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The Question

‘... ’tis past doubt,
that Men have in their Minds several Ideas ...:
It is in the first place to be enquired,
How he comes by them?’(Locke, n.d., p. \ 104)

(Locke, 1689 p. 104)

As Locke saw it, questions about the nature of minds are bound up with questions about their developmental origins.
Where Locke asked a question about Ideas, I want to consider a perhaps simpler question about knowledge. How do humans make the transition from not knowing any simple facts about particular things in a given domain to possessing some such knowledge?
Philosophers have been thinking about this question for a long time.
In a beautiful myth, Plato (who also asked this question) suggests that the answer is recollection. Before we are born, in another world, we become acquainted with the truth. Then, in falling to earth, we forget everything. But as we grow we are sometimes able to recall part of what we once knew. So it is by recollection that humans come to know about objects, causes, numbers and everything else.

myths

Leibniz explicitly endorses a version of Plato's view.

‘the soul inherently contains the sources of various notions and doctrines which external objects merely rouse up on suitable occasions’

Leibniz (1996, p. 48)

(Leibniz, 1996, p. \ 48)
The view is subtler than it seems: we'll return to the subtelties later. [*Actually that isn't in these lectures, but it should be.]
Locke, as you probably know, was an empiricist. Here's his manifesto.

‘Men, barely by the Use of their natural Faculties, may attain to all the Knowledge they have, without the help of any innate Impressions’

Locke 1975 [1689], p. 48

(Locke, n.d., p. \ 48)
Spelke is blunt.

‘Developmental science [...] has shown that both these views are false’

(Spelke & Kinzler, 2007, p. \ 89).

(Spelke and Kinzler 2007, p. 89)

[Spelke doesn't have exactly Locke vs Leibniz in mind here, but rather modern descendants of their views.]

physical objects

In this talk I shall focus on knowledge of physical objects as a case study.
This talk is about two related questions. First, What is the nature of infants’ earliest cognition of physical objects? And, second, How do you get from these early forms of cognition to knowledge of simple facts about particular physical objects?
I want to start by reviewing some quite famous experimental findings about infants’ capacities to track briefly occluded physical objects.