versation is, to say the least, rather restricted. Given young children's
sadly limited capacities, it would seem that only some miracle could
turn them into competent adults. But that is nonsense. Children can
learn a lot because they knowa lot. Scientists can now describe very
precisely those mental processes that help children discover (almost)
all there is to know, using the very confusing information we make
available to them. However difficult this may be to believe, little chil-
dren may in fact be very bright.
What makes them bright is what makes us all bright: that our
minds comprise a variety of specialized inference systems. For psy-
chologists, children are a kind of natural experiment. Although their [107]
knowledge of many domains of experience is minimal, they gradually
figure out all sorts of pertinent facts about their surroundings. The
only way they could do that is by inferringsome description of their
surroundings on the basis of limited exposure. This is possible only if
they start with some definite biases about what aspects of the environ-
ment they should attend to, and what they should infer from these
cues. Here are a few illustrative examples.
If you open up a crocodile, what will you find inside? Take a
(dead) crocodile. Armed with a sharp knife, proceed to dissect
the reptile. Inside, you will find bones, muscles and various
internal organs. Now here is a truly difficult question: What
do you think you would find if you opened up a secondcroco-
dile? Most people will answer: Very likely a bunch of similar
bones and muscles and internal organs. This of course is the
right answer. If we want to find out whether crocodiles have
lungs, it seems to make little sense to dissect two hundred of
them and compare our findings, because we are fairly certain
that opening one (or a couple at the most, if we can stretch our
research funds a bit) is quite enough. But there is not much in
our own experience to justify this belief. We just assumethat all
members of a species have similar "innards" (with the excep-
tion of sexual organs, of which we expect two different ver-
sions). Now this is a belief that even young children (three- to
five-year-olds, depending on how you ask the question) seem
to share, even though they have even less experience of ani-
mals than we do, and certainly little experience of butchery
and dissection. You may find that the question was not so diffi-
cult. After all, if wecallall these things "crocodiles" it is toTHEKIND OF MIND ITTAKES