The Philosophical Baby What Children's Minds Tell Us About
Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
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ALSO BY ALISON GOPNIK
The Scientist in the Crib:
What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind
(coauthor with Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl)
Words, Thoughts, and Theories
(coauthor with Andrew N. Meltzoff)
The Philosophical Baby
The Philosophical Baby
WHAT CHILDREN'S MINDS TELL US ABOUT
TRUTH, LOVE, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE
Alison Gopnik
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
New York
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
18 West 18th Street, New York iooii
Copyright © 2009 by Alison Gopnik
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2009
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint stanza 4 from
"Dragonflies Mating," from Sun Under Wood: New Poems by Robert Hass,
Ecco Press, p. 9. Copyright © 1996 by Robert Hass. Reprinted by permission
of HarperCollins Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gopnik, Alison.
The philosophical baby : what children’s minds tell us about truth, love,
and the meaning of life / Alison Gopnik.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-23196-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-374-23196-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Cognition in children. 2. Human information processing in children.
3. Perception in children. 1. Title.
BF723.C5G675 2009
155.4113—dc22
2008049226
Designed by Gretchen Achilles
www.fsgbooks.com
i3579 i° 8642
TO BLAKE, MY PHILOSOPHICAL BABY BROTHER,
WITH PROFOUND GRATITUDE FOR THE TRUTH AND LOVE
HE HAS ALWAYS GIVEN ME
s
Contents
Introduction 3
HOW CHILDREN CHANGE THE WORLD 6
HOW CHILDHOOD CHANGES THE WORLD 9
A ROAD MAP 1 5
1. Possible Worlds: Why Do Children Pretend? 19
THE POWER OF COUNTERFACTUALS 21
COUNTERFACTUALS IN CHILDREN: PLANNING THE FUTURE 23
RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST 26
IMAGINING THE POSSIBLE 27
IMAGINATION AND CAUSATION 31
CHILDREN AND CAUSATION 34
CAUSES AND POSSIBILITIES 37
MAPS AND BLUEPRINTS 39
CAUSAL MAPS 41
DETECTING BLICKETS 43
viii I CONTENTS
2. Imaginary Companions:
How Does Fiction Tell the Truth? 47
DUNZER AND CHARLIE RAVIOLI 49
NORMAL WEIRDNESS 52
MAKING A MAP OF THE MIND 54
IMAGINARY COMPANIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE 60
AUTISM, CAUSATION, AND IMAGINATION 61
MAPS AND FICTIONS 63
WHY MINDS AND THINGS ARE DIFFERENT 65
SOUL ENGINEERS 68
THE WORK OF PLAY 70
3. Escaping Plato’s Cave: How Children, Scientists,
and Computers Discover the Truth 74
OBSERVATION: BABY STATISTICS 81
EXPERIMENTATION: MAKING THINGS HAPPEN 86
DEMONSTRATION: WATCHING MOM'S EXPERIMENTS 92
UNDERSTANDING MINDS 96
4. What Is It Like to Be a Baby?
Consciousness and Attention 106
EXTERNAL ATTENTION 1 1 0
INTERNAL ATTENTION 1 1 2
BABY ATTENTION 1 1 6
YOUNG CHILDREN AND ATTENTION 123
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BABY? 1 25
TRAVEL AND MEDITATION 126
CONTENTS I ix
5. Who Am I? Memory, Self,
and the Babbling Stream 133
CONSCIOUSNESS AND MEMORY 134
CHILDREN AND MEMORY 138
KNOWING HOW YOU KNOW 140
CONSTRUCTING MYSELF ' 144
CHILDREN AND THE FUTURE 147
THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 150
LIVING IN THE MOMENT 152
INTERNAL CONSCIOUSNESS, FREE ASSOCIATION,
HYPNAGOGIC THOUGHT, AND INSIGHT MEDITATION 154
WHY DOES CONSCIOUSNESS CHANGE? 156
A MAP OF MYSELF: CONSTRUCTING CONSCIOUSNESS 160
6. Heraclitus’ River and the Romanian
Orphans: How Does Our Early Life Shape
Our Later Life? 164
LIFE CYCLES 1 68
THE PARADOX OF INHERITANCE 169
HOW BABIES RAISE THEIR PARENTS 174
7. Learning to Love: Attachment and Identity 179
THEORIES OF LOVE 1 79
BEYOND MOTHERS: SOCIAL MONOGAMY AND
ALLOMOTHERING 191
LIFE'S WEATHER 1 95
THE CHILD INSIDE 1 96
X I CONTENTS
8. Love and Law: The Origins of Morality 202
IMITATION AND EMPATHY 205
ANGER AND VENGEANCE 209
BEYOND EMPATHY 210
PSYCHOPATHS 212
TROLLEYOLOGY 214
NOT LIKE ME 216
WIDENING THE CIRCLE 21 9
FOLLOWING THE RULES 221
BABY RULES 223
DOING IT ON PURPOSE 225
RULES AS CAUSES 226
THE PERILS OF RULES 229
THE WISDOM OF HUCK FINN 230
9. Babies and the Meaning of Life 234
AWE 238
MAGIC 239
LOVE 241
CONCLUSION 243
Notes 249
Bibliography 257
Acknowledgments 273
Index 277
The Philosophical Baby
Introduction
one-month-old stares at her mothers face with fixed,
/L„j| 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? 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 mortal¬
ity? 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 he the same person? All of us once were
4 I THE PHILOSOPHICAL BABY
children and most of us will become parents—we have all asked
these sorts of questions.
Childhood is a profound part of the human condition. But it is
also a largely unexamined part of that condition—so taken for
granted that most of the time we hardly notice it at all. Childhood
is a universal fact, but when we do think about it, it is almost
always in individual first-person terms: What should I do, now,
about my child? What did my parents do that led me to be the way
I am? Most books about children are like this, from memoirs and
novels to the ubiquitous parenting advice books. But childhood is
not just a particular plot complication of Irish autobiographies or
a particular problem to be solved by American self-help programs.
It is not even just something that all human beings share. It is, I’ll
argue, what makes all human beings human.
When we start to think about childhood more deeply, we real¬
ize that this universal, apparently simple fact is riddled with com¬
plexities and contradictions. Children are, at once, deeply familiar
and profoundly alien. Sometimes we feel that they are just like
us—and sometimes they seem to live in a completely different
world. Their minds seem drastically limited; they know so much
less than we do. And yet long before they can read or write they
have extraordinary powers of imagination and creativity, and long
before they go to school they have remarkable learning abilities.
Their experience of the world sometimes seems narrow and con¬
crete; at other times it looks far more wide-ranging than adult ex¬
perience. It seems that our experiences as children were crucial in
shaping who we are. And yet we all know that the path from child
to adult is circuitous and complex, and that the world is full of
saints with terrible parents and neurotics with loving ones.
The younger children are, the more mysterious they are. We
can more or less remember what it was like to be five or six, and
INTRODUCTION I 5
we can talk with sehool-age children on a reasonably equal basis.
But babies and toddlers are utterly foreign territory. Babies can’t
walk or talk, and even toddlers, well, toddle, and yet science, and
indeed common sense, tells us that in those early years they are
learning more than they ever will again. It may be hard to see just
how the child is father to the man. Yet it is even more difficult to
trace the link between the “I” writing this page and the seven-
pound bundle of fifty years ago, all eyes and forehead, or even the
later thirty-pound whirlwind of tangled sentences, intense emo¬
tions, and wild pretend play. We don’t even have a good name for
this age range. This book will focus on children under five and I’ll
sometimes use the word "babies’ to talk about anybody younger
than three. For me "babies” means that particularly adorable com¬
bination of chubby cheeks and funny pronunciation, though I rec¬
ognize that many three-year-olds themselves would reject the
description vigorously.
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 chil¬
dren were irrational, egocentric, and amoral. Their thinking and
experience were concrete, immediate, and limited. In fact, psy¬
chologists 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 car¬
ing, and even more conscious than adults are.
This scientific revolution has led philosophers to take babies
seriously for the first time. Children are both profound and puzzling,
and this combination is the classic territory of philosophy. Yet you
could read 2,500 years of philosophy and find almost nothing
