Back Cover Blurb
- Taking a stand midway between Piaget's constructivism and Fodor's nativism, Annette Karmiloff-Smith offers an exciting new theory of developmental change that embraces both approaches, showing how both are necessary to a fundamental theory of human cognition. Karmiloff-Smith shifts the focus from what cognitive science can offer the study of development to what a developmental perspective can offer cognitive science, presenting a coherent portrait of the flexibility and creativity of the human mind as it develops from infancy to middle childhood.
- Formerly a research collaborator of Piaget and Inhelder at Geneva University, Annette Karmiloff-Smith is Senior Research Scientist with Special Appointment at the MRC Cognitive Development Unit in London, Professor of Psychology at University College London, Academy.
- "... deserves wide readership by both developmentalists and non-developmentalists who need an overview of the state off the art. Clearly and comprehensively, Karmilofff-Smith shows the highly structured ways in which different representational processes emerge from infancy onwards."
→ Andrew Whiten, Nature
ContentsSeries Foreword – xi
Preface – xiii
- Chapter 1: Taking Development Seriously – 1
- Is the initial architecture of the infant mind modular? – 1
- Prespecified modules versus a process of modularization – 4
- What constitutes a domain? – 6
- Development from a domain-general perspective – 7
- Development from a domain-specific perspective – 8
- Reconciling nativism and Piaget's constructivism – 9
- The notion of constraints on development – 11
- New paradigms for studying young infants – 12
- Beyond domain-specific constraints: The process of representational redescription – 15
- RR model1 – 17
- The importance of a developmental perspective on cognitive science – 26
- The importance of a cognitive science perspective on development – 27
- The plan of the book – 28
- Chapter 2: The Child as a Linguist – 31
- Language acquisition as a domain-general process: The Piagetian infant – 33
- Language acquisition as a domain-specific process: The nativist infant – 35
- The infant's and the young child's sensitivity to semantic constraints – 40
- The infant's and the young child's sensitivity to syntactic constraints – 43
- The need for both semantic and syntactic bootstrapping – 45
- Beyond infancy and early childhood – 47
- The RR model and becoming a little linguist – 47
- From behavioral mastery to metalinguistic knowledge about words – 51
- From behavioral mastery to metalinguistic knowledge of the article system – 54
- Beyond the word and the sentence – 60
- From the nativist infant to the constructivist linguist – 62
- Chapter 3: The Child as a Physicist – 65
- Understanding the physical world: The Piagetian infant – 65
- Understanding the physical world: The nativist infant – 66
- Constraints on object perception in early infancy – 67
- Understanding object behavior: Innate principles and subsequent learning – 72
- Rethinking object permanence – 74
- The representational status of early knowledge: Do infants have theories? – 77
- Becoming a little theorist – 78
- From behavioral mastery to metacognitive knowledge about the animate / inanimate distinction – 79
- From behavioral mastery to metacognitive knowledge about gravity and the Law of Torque – 82
- Representational redescription and theory building – 87
- Chapter 4: The Child as a Mathematician – 91
- Number acquisition as a domain-general process – 91
- Challenges to Piaget's view – 93
- Number acquisition as a domain-specific, innately guided process – 96
- The role of subitizing: Perceptual or conceptual? – 98
- Constraints on learning how to count – 100
- The representational status of early number knowledge – 104
- Learning the language of counting and mathematics – 105
- Is mathematical notation essential to number development? – 107
- Reconciling domain-specific counting principles with the failure to conserve: Cultural universals – 107
- Becoming a little mathematician – 110
- Metamathematical knowledge: The child's changing theory of number – 110
- Number in nonhuman species – 112
- The RR model and number representation in the human child – 114
- Chapter 5: The Child as a Psychologist – 117
- Piagetian view of the child as a psychologist – 118
- The domain-specific view: Infancy prerequisites to a theory of mind – 118
- What conspecifics look like – 118
- How conspecifics interact – 121
- Theory of mind in nonhuman species – 124
- What is special about theory-of-mind computations? – 126
- The toddler's theory of mind – 127
- Is language essential for distinguishing propositional attitudes from prepositional contents? – 129
- The child’s developing belief / desire psychology – 130
- The RR model and changes in children's theory of mind – 132
- Should theory of mind be set in a broader, domain-general context? – 134
- Is theory of mind just like any other theory-building process? – 137
- Chapter 6: The Child as a Notator – 139
- Does precedence imply derivation? – 140
- Notation from a domain-general perspective – 141
- A domain-specific approach to notation – 142
- Preliterate and prenumerate children's notational competence – 143
- The RR model and early notational skills – 145
- Biology versus culture: The paradox of notational systems – 146
- Using the notational domain to probe the RR model and microdevelopmental change – 148
- The importance of behavioral mastery – 155
- Constraints on representational redescription – 155
- Implicit representations and their procedural status – 161
- RR and the progressive relaxation of sequential constraints – 162
- Exogenously driven and endogenously driven change – 163
- Chapter 7: Nativism, Domain Specificity, and Piaget's Constructivism – 165
- Domain specificity and Piagetian theory – 166
- Domain specificity and abnormal development – 168
- What is left of Piagetian theory? – 171
- Chapter 8: Modeling Development: Representational Redescription and Connectionism – 175
- Soft-core and hard-core approaches to the modeling of development – 175
- The basic architecture of connectionist models – 176
- Nativism and connectionism – 179
- Domain specificity and connectionism – 180
- Behavioral mastery and connectionism – 181
- Implicit representations and connectionism – 182
- Explicit representations and connectionism – 186
- What is missing from connectionist models of development? – 188
- There'll be no flowcharts in this book! – 190
- Chapter 9: Concluding Speculations – 191
Notes – 195
Bibliography – 205
Index – 229
In-Page Footnotes ("Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - Beyond Modularity")
Footnote 1:
Book Comment
A Bradford Book, MIT Press, Fourth printing, 1999. Paperback.
"Fodor (Jerry) - There and Back Again: A Review of Annette Karmiloff-Smith's Beyond Modularity"
Source: Fodor - In Critical Condition - Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind
Notes
- A somewhat negative review of "Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - Beyond Modularity".
- I was interested in Modularity of Mind, Innateness and Connectionism in my undergraduate Philosophy of Psychology course at Birkbeck back in 2002 or thereabouts. I've not really touched on it since, I don't think. I should review – and convert – my undergraduate Essay on Modularity of Mind1
- Anyway, I've now read this Paper, but it'll make more sense once I've read the book that it reviews. Indeed, if I ever get the time, it’ll be good to iterate re-reads of both.
- Basically, Fodor is unimpressed by Karmiloff-Smith’s ‘RR Thesis’ (see below). He thinks that any ‘theories’ older children (and adults) concoct in domains covered by Modules are made on the basis of output from these modules rather than changes to the modules themselves.
Introduction
- These days, hordes of people are interested in the idea that aspects of cognitive architecture may be modular. I know at least two or three (people, not hordes or aspects), and there may be others. But "modularity" means different things on different tongues. In this chapter, I want briefly to distinguish between some versions of modularity theory that are currently in play. Then, I will discuss one of them in critical detail.
- There are four essential properties connected with the notion of a module: Unless you believe that at least some mental entities instantiate at least two of them, you are not in the modularity camp according to my way of choosing sides.
- Encapsulation: Information flow between modules — and between modules and whatever unmodularized systems the mind may contain — is constrained by mental architecture. "Constrained by mental architecture" means "not cognitively penetrable" (Pylyshyn, 19842): You can't change such an arrangement (just) by fooling around with someone’s beliefs and desires. In particular, architectural arrangements are (relatively) insensitive to instructional variables in experimental tasks. The persistence of illusions is the classical instance. Convincing the subject that the Muller-Lyre effect is illusory doesn't make the apparent difference between the length of the lines go away.
- Inaccessibility In effect, the inverse of encapsulation. Just as information about beliefs and desires can't get into a module, so the information that is available to its computations is supposed to be proprietary and unable to get out. In particular, it is supposed not to be available for the subject's voluntary report.
- Domain specificity The information and operations by which a module is constituted apply only in the module’s proprietary domain. Concepts and processes may thus be available for language learning, or face recognition, or space perception which are not likewise available for balancing one's checkbook or deciding which omnibus to take to Clapham.
- Innateness The information and operations proprietary to a module are more or less exhaustively “genetically preprogrammed" (whatever, exactly, that means).
- Table 11.1
| | NC | AKS | JAF |
| Encapsulated | Don't care * | Yes and No # | Yes |
| Inaccessible | Yes | Yes and No % | Yes |
| Domain-specific | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Innate | Yes | Yes and No @ | Yes |
- Note: NC is Chomsky, AKS is Karmiloff-Smith, and JAF is me.
- People who agree that some mental processes are modular may, nonetheless, differ appreciably in their views about the encapsulation, accessibility, domain specificity, and innateness of even their favorite candidates.
- Table 11.1 shows a rough sketch of the way three currently active theorists distribute, all of whom think of themselves as pro-module in some sense or other. Comments:
- *: Chomsky, in some of his moods, dislikes the whole information- processing view of mental operations. If the mind isn't an information processor at all, then the question of whether it's an encapsulated information processor doesn't arise.
- #: A proposed principle of the ontogeny of cognition: Mental processes become encapsulated in the course of cognitive development (perhaps through overlearning). So they are encapsulated synchronically but not diachronically. I'll refer to this putative process as modularization (my term, not Karmiloff-Smith's).
- %: Another proposed principle of cognitive development: Modularized information becomes increasingly accessible over time as a result of an "epigenetic" process of representational redescription (the "RR" theory3). I'll refer to this as a process of demodularization (again, my term).
- @: What's innate: Some domain-specific information and "attentional biases"; and, presumably, the psychological mechanisms that underlie the putative epigenetic processes. But neither encapsulation nor accessibility are themselves genetically preprogrammed.
- An aside about attention: It's a recurrent theme in Beyond Modularity (BM) and also in Elman et al. (see chapter 12) that "There must be some innate component to the acquisition of [e.g.] language [but] ... this does not mean that there has to be a ready-made module. Attention biases and some innate predispositions could lead the child to focus on linguistically relevant input and. with time, to build up linguistic representations that are domain specific" (36). This emphasis on innate attentional biases is not widely shared by modularity theorists. It strikes me as unpromising, and I won't discuss it in what follows. In neither Karmiloff-Smith's book nor Elman's is it explained how one could have a disposition (innate or otherwise) to concentrate on Xs unless one already has the concept of an X. ("Pray, attend to the passing flubjumbs." "Can't.” "Why not?” "Don’t know what a flubjumb is.") Postulating innate attentional biases doesn't dispense with the postulation of innate conceptual content; it just presupposes it.
- It may be that, in passages like the one just quoted, Karmiloff-Smith is only suggesting that it would be a help to the child to be (differentially) interested in speechlike sounds. That's quite plausible, in fact; but it doesn't even begin to explain how someone who is so biased manages "with time, to build up linguistic representations that are domain specific." As far as anybody knows, you need innate conceptual content to do that; indeed, as far as anybody knows, you need great gobs of it. (I am disposed to attend to the speech sounds that German speakers make; but I find learning German very hard for all that.)
- So much for some current kinds of modularity theories. Perhaps I should say at the outset that I think you'd have to be crazy to bet much on which, if any, of them is true. The study of mental architecture is in its infancy, and it looks to be developing very slowly. My modest ambition in what follows is just to indicate some doubts about Karmiloff-Smith's view. And, even here, I'm not going to argue for anything so positive or decisive as that she is plain wrong about modularity. I will, however, try to show that the ways she sets out her view, and the ways she undertakes to defend it, are insensitive to certain distinctions that a cognitive architect really ought to observe. And that, when this is all cleared up, what’s left may after all be true — who knows? — but, as things stand, neither the arguments for modularization (the thesis that cognitive architecture becomes increasingly modular with development) nor the arguments for demodularization (the thesis that information in modules becomes increasingly accessible with development), are persuasive.
Conclusion
- Where does all this leave us? There are two issues that everybody is trying to get clear on: What is the cognitive architecture of the adult mind? and, whatever it is, how did it get to be that way? I think the empirical results over the last couple of decades make a not implausible case that modular architecture is an appropriate idealization for some aspects of the organization of mature cognition. About the second question, however, nothing is really known; we're all just playing our hunches. Perhaps the deepest issue that divides people in the theory of cognitive development is whether there are ontogenetic processes that affect cognitive architecture. Karmiloff-Smith and Piaget are betting that there probably are; Chomsky and I are betting that there probably aren't. All I can tell you for sure is this: There may in fact be architectural changes in the course of the ontogeny of cognition, but nobody has found a clear case of one so far — and since the developmental plasticity of the mind has been a main theme of Anglo-American psychological speculation for a couple of centuries, I do think that fact is striking.
Paper Comment
In-Page Footnotes ("Fodor (Jerry) - There and Back Again: A Review of Annette Karmiloff-Smith's Beyond Modularity")
Footnote 2: Footnote 3:
- I’m not as sure as I'd like to be about what an epigenetic process is. Karmiloff-Smith provides the following gloss on Piaget's usage: 'For Piaget both gene expression and cognitive development are emergent products of a self-organizing system that is directly affected by its interaction with the environment" (9). But a self-organizing system that is, nevertheless, "directly affected by its interaction with the environment" is, to my taste, rather like a circle that nevertheless has comers. Probably "epigenetic" just means "not primarily input driven." I shall assume that is what it means.
"Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - Beyond Modularity: Preface"
Source: Karmiloff-Smith - Beyond Modularity, 1992
Preface
- This book aims not only to reach developmental psychologists, but to persuade students and scientists in other areas of cognitive science — philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, ethology, adult cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science — to treat cognitive development as a serious theoretical science contributing to the discussion of how the human mind is organized internally, and not as merely a cute empirical database about when external behavior can be observed. Nowadays much of the literature focuses on what cognitive science can offer the study of development. In this book, I concentrate on what a developmental perspective can offer cognitive science.
- As Piaget's conception of the sensorimotor infant is being severely undermined by new paradigms for studying infancy, the battle between nativism and constructivism once again rears its rather unconstructive head. In this book I do not choose between these two epistemological stands, one arguing for predominantly built-in knowledge and the other for a minimum innate underpinning to subsequent domain-general learning. Rather, I submit that nativism and Piaget's constructivism are complementary in fundamental ways, and that the ultimate theory of human cognition will encompass aspects of both. The state of the art in developmental theorizing is currently such that an exploration of the integration of nativism and Piaget's constructivism is timely.
- I spent some 13 years immersed in Piagetian theory at Geneva University, first as a student and then as a research collaborator. During that time, the home-grown Piagetians always considered me a heretic, both personally and theoretically. I refused to address Piaget as Patron, meaning "Boss," as he expected everyone in his department to do; I dared to put in writing that Piaget had underestimated the role of language in cognitive development; and, worse, I argued that sensorimotor development alone could never explain how language acquisition initially got off the ground — that there had to be some innate component, even if more general processes might operate in subsequent development. Yet each time I went out into the big wide world of psychology conferences, I was considered a prototypical constructivist Piagetian — one who knew about Descartes, Kant, and Hume but who had never even heard of the journal Child Development!
- Does this strange cocktail of Piagetian and anti-Piagetian theoretical musing mean that epistemological schizophrenia is setting in? No; I think it reflects the state of developmental theorizing in recent years, as dynamical systems theory and connectionism have started to offer some formal modeling of a number of Piagetian ideas while at the same time infancy research has suggested more innate underpinnings to the human mind than had previously been granted. Piagetians attribute the absolute minimum of innate structure to the human infant. Nativists attribute a great deal of built-in, domain-specific knowledge to the neonate, relegating learning to a less important role. Yet these epistemologies are not necessarily mutually exclusive for a theory of development. In this book I argue that a fundamental aspect of human development is the process by which information that is in a cognitive system (partly captured within a nativist stance) becomes knowledge to that system (partly captured within a constructivist stance). The theoretical discussions are illustrated by empirical findings from both linguistic and nonlinguistic development. This book is intended to excite the reader about the possibilities that a developmental perspective embracing both innate predispositions and constructivism might yield.
- Many friends and colleagues have influenced my thinking, not least Jean Piaget, Barbel Inhelder, Mimi Sinclair, and their numerous collaborators at Geneva University. If at times I seem somewhat anti-Piagetian, this in no way detracts from the enormous influence that my studies and my work at Geneva University still have on my thinking. I should also particularly like to acknowledge thought-provoking debates in recent years with all my present and previous colleagues at the Medical Research Council's Cognitive Development Unit in London — in particular its Director, John Morton. The CDU has been a most stimulating work environment, largely due to John's deep commitment to theoretical as well as experimental advances. Weekly meetings of the University College London's Cognitive Science faculty, organized by David Green, also provided a lively forum for exploring ideas. I should also like to acknowledge stimulating discussions at various times with ….
"Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - Taking Development Seriously"
Source: Karmiloff-Smith - Beyond Modularity, 1992, Chapter 1
"Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - The Child as a Linguist"
Source: Karmiloff-Smith - Beyond Modularity, 1992, Chapter 2
"Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - The Child as a Physicist"
Source: Karmiloff-Smith - Beyond Modularity, 1992, Chapter 3
"Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - The Child as a Mathematician"
Source: Karmiloff-Smith - Beyond Modularity, 1992, Chapter 4
"Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - The Child as a Psychologist"
Source: Karmiloff-Smith - Beyond Modularity, 1992, Chapter 5
"Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - The Child as a Notator"
Source: Karmiloff-Smith - Beyond Modularity, 1992, Chapter 6
"Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - Nativism, Domain Specificity, and Piaget's Constructivism"
Source: Karmiloff-Smith - Beyond Modularity, 1992, Chapter 7
"Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - Modeling Development: Representational Redescription and Connectionism"
Source: Karmiloff-Smith - Beyond Modularity, 1992, Chapter 8
"Karmiloff-Smith (Annette) - Beyond Modularity: Concluding Speculations"
Source: Karmiloff-Smith - Beyond Modularity, 1992, Chapter 9
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