Intellectual Fashions

I used to get excited when "new knowledge" upset old, established knowledge. I would get excited when claims that butter would clog your arteries so you need to eat margarine, that margarine is worse for you than butter, that we are blank slates and even our gender can be re-shaped, that we are little genetic machines wholly determined by the chemistry within, and so on, back-and-forth. I noticed there was a fairly steady turnover of these "advances" followed by retreats and then the same "advance" recycled as a new "discovery". It became obvious these were intellectual fads, a kind of mania that swept not just ordinary people but also scientists.

Here's the latest from a review by A. C. Grayling of the book The Philosophical Baby : What Children's Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life authored by Alison Gopnik. This is from a review on the Barnes & Noble web site. I've bolded key bits:

One of the most interesting parts of the book concerns the basis of morality in early childhood development. Gopnik describes empirical investigation into the capacity shown by babies and toddlers for empathy and altruism, and into early childhood understanding of harm and the nature of rules. It is often observed that children have an acute sense of fairness; experiments clearly show that they know how others feel, and act on that knowledge.

This is ridiculous. Sure most kids at a certain age show a marked interest in "fairness". But below and above that age, you see some remarkably un-moral behaviour. Kids grabbing things from others, running over others to get some desired goodie. Kids bonking others over the head with impatience or anger. Nothing remarkably "moral" about that.

Here's the "selling" of a scientific "revolution" in full flight:

In the days when Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud dominated thinking about child development, small children were thought to be irrational, incoherent, and solipsistic in their thinking and both easily distractible and unfocused in their awareness of the world. Recent work in developmental psychology offers a sharply contrasted picture. "Children are unconsciously the most rational beings on earth," says Alison Gopnik, "brilliantly drawing accurate conclusions from data, performing complex statistical analyses, and doing clever experiments." And not only does empirical work reveal this about babies and small children, but what is thus revealed throws light on some of philosophy's more intriguing questions about knowledge, the self, other minds, and the basis of morality.

This is ridiculous. Just as Piaget and Freud over-sold their intellectual "goods", so Gopnik is going beyond the bounds of good sense in selling the idea of children are hyper-rational. What nonsense!

Here is more of this intellectual extravance:

Gopnik describes how imagination contributes to the vast amount of knowledge that children acquire in their first few years. ... This learning proceeds, says Gopnik, in ways that a scientist would recognize as familiar: by experimentation and recognition of statistical patterns. In the child the application of these methods is unconscious and instinctive, and it is aided by the presence of caregivers who provide active instruction. But the basis of child learning is no different from the more conscious and deliberate methodology of adult enquirers.

If Grayling really believed this he would call for schools to be razed to the ground. We are all "little scientists" fully sprung forth and able to reason and discover our way through the world. Why bother educating. Let the little rugrats educate themselves. It would save trillions of dollars globally and we would all obviously be better off! What foolishness!

Here is yet more nonsense:

Children appear to have a far more vivid awareness of the world around them than adults do, Gopnik, reports, because an adult's "spotlight awareness" that enables concentration on specific features of an environment involves losing the "lantern awareness" that brings the whole environment to the forefront of attention. This childhood form of awareness is likened by Gopnik to how adults feel when they visit a foreign country; they focus less on particulars and experience everything more globally because so much is unfamiliar.

If the children are so "skilled" why don't we let them sit the adults down and "eduate" us old duffers who don't show these marvelous skills of "spotlight awareness". Nutty!

I certainly hope that all this folderol is A. C. Grayling's over-the-top enthusiasm and not the true content of Gopnik's work. At least that is my working hypothesis. My prejudice is that since Grayling is a philosopher and Gopnik is a psychologist, then Grayling is probably the one who has run past the data and created an "interpretation" that isn't substantiated by the facts. I suspect Gopnik's work is much more mundane and far less earth shattering. But that wouldn't sell, so Grayling has "sexed it up" for public consumption.