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I started this talk by posing two related questions ...

 

My first questino was, What is the nature of infants’ earliest cognition of physical objects?

 

 

The leading answer is that involves a ‘third type’ of representation, something distinct from perception and knowledge

 

I have questioned this ...

 

I think the Crude Picture of the Mind is surprisingly useful in getting a fix on developmental discrepancies, particularly compared to theories which postulate either knowledge (incorrect predictions) or core knowledge (no predictions).

 

Contra the view suggested by Carey, it seems that, at least in the domain of physical objects, there is no need to postulate ‘core knowledge’ as something distinct from the epistemic, motoric and perceptual

 

I also think the importance of metacognitive feelings may have been overlooked.

 

When it comes to explaining how different bits of the mind interact, or how knowledge emerges in development, we need metacognitive feelings because, aside from effects on behaviour and control of attention, **it is only metacognitive feelings that connect the motoric and perceptual to knowledge**.

 

Metacognitive feelings have been quite widely neglected in philosophy and developmental psychology. They are a means by which cognitive processes enable perceivers to acquire dispositions to form beliefs about objects’ properties which are reliably true. Metacognitive feelings provide a low-cost but efficient bridge between non-conscious cognitive processes and conscious reasoning.

 

In the case of objects, we had some success by identifying psychological mechanisms that are responsible for adult cognition and then working back to the infants.

 

Davidson is wrong we do not lack vocabularies ... cognitive science already provides them (object indexes, motor representations, metacognitive feelings ...).

 

One moral: If we want to understand the developing mind, it is often useful to think about forms of adult cognition which are more primitive than knowledge and belief.

 

... But how might appealing to these capacities enable us to explain the developmental emergence of knowledge? We are still very far from an explanation!

 

The other question I mentioned at the start of this talk was, How do you get from these early forms of cognition to knowledge of simple facts about particular physical objects?

 

On any standard view,

 

 

 

Let me offer you a conjecture which I have not argued for but which is perhaps tempting given the difficulty of identifying ways in which processes interact ...

 

Metacognitive feelings have been quite widely neglected in philosophy and developmental psychology. But they are important as a means by which cognitive processes enable thinkers to acquire dispositions to form reliably true beliefs about objects. More generally, metacognitive feelings provide a low-cost but efficient link from otherwise mostly inaccessible cognitive processes to thought. When it comes to explaining how different bits of the mind interact, and how knowledge emerges in development, we need metacognitive feelings because {it is only metacognitive feelings (and behaviours and other intentional isolators) that connect the motoric and perceptual to knowledge}. And this is a reason for thinking that cognitive development is a process of (re)discovery.

 

I mentioned earlier Koriat’s proposal that

 

 

Although he wasn’t talking about development, I think we can see that there’s something to this.

 

Metacognitive feelings have a dual role. By triggering ‘stop-and-think’ responses to events which interfere with automatic processing, they may create opportunities for learning.

 

But because they are intentional isolators, they also serve to keep the later-developing, less automatic processes separate from the more automatic, early-developing processes.

 

So they both ‘allow a transition’ of one kind and prevent a transition of another kind.

 

So my question was how the operations of object indexes might explain patterns of looking duration in habituation and violation-of-expectation experiments. My guess is that some operations of object indexes give rise to metacognitive feelings, which in turn influence looking durations.

 

## 2. Development Is Rediscovery

 

This guess gives rise to a further question (which I want to articulate but won’t attempt to answer). In asking how the operations of object indexes might give rise to patterns in looking duration, we have been concerned with what happens a short interval of time. But the guess about metacognitive feelings raises a question about the course of development in the first months or years of life. Let me explain.

 

In the beginning Spelke and others conjectured that infants’ abilities to track briefly occluded objects were a consequence of their having core knowledge for objects. This conjecture is related to the later hypothesis about object indexes. The idea is that we can further specify the mechanisms that realise infants’ core knowledge of physical objects by identifying it with two things: a system of object indexes and a system capable of representing physical objects motorically.

 

So core knowledge of objects is not one thing but three: it is realised by (i) a system of object indexes; (ii) associated metacognitive feelings and (iii) a capacity to represent affordances motorically.

 

There was always a question about how infants’ core knowledge about objects might explain the emergence of knowledge knowledge (that is, knowledge proper) about objects. Now this question becomes, What is the role of a system of object indexes in the emergence in development of knowledge of physical objects? In short, How do you get from object indexes to knowledge?

 

Answers to these questions typically rely on _The Assumption of Representational Connections_: the transition involves operations on the contents of core knowledge states, which transform them into (components of) the contents of knowledge states.

 

This Assumption is required by almost any current account of the developmental emergence of knowledge. It is required, for example, by Spelke’s suggestion that mature understanding of objects, number, and mind derives from core knowledge by virtue of core knowledge representations being assembled (Spelke, 2000); claims by Leslie and others that modules provide conceptual identifications of their inputs (Leslie, 1988); Karmiloff-Smith’s representational re-description (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992); and Mandler’s claim that ‘the earliest conceptual functioning consists of a redescription of perceptual structure’ (Mandler, 1992).

 

But the Assumption of Representational Connections requires, of course, that core knowledge provides a conceptual identification of objects and some of their properties such as location or size, or at least that it involves standing in some kind of intentional relation to these things.

 

[Key point is that since metacognitive feelings don’t have [relevant] content, direct representational connections between core knowledge and knowledge proper are impossible.]

 

But recall the guess about metacognitive feelings linking object indexes to patterns of looking duration. If this guess is right, then it is not true that core knowledge provides a conceptual identification of objects. And it is not true that having core knowledge involves standing in any kind of intentional relation to objects and their properties. This means that we must reject Assumption of Representational Connections. And rejecting this Assumption makes the question about development particularly difficult to answer.

 

It means that rather than assembing or redescribing representations, development must be a process of rediscovery.

 

The step from metacognitive feelings to knowledge is like the step from feeling electric shocks to understanding electricity. So coming to know simple facts about particular physical objects may begin with object indexes and the metacognitive feelings these give rise to, but it does not end there. Interpreting the metacognitive feelings may involve interacting with objects, learning to use tools, and perhaps interacting with others and objects simultaneously.

 

Coming to know facts about physical objects is a matter of rediscovering things already implicit in a system of object indexes.

 

Some might object that development can’t require such rediscovery because it would be hopelessly inefficient to require things already encoded to be learnt anew. But rediscovery is an elegant solution to a practical problem. If you are building a survival system you want quick and dirty heuristics that are good enough to keep it alive: you don’t necessarily care about the truth. If, by contrast, you are building a thinker, you want her to be able to think things that are true irrespective of their survival value. This cuts two ways. On the one hand, you want the thinker’s thoughts not to be constrained by heuristics that ensure her survival. On the other hand, in allowing the thinker freedom to pursue the truth there is an excellent chance she will end up profoundly mistaken %(Malebranche?) or deeply confused %(Hegel?) about the nature of physical objects. So you don’t want thought contaminated by survival heuristics and you don’t want survival heuristics contaminated by thought. Or, even if some contamination is inevitable, you want to limit it. %So you want inferential isolation. This combination is beautifully achieved by giving your thinker a system or some systems for tracking objects and their interactions which appear early in development, and also a mind which allows her to acquire knowledge of physical objects gradually over months or years, taking advantage of interactions with objects as well as social interactions about objects—providing, of course, that the two are not directly connected but rather linked only very loosely, via metacognitive feelings.

 

Of course, if the Assumption of Representational Connectedness is wrong and development is rediscovery, then core knowledge can only play a relatively modest role in explaining the developmental acquisition of knowledge. Instead, simple froms of social interaction, perhaps including referential communication or even communication by language will play a key role in the developmental emergence of knowledge of simple facts about physical objects. And of course they can only do this if abilities for social interactions including communication do not already presuppose such knowledge.

 

But this is a topic for further inquiry. For now, I mainly want to sugggest that we must either reject my claim that core knowledge influences its subject only through modifications of the body, of behaviour and attention and of phenomenology or else face up to the challenge of explaining how development could be a process, not of recycling representations already available in the very first months of life, but of rediscovery.

 

And,

 

[Key point is that since metacognitive feelings don’t have [relevant] content, direct representational connections are impossible.