Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life
By Alison Gopnik
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. 288 pages. Nonfiction

Gopnik begins this fascinating work by reviewing the place of infants and young children in philosophical literature and how it has radically changed from the days of Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud. The field of cognitive science is exploding as new advances in science and technology make us rethink time honored traditions about how the mind works. Gopnik takes the viewpoint of an evolutionary biologist as she tries to answer fundamental philosophical questions about how babies’ minds develop. Gopnik also emphasizes the difference between the minds of adults and children. Babies, of course, are more impressionable and pliable and that has advantages and disadvantages. Adults have more neural pathways that are specific and specialized which allow us to focus on tasks. To prove her point Gopnik describes watching a three year old try to get dressed, everything from the color of his socks to a speck of dusk on the carpet can be distracting. Gopnik and others in her field have even done experiments which prove that babies use types of statistical analysis and are even capable of pretend thinking, or to coin her more scientific turn of phrase, “counterfactual thinking.”

This was an absorbing read although it was definitely a jargon heavy book. At times I felt as if I was reading an especially interesting textbook. I enjoyed the fact that Alison Gopnik is a mother of three children and thus brought in various personal anecdotes to prove her points. Her enthusiasm for the subject shines through. In a way it was amusing to read about scientists validating what mothers have known for years, babies really are smart.

ALC