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Loading... Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human (edition 2004)by Paul Bloom1   name99 | Nov 14, 2006 |   Full review: http://libwen.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/descartes-baby-how-the-science-of-child-d... (  ) juliayoung | Dec 29, 2010 | The basic story is the assumption that babies are born not just with innate baby physics, an intuitive understanding of how material object in the world should behave, but even beyond that with innate baby psychology, an appreciation that some of the things in the world have intent. From this starting point (which is filled in with plenty of interesting observations about experiments done involving babies) we go on to discuss the case of people born without this innate sense of psychology (ie autistics), issues like "what is art", our sense of morals, why people universally seem so keen to imagine the existence of a spirit realm of some sort, and our sense of disgust. In many ways this covers the same sort of territory as the wilder sociobiology theorists, but comes across as much more satisfactory. I think this is because the author isn't starting from the (not necessarily relevant) point of "how does an appreciation of art derive from life on the savanna". Rather he's starting with the much more pragmatic view of "as best we can tell, what does it appear that babies are born with", and proceeding from there. It also helps that he seems rather more philosophical, and rather more willing to admit that he doesn't have all the answers (while not giving up and saying that there are no answers to be found, that it's all a mystery). (  )1 name99 | Nov 14, 2006 |  miketroll | Mar 15, 2007 | |
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The basic story is the assumption that babies are born not just with innate baby physics, an intuitive understanding of how material object in the world should behave, but even beyond that with innate baby psychology, an appreciation that some of the things in the world have intent.
From this starting point (which is filled in with plenty of interesting observations about experiments done involving babies) we go on to discuss the case of people born without this innate sense of psychology (ie autistics), issues like "what is art", our sense of morals, why people universally seem so keen to imagine the existence of a spirit realm of some sort, and our sense of disgust.
In many ways this covers the same sort of territory as the wilder sociobiology theorists, but comes across as much more satisfactory.
I think this is because the author isn't starting from the (not necessarily relevant) point of "how does an appreciation of art derive from life on the savanna". Rather he's starting with the much more pragmatic view of "as best we can tell, what does it appear that babies are born with", and proceeding from there.
It also helps that he seems rather more philosophical, and rather more willing to admit that he doesn't have all the answers (while not giving up and saying that there are no answers to be found, that it's all a mystery). (