Descartes' Baby

Having held forth on art, on disgust and on ancient Greeks, time to draw my report on Bloom’s book about Descartes' baby to a close.

A short, easy-read book of 227 pages, printed on rather cheap paper which is already browning. According to Wikipedia, Bloom was born in 1963 and ‘… is a Canadian American psychologist … professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, fiction, and art…’.

Quite a lot of space is given to sketches of experiments with children which tell us about how children learn to think about the world they live in – and the people in it.

Chapter 1, tells us first about how very young children get to know about basic properties of the objects they need to interact with. Properties like not disappearing, not changing their shape and falling to the ground if they are not supported. Second, about how very young children get to know about and to copy other people – this last being a habit which we don’t shake off as adults. They are very interested in faces, more or less from the word go. They learn how to read faces. In time, they learn that other people may have beliefs and desires which are not the same as their own. That these other people may have and may act on beliefs which are wrong. People, including themselves, have bodies and souls – a position clearly articulated by Descartes back in the first half of the 17th century. Bloom takes us through some of the stages of this journey.

He also reminds us that sometimes this goes wrong, and some children fail to gain a proper understanding of other people, possibly ending up as autistics.

Chapter 2, tells us about how we organise the things in the world into categories. Things like lions, tigers, tomatoes, chairs and tables. Things with shared properties. The quick and the dead. The categories themselves are organised into a hierarchy, so tomatoes are a kind of food. Generally speaking, it is enough to know what category something is in. We don’t need to know exactly which tomato we have in our hand. Generally speaking, things stay in category, they don’t move around. 

We often wonder about how things came to be, how and why they were created in the first place.

A lot of the anxious objects of chapter 3 are the art already noticed.

Learning about the difference between things and pictures of things.

We learn from chapter 4 that nearly everybody is pretty moral, more or less from the word go. Most children have a well developed sense of right, wrong and fairness. Except for psychopaths, nearly all men, who are amoral, more or less from the word go. Fortunately, there are not too many of them.

While the moral circle of chapter 5 is the circle of those whom we consider within the realm of decent, considerate behaviour. In the olden days, this excluded pretty much everyone and everything beyond the tribe. In the eyes of some Romans (for example), this might have excluded slaves. From where I associate to novels in which house servants barely counted as people as far as their employer was concerned: it didn’t really matter what you did or said in front of them. We are reminded that humans have always been social animals, living in groups and having children who need years of care. We have to learn to balance looking after ourselves, looking after our children (and perhaps our parents) and looking out for the group.

Morality is more like botany than physics. Physics might be the same the world over, but different plants evolve and thrive in different places. It is also more personal, it touches us in a way that science does not. This makes it all much more emotive – and much harder to change.

The body and soul emotion of chapter 6 is the disgust already noticed.

Chapter 7 gets a bit religious, although Bloom himself is a non-believer. About how we tend to think in terms of bodies and souls, and how we tend to think of souls persisting after death, perhaps for ever. Perhaps on a temporary basis as a ghost. So while body and soul are usually paired up, some bodies don’t have souls – for example zombies – and some souls don’t have bodies – for example ghosts.

How children learn about the facts of death. About, for example, whether dead people need to clean their teeth twice a day.

In chapter 8, we are reminded that most people in the US believe in a god or one sort or another. We have the interesting notion that most self respecting supernaturals are like us in many ways, with needs, likes and dislikes – but they always have some rule-breaking capabilities which make them interesting. But not too many of them because then they get too complicated. They are often invisible and sometimes all knowing. While some of them are visible and rather less knowing, things like mountains and trees.

We are referred to Pascal Boyer and I shall now take another look at reference 2, which has been sitting on a shelf since I read it maybe 20 years ago, at about the time that it was published.

A collection of good stuff, if a bit glib sounding, a bit shallow at times. A suspicion that it is all a bit Anglophone-centric. But there is plenty of food for thought – to use a well trodden phrase which is apt here.

References

Reference 1: Descartes' baby: how the science of child development explains what makes us human – Paul Bloom – 2004.

Reference 2: Religion explained: The human instincts that fashion gods, spirits and ancestors – Pascal Boyer – 2001.

Reference 3: How children learn the meaning of words – Paul Bloom – 2002. Bought from AbeBooks on the strength of this one.

Group search key: pba.