...questions he thought would one day be answered. Here Popper was issuing direct challenge to Wittgenstein, who had argued that philosophy could only analyze linguistic puzzles--not solve any real problems.

The visit has become most famous for the subsequent controversy among eye-witnesses over whether or not Wittgenstein's response to this challenge was to angrily brandish a fireplace poker at Popper.

But there is a more interesting aspect to the story. One of the problems Popper described was the problem of causal induction: How is it possible for us to correctly infer the causal structure of the world from our limited and fragmentary experience? Popper claimed that this problem would one day be solved, and he turned out to be right. Surprisingly, at least part of the solution to the problem comes from a source about as far removed from the chilly Cambridge seminar room of fifty years ago as possible--it comes from babies and young children.

The past thirty years have been a golden age for the study of cognitive development. We've learned more about what babies and young children know, and when they know it, than we did in the preceding two thousand years. And this new science has completely overturned traditional ideas about what children are like.

The conventional wisdom, from Locke to Freud and Piaget, had been that babies and young children are irrational, egocentric, pre-causal, and solipsistic, governed by sensation rather than reason, and impulse rather than intention. In contrast, the last thirty years of research have taught us that even the youngest infants--literally newborns--already know a great deal about a wide range of subjects. Moreover, we have been able to chart consistent changes in children's knowledge of the world as they grow older. Those changes suggest that even the youngest babies are solving Popper's problem: somehow they accurately learn about the causal structure of the world from their experience.

Consider how children come to understand one particularly important aspect of the world--the fact that other people have emotions, desires, and beliefs and that those mental states cause their behavior. All of us know that other people have minds in spite of the fact that we only see the movements of their physical bodies. This raises another ancient philosophical question: How do we come to know other minds?

In the last fifteen years, a great deal of empirical research has begun to illuminate the intuitive psychology of even the youngest human beings. Infants seem to be born believing that people are special and that there are links between their own internal feelings and the internal feelings of others. For example, newborns can imitate facial expressions: when an experimenter sticks his tongue out at the baby, the baby will stick out her own tongue; when he opens his mouth, she will open hers; and so on. In order to do this, newborns must be able to link their own internal kinesthetic sensations, the way their mouth feels from the inside, to the facial gestures of another person--that pink thing moving back and forth in the oval in front of them. (1)

By a year, babies seem to understand that mental states can be caused by external objects. For example, fourteen-month-olds saw an experimenter make a disgusted face as she looked inside one box, and a happy face when she looked inside another box. Then she gave the children the boxes. The children cheerfully opened the 'happy' box but kept the 'disgusted' box shut. (2) In another experiment, infants seemed to predict that a hand that had reached toward an object would continue to reach toward it even when it was placed at a new location--just as their own hands would. (They did not, however, make this same prediction...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Daedalus
Happiness as a Faustian bargain., March 22, 2004
How not to buy happiness., March 22, 2004
Appearance of scandal.(Short Story), March 22, 2004
On the art of adaptation., March 22, 2004
The psychology of subjective well-being., March 22, 2004

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