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[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.