression is of a deeply considered scientist always mindful of the border between fact and speculation, able to acknowledge when we are short an explanation, and careful to flag and motivate conjecture in the context of data contradicting extant theories. She is no wimp in this regard. While Sigmund Freud is something of an easy target, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Noam Chomsky are not. It takes courage and organized argument to assail Piaget, the lionized founder of developmental psychology, whose work Jordan Peterson popularized of late. Gopnik takes him on in a respectful yet firm style that should be imitated.
I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in epistemology, moral philosophy, evolutionary psychology or, of course, children. You close this book knowing that you are not done thinking about it. No doubt I will find cause to revisit and edit this review.
July 24, 2018
In the Middle Ages, humans thought of children as imperfect adults. Once the half-grown-ups reached age seven, that was the age of reason and they could be judged as adults, at least by God, and found wanting. Then, roughly in the Victorian period, we developed a sense of childhood as a time apart. Children were different from us world-weary grownups -- they were innocent and pure. Both good and bad consequences flowed from this shift in perspective.
Once the psychological-industrial complex developed a view of childhood, it was still seen as a time apart, but basically an ill-formed one. Children were little monsters, on the whole, possessed of all the urges of adults without any of the restraints.
Today, we have a more nuanced view, as beautifully written up in this delightful volume by Alison Gopnik. Babies are once again more like us grownups in some ways -- possessed of morality, reasoning, and rational thought right from the womb -- but different in others. Children are more plastic, more open, and more present than us, like tiny enlightened Buddhist monks, perhaps. Gopnik reintroduces us to the world of childhood, and it's pretty special. Gone are the little monsters (unless you're trying to get one ready for school) and replacing them are philosophical babies who have a good deal to teach us about learning, thinking, and wonder. It's a good time to be an infant.
Once the psychological-industrial complex developed a view of childhood, it was still seen as a time apart, but basically an ill-formed one. Children were little monsters, on the whole, possessed of all the urges of adults without any of the restraints.
Today, we have a more nuanced view, as beautifully written up in this delightful volume by Alison Gopnik. Babies are once again more like us grownups in some ways -- possessed of morality, reasoning, and rational thought right from the womb -- but different in others. Children are more plastic, more open, and more present than us, like tiny enlightened Buddhist monks, perhaps. Gopnik reintroduces us to the world of childhood, and it's pretty special. Gone are the little monsters (unless you're trying to get one ready for school) and replacing them are philosophical babies who have a good deal to teach us about learning, thinking, and wonder. It's a good time to be an infant.
November 4, 2009
Wow, what a powerhouse of psychological, philosophical, and scientific analysis! Intellectual discourse on the highest level, yet so very readable! This gem is a very compelling account of who we are and what we learn, know and understand by studying children under the age of five. Primarily, all manner of profound topics (from love to morality and everything in between) are discussed relative to that which comes innately (heritability), from imitation, or learning from life experience, and how these factors or processes impact life outcomes through their interrelationships. One of the most novel things Gopnik points out in her book is that throughout 2,500 years of philosophical writing, analysis of the universal yearning for immortality has never touched on the desire for having children and the satisfaction in raising children. Philosophy has been focused on man's desire to avoid physical death and resist fading into oblivion. However, on a very basic level, children give us our immortality, and we are enriched by analyzing why we feel this is so. I highly recommend reading Gopnik's book.
December 30, 2009
This book isn't a self-help parenting book. Rather it's a digest of research on the cognitive development of children. A good deal of effort is spent refuting early-held ideas about the cognitive ability of children (they had little or none) based on the writings primarily of Jean Piaget. Gopnik covers the past 20 years or so of research which has demonstrated that children have an innate sense of morality -- at least about some things: hitting is unequivocally bad, while being naughty is up for debate.
The title comes from the Plato's metaphor of man being inside a cave with nothing but his own shadows on the wall to use to make sense of his world. Plato described our lifelong quest for learning as an effort to get to the opening of the cave where the light is better. Sorry, that trivializes it somewhat.
According to Gopnik, from a very early age, babies make hypotheses about cause and effect. For anyone who has children who have made it to age three, this is kind of a "well, duh" idea. However, she does provide interesting insight into the ways kids minds develop and how they process the world and the people around them.
The title comes from the Plato's metaphor of man being inside a cave with nothing but his own shadows on the wall to use to make sense of his world. Plato described our lifelong quest for learning as an effort to get to the opening of the cave where the light is better. Sorry, that trivializes it somewhat.
According to Gopnik, from a very early age, babies make hypotheses about cause and effect. For anyone who has children who have made it to age three, this is kind of a "well, duh" idea. However, she does provide interesting insight into the ways kids minds develop and how they process the world and the people around them.
March 15, 2011
I wanted to read this book because of my background in philosophy and my own little one. And this is a really interesting book, just not a philosophical one. The book is mostly filled with anecdotes and explanations of studies that show how babies think. I would say it's more a psychology of babies or the science of babies' cognition rather than philosophy. And it makes sense, (after reading it I found out) the author is a psychologists. Gopnik does throw around some philosophical concepts, names of philosophers, and some theological ideas, but she does it in the way that non-philosophers often do.
All of that aside, the studies she described were really facinating and left me interested in finding the actual articles describing the work in greater detail. Really interesting stuff and put in a way that even a sleep-deprived mom can follow. :)
All of that aside, the studies she described were really facinating and left me interested in finding the actual articles describing the work in greater detail. Really interesting stuff and put in a way that even a sleep-deprived mom can follow. :)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 183 reviews