What Babies Know Quotes

“Q: If evolution can produce creatures that fly and walk as well as swim, why did't it endow newborn minds with more concepts?
A: Historically, thinkers on both sides of the nativist-empiricist controversy have assumed that the more one knows innately, the less one needs to learn. Recent research in computational cognitive science suggests, however, that the reverse is true. A creature who possessed a rich array of innate concepts would face a massive learning challenge if it lives, as all animals do, in an uncertain and changeable environment. For such a creature, possession of the infinitely many concepts that are expressible in an innate language of thought would be a curse: the curse of a compositional mind.”
― Elizabeth S. Spelke, What Babies Know: Core Knowledge and Composition Volume 1

“The abstract concepts at the center of our oldest cognitive systems constitute a primordial 'blessing of abstraction,' counter to long-standing intuitions concerning what is learned or innate, and what is unique to our species or shared by other animals. For millennia, thinkers have supposed that knowledge begins with modality-specific sensations and culminates in abstract concepts only late in ontogeny and phylogeny. Multidisciplinary research in the developmental cognitive sciences turns this assumption on its head. Although we do not routinely articulate our abstract concepts, they are foundations for learning about things, places, and events at all ages and in a wide range of species. Ancient cognitive systems capture properties of the world that apply to all the diverse environments in which these creatures live.”
― Elizabeth S. Spelke, What Babies Know: Core Knowledge and Composition Volume 1