Pascal Boyer
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pg 112 We cannot help assuming that objects around us belong to very different classes, that they have different "hidden" properties (an essence, if they are animals; goals, if they are agents) that explain what they are. Even more striking, we do all that long before we accumulate enough knowledge of the world to realize that these expectations allow us to understand our environment. Infants assume that things that move by themselves have goals, that different faces are crucial to interacting with different people, that the sounds coming out of their mouths must be treated in a different way from noises produced by objects. All this is found in normal minds and all this is found very early. Which of course leads many people to wonder, Whence the principles? Are children born with these ontological categories and inference systems? Are distinctions such as that between animates and inanimates innate in the human infant? This question, unfortunately, does not make much sense. For instance, we know that preschoolers have different expectations about animals and artifacts. Now could this be an innate distinction? Well, we happen to know that younger children expect most animal-looking things to move by themselves, but not most artifact-looking things. Could this be based on some even more precocious distinction? Perhaps, since infants differentiate between animate ("erratic") motion and inanimate ("Newtonian") motion. So it would seem that we can go backward in time and find the origins of complex conceptual distinctions in earlier and earlier capacities. However, note that the further back we go in time, the more we change the concepts themselves. We started with a concept of "animal," then moved on to "animal-looking thing," then to "self-propelled thing" and "thing with erratic motion." So, whatever we will find at birth will not be, strictly speaking, the "animal" concept but something that (normally) leads to something that leads to something that builds the "animal" concept. The same is true of other concepts. You find early precursors of these concepts, but the further back you go the less they look like the concepts you are interested in and the more you find generative structures that usually result in the concepts you want to explain. You have to redescribe the concepts as you move backward in time, and at some point you are certainly studying extremely earlydeveloped structures with huge consequences for the child's future concepts, but these structures do not correspond to the conceptual labels you started with. In particular, it is very likely that genetic material has a direct effect on the separation between cortical areas and on the neural pathways that get these neural areas to interact. How brain connections get activated to support inference systems obviously requires a lot of further calibration. The confusion is created here by our tendency to understand concepts as encyclopedia entries that describe objects. So we wonder whether infants have some part of the entry that we find in the adult mental encyclopedia. But, as I said above, the encyclopedia description is rather misleading. Ontological categories in fact consist of a set of switch settings activating or inactivating this or that inference system. Pascal Boyer
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