Do Children and Other Animals Think Like Scientists?

Speaker: Professor Marta Halina is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence
Series: Cambridge Philosophical Society

For decades, psychologists have characterised young children as little scientists, a comparison made famous by the 1999 book The Scientist in the Crib. A core claim of this perspective is that children (and other animals such as chimpanzees, dogs, and birds) use abstract theories to navigate the world, much like researchers discovering and applying general laws.

This idea is striking when contrasted with contemporary philosophy of science. Within this discipline, there is a consensus that scientists rarely understand the world through universal laws; instead, they operate in a piecemeal, pluralistic way. The world is tangled and dappled. To successfully predict and explain it, scientists often adopt a ‘case-worker’ approach: sifting through a collection of models to determine which one applies here and now. If scientific success relies on this case-worker strategy rather than through the application of general laws, then we should reassess how children and animals learn to navigate the causal world.

In this talk, I develop a case-worker account of how we navigate our everyday physical environments. I draw on embodied and predictive processing accounts of cognition and action to do so. Under this approach, generative models affect how an agent probes the world through actions such as touch or moving their eyes. These models are, in turn, continuously selected and adjusted based on contextual sensory information. Ultimately, this approach shows that successful causal understanding need not appeal to general laws. We do not need to reject the idea of the child as a scientist, but we do need to update our notion of what this means.