Centre for Education Neuroscience warmly invite you to join them for their Learning and Reasoning Group seminar taking place on Wednesday, 11th February, from 5 pm – 6 pm (GMT time). Prof. Susan Carey will be presenting on difficult concepts, hard words to learn.
Abstract: Beyond doubt, in my view, four decades of research has established rich innate, abstract representations in non-human animals and prelinguistic infants—so called systems of “core knowledge.” The attested and putative domains of core knowledge include number, intuitive physics, agency (intentional, causal, communicative), geometry, abstract relations (such as sameness/ difference), and logic. I will sketch evidence for such abstract content in non-linguistic thought, but I begin with a puzzle. Give evidence for these innate abstract representations, why are external symbols for the same content (words, formal notations) so hard to construct, requiring tens of thousands years of cultural construction (or more) and many years in individual child development to master? As I will illustrate, one answer is that the content in non-linguistic thought is partial; the non-linguistic representations capture some of the target concepts’ meanings but not all. Here I proposal an additional answer: the representational systems in core knowledge are different in kind from those in adult cognition. Sometimes the attested content is entirely implicit, not represented at all. In addition, core knowledge systems are systems of perception, with iconic formats. As Block, Burge, Greenberg, along with many other current philosophers, establish, there is a joint in nature between perceptual systems of representation and conceptual ones. Using number as a case study, I show that the ways the content is partial follows from the differences between the iconic and analog perceptual formats, on the one hand, and the fully symbolic ones of natural language. Using the abstract relations same/different as case study, where the content is not partial, I illustrate the effects of format differences alone as a source of difficulty of learning the adult meanings of language. I will also illustrate the conceptual consequences of doing so.
Speaker bio: Susan Carey grew up in the earliest days of cognitive science. She got her PhD psychology at Harvard in 1972, after being an undergraduate and graduate student in Harvard’s “Center for Cognitive Studies,” working with George Miller, Jerome Bruner, Roger Brown, Peter Wason (who visited for a year), and Roger Shepard. Thanks to affirmative action, she got a job at MIT’s Psychology Department, which was already a department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, with an office across the hall from Jerry Fodor. Her life’s work concerns the origins of the human conceptual system over three timescales—evolution, cultural construction and ontogenesis. She was mentored in a history of science case study by Tom Kuhn, who was a faculty member in the philosophy department at MIT. In 2000, she moved to Harvard to build the Laboratory for Developmental Studies with Elizabeth Spelke. She retired in 2023, and is now a Visiting Scholar in the NYU Psychology Department and the CUNY Center for Cognitive Science. She is writing a book on the issues discussed in the talk.
This is a CEN event.