The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children

Anca Gheaus, Gideon Calder, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Anca Gheaus, Gideon Calder, Jurgen De Wispelaere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138915978
• eBook ISBN: 9781351055963
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Childhood looms large in our understanding of human life, as a phase through which all adults have passed. Childhood is foundational to the development of selfhood, the formation of interests, values and skills and to the lifespan as a whole. Understanding what it is like to be a child, and what differences childhood makes, are thus essential for any broader understanding of the human condition. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is an outstanding reference source for the key topics, problems and debates in this crucial and exciting field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into five parts:

· Being a child

· Childhood and moral status

· Parents and children

· Children in society

· Children and the state.

Questions covered include: What is a child? Is childhood a uniquely valuable state, and if so why? Can we generalize about the goods of childhood? What rights do children have, and are they different from adults' rights? What (if anything) gives people a right to parent? What role, if any, ought biology to play in determining who has the right to parent a particular child? What kind of rights can parents legitimately exercise over their children? What roles do relationships with siblings and friends play in the shaping of childhoods? How should we think about sexuality and disability in childhood, and about racialised children? How should society manage the education of children? How are children's lives affected by being taken into social care?

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of childhood, political philosophy and ethics as well as those in related disciplines such as education, psychology, sociology, social policy, law, social work, youth work, neuroscience and anthropology.

11PART I

Being a child

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EPISTEMOLOGY

Knowledge in childhood

Fabrice Clément and Melissa Koenig

Introduction

The word infant comes from the Latin in- (not) and fant- (speaking); the noun infans referred to a child who had not yet learned to talk. Therefore, almost by definition, young children have long been conceived as devoid of knowledge. This conception is not limited to Western civilization. The Vezo of Madagascar, for instance, consider that it is not worth explaining anything to children before they are about seven (Astuti 1995) – an age also considered as the age of reason by the Roman Cicero. From this perspective, children can only move from an absence of knowledge to its progressive acquisition through learning. Rousseau, for instance, thought that we are born “capable of learning, knowing nothing, perceiving nothing” (Rousseau, L’Emile, quoted in Kessen 1965: 76–77). It is now generally accepted that children learn from a very early age, but the famous phrase from James that the mental life of babies is “a blooming buzzing confusion” (James 1981: 462) would not surprise many contemporary Westerners.

Here we examine various notions of knowledge as they have been studied in young children by developmental science, and as young children apply them to others. In the first section, we review scientific conceptions of child knowledge, from Piaget’s account to current theoretical approaches. In the second section, we discuss normative notions of knowledge and belief from contemporary epistemology and their implications for understanding children’s knowledge. In the third section, we discuss children’s own concepts of knowledge as expressed in their learning decisions, and we conclude with thoughts on how descriptive and normative projects might inform one another.

Notions of knowledge in child development

Faithful to the long tradition described above, Piaget’s ambition was to understand how the child constructs knowledge from very meagre beginnings. On the long road to reason and knowledge, Piaget grants the baby only minimal initial equipment: some reflexes (like the sucking reflex) and her first actions on the environment. These first interactions with the world give rise to schemes, i.e. proto-conceptual frameworks which, once developed, assimilate new patterns of stimulation with configurational resemblances. When assimilation is impossible, the scheme will accommodate the novel situation and change (Piaget 1952). The famous case of 14“object permanence” illustrates this constructivist process. Piaget discovered that six-month-old babies interrupted an ongoing search as soon as an object was occluded (Piaget 1954). At around eight to nine months, babies revealed a rather puzzling pattern of search activity: the “A, not-B” error. They often searched at the location where they have previously found a hidden object (location A), even when they intently watched as it was hidden at a second location (location B). Piaget interpreted this error as evidence that infants viewed the object as an extension of their own action, the schema of the object and the schema of the action being not completely separated from one another. For Piaget, it was not before 12 to 18 months that children constructed a stable representation of an object as being “detached” from their own activities. Once this representational insight of the permanent object is achieved, the child can persist in searching under any number of screens, showing that she constantly maintains an image of the invisible object in mind throughout the searching period.

This vision of babies as empirical constructivists, who start with little but slowly build more and more abstract knowledge “by a process of elaboration essentially based on the activity of the child” (Inhelder 1962: 20), has been placed in a constant state of revision by a large number of studies indicating that babies may possess, from a very early age, basic or core concepts that support their expectations about how things work (Carey 2009; Spelke 1994; for a contemporary review, see Barner and Baron 2016). This type of research was made possible by the use of a specific methodology to study infants: habituation. It is known that organisms gradually cease to respond to a stimulus after repeated presentations. Thanks to this basic attentional mechanism, it is possible to study how young babies “make sense” of different aspects of their environment. Infants’ surprise in response to a modified stimulus introduced after a period of habituation can be interpreted as a sign that babies expected something different to happen, or detected novelty in the test stimulus relative to what was presented during the habituation phase. This is how Renée Baillargeon and Elizabeth Spelke discovered infants’ expectations about objects in a series of experiments. In one of their initial studies, they first familiarized infants with a screen whose top rotated toward and away from them a full 180°. They then laid the screen flat toward the infant and placed an object (a box) behind the pivot line of the screen. In the “possible” condition, the top rotated away from the infant, hiding first the box and then reaching the position where it reached the box and stopped. In the “impossible” condition, the screen continued to rotate a full 180°, invading the space that was occupied by the box. The results showed that 3.5-month-old infants looked longer when presented with the impossible event, indicating by the reaction that they were surprised by what was presented to them. In other words, infants expected the screen to stop when it reached the invisible box, demonstrating an implicit understanding of some of the physical properties of the object (Baillargeon, Spelke, and Wasserman 1985).

Since then, a wave of experimental research has demonstrated infants’ precocious understanding of physical entities and their properties (for a synthesis, see Baillargeon 2004; Baillargeon et al. 2011). In parallel, comparable research challenging Piaget’s account has revealed infants’ basic expectations about other domains of their environment. For instance, young children understand many entities in terms of their essence: they conceive of many categories (i.e., “lion”, “rabbit”, “boy”, “girl”) as having an underlying reality that defines the properties of its members (Gelman 2003). Children have also demonstrated basic expectations about sets of small numbers (Wynn 1992), moral behaviors (Turiel 1983; Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom 2007) or social relationship and membership (Kaufmann and Clément 2014; Kinzler, Dupoux, and Spelke 2007; Thomsen, Frankenhuis, Ingold-Smith, and Carey 2011). However, the most prolific area for the study of early cognitive competences have been in “naïve psychology”, i.e. the ability to attribute mental states to others in order to compute their likely behaviors in terms of beliefs and desires (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith 1985; Wellman 1990, 2014). For a long time, it has been 15thought that the ability to represent others’ mental states developed relatively late, i.e. at around four or five years of age (Wimmer and Perner 1983; Perner 1991). However, recent – and still discussed – studies indicate that an implicit understanding of others’ epistemic states exists at a much earlier age (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005).

This burgeoning field of research on children’s so-called “naïve theories” are closely linked with the development of evolutionary psychology. Darwin himself, notably in The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals, suggested that many mental abilities emerge through a process of natural selection. This idea recently gave rise to a model insisting on the fact that we inherited not only physiological organs but also psychological “modules” that constituted advantages in our species’ evolutionary past (Tooby and Cosmides 1990). From an evolutionary perspective, it is not surprising to discover that babies are endowed with certain basic conceptual knowledge. In developmental psychology, Elizabeth Spelke and Susan Carey refer to infants’ early conceptual competences as core knowledge (Carey 2009; Spelke and Kinzler 2007). These early emerging knowledge systems are seen as “mechanisms for representing and reasoning about particular kinds of ecologically important entities and events” (Spelke 2000: 1233). These specific systems filter and detect the relevant entities and, due to the set of domain-specific principles that govern these entities, they support inferences about how such entities behave.

It is possible to position most contemporary researchers on a scale that goes from strict empiricism (all knowledge is dependent upon sense experience) to strong nativism (sense experience is structured by innate constraints). The core knowledge hypothesis, by specifying our conceptual primitives, would definitely fall on the nativist side. On the other hand, interesting developmental proposals insist on specifying the constructivist processes of cognitive development. For various neuroconstructivists, for instance, the human neocortex is characterized by its flexibility. Therefore, it has to be conceived as a changing organ with dynamic, backpropagating interactions between different levels – genes, brain, cognition, behavior and environment (Karmiloff-Smith 2009). This position is not incompatible with the existence of some genetic constraints, responsible for the general structures of the brain; nor with some conceptual constraints, responsible for basic constraints on human knowledge. But if neuroconstructivism is compatible with nativism, it is only in a weak sense because the focus is on epigenesis, i.e. on the developing interactions between genes and the environment. For the neuroconstructivists, genetic mechanisms are only responsible for a general starting point: processing certain kinds of information with increasing proficiency leads to a gradual specialization of parts of the brain, that become domain specific by progressive modualization. In other words, the dynamic development of our brain plays a role in the way information is channeled and processed, such that those parts of the brain that become specialized for processing language, or human behavior, for example, emerge relatively late in development (Karmiloff-Smith 1998; see also ch. 2, ch. 3).

Another contemporary position, strongly influenced by empiricism, attempts to understand the rapid and effortless learning competencies of children by investigating their ability to build and elaborate their causal knowledge. In this perspective, what is essential for the child is to generate from sensory inputs causal “maps of how the world works” (Gopnik 2009: 21). To this end, babies are endowed with a specific system, largely innate, that helps them detect the causal structures of the world so that they can then generate new expectations or hypotheses and anticipate what will happen next. These causal learning systems enable children to infer causal relations from patterns of correlation, a procedure that can be modeled as Bayesian networks (Gopnik et al. 2004). This perspective can be considered a midway between empiricism and nativism, with babies functioning like little scientists by formulating testable hypotheses or questions, conducting experiments, analyzing statistics and forming theories to account for their observations. In the long run, this will lead to the creation of different theories, according to the 16specific causal structure of a given domain (naïve physics, psychology, etc.) that will be unveiled by children.

Of course, the exact ways in which children develop knowledge during their early developme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Being a child
• Part II: Childhood and moral status
• Part III: Parents and children
• Part IV: Children in society
• Part V: Children and the state
• Index