At several points, I have mentioned findings about infants and
young children. The most striking and fascinating models of the men-
tal encyclopedia—or rather, of the systems making up what seems to
be an encyclopedia—have come from developmental psychology. This
is not an accident. The study of young children asks the most radical
of philosophical questions—Where does knowledge come from? How do
we ever manage to discover anything about the world around us?—but turns
them into scientific questions settled by experimental tests. We know
a lot more now about how minds work because we have found out a
lot about how young minds grow.^9
[106]
PROGRESS BOX 5:
DOMAIN-SPECIFICITY- Perception and understanding of surround-
ings require inferences and guesses about different
aspects of objects around us. - The mind is composed of specialized sys-
tems that produce inferences about these different
aspects. - Objects in different "ontological cate-
gories" activate different sets of these specialized
systems. - Each inference system is itself composed of
even more specialized neural structures.
WHAT EVERY NURSERY-SCHOOL
CHILD KNOWSLittle children do not seem very bright. Two-year-olds are clumsy,
they have no manners or morals, they (literally) could not find their
way out of a paper bag. They talk with an awful accent and their con-RELIGION EXPLAINED