ity. This helps the child acquire a huge amount of information about
her surroundings, because the mind is biased to ignore all sorts of facts
about the world and attend to only some of them. Paying attention to
all potential connections of all objects would be (if it were possible) a
waste of time and resources. You learn a lot only if you are selective.INNATENESS AND DEVELOPMENT
We cannot help assuming that objects around us belong to very dif-
[112] ferent classes, that they have different "hidden" properties (an
essence, if they are animals; goals, if they are agents) that explain what
they are. Even more striking, we do all that long before we accumu-
late enough knowledge of the world to realize that these expectations
allow us to understand our environment. Infants assume that things
that move by themselves have goals, that different faces are crucial to
interacting with different people, that the sounds coming out of their
mouths must be treated in a different way from noises produced by
objects. All this is found in normal minds and all this is found very
early. Which of course leads many people to wonder, Whence the
principles? Are children born with these ontological categories and
inference systems? Are distinctions such as that between animates and
inanimates innatein the human infant?
This question, unfortunately, does not make much sense. (I said
that already in another chapter, but some dead horses require repeated
flogging, as they keep rising from the dead to cause recurrent concep-
tual confusion.) For instance, we know that preschoolers have differ-
ent expectations about animals and artifacts. Now could this be an
innate distinction? Well, we happen to know that younger children
expect most animal-looking things to move by themselves, but not
most artifact-looking things. Could this be based on some even more
precocious distinction? Perhaps, since infants differentiate between
animate ("erratic") motion and inanimate ("Newtonian") motion. So
it would seem that we can go backward in time and find the origins of
complex conceptual distinctions in earlier and earlier capacities. How-
ever, note that the further back we go in time, the more we change the
concepts themselves. We started with a concept of "animal," then
moved on to "animal-looking thing," then to "self-propelled thing"
and "thing with erratic motion." So, whatever we will find at birth will
not be, strictly speaking, the "animal" concept but something that
RELIGION EXPLAINED