Alison Gopnik - The Philosophical Baby

What Childrens Minds Tell Us about Truth,
Love & the Meaning of Life

ALISON GOPNIK

Alison Gopnik is an internationally renowned authority on childrens learning, the author of over 100 articles and the co-author of two books: Words, Thoughts And Theories (1998) and the acclaimed How Babies Think (2001). She has also written for the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and was Associate Editor of Child Development (the leading journal in the field). She is a Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.

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TO BLAKE, MY PHILOSOPHICAL BABY BROTHER,

WITH PROFOUND GRATITUDE FOR THE TRUTH AND LOVE

HE HAS ALWAYS GIVEN ME

A ONE-MONTH-OLD STARES at her mothers 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? 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 cant 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 parentswe 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 conditionso 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, Ill argue, what makes all human beings human.

When we start to think about childhood more deeply, we realize that this universal, apparently simple fact is riddled with complexities and contradictions. Children are, at once, deeply familiar and profoundly alien. Sometimes we feel that they are just like usand 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 concrete; at other times it looks far more wide-ranging than adult experience. 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 we can talk with school-age children on a reasonably equal basis. But babies and toddlers are utterly foreign territory. Babies cant 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 emotions, and wild pretend play. We dont even have a good name for this age range. This book will focus on children under five and Ill sometimes use the word babies to talk about anybody younger than three. For me babies means that particularly adorable combination of chubby cheeks and funny pronunciation, though I recognize that many three-year-olds themselves would reject the description vigorously.