"So, I started off with Piaget, and Piaget, like Freud, believed in general, across the board changes in how children think.
An alternative, though, is that there's separate modules, and this is a view developed, again, by Noam Chomsky, and also by the philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor, who claimed that the whole idea of a child developing as a single story is mistaken. What you get instead is there are separate pre-wired systems for reasoning about the world. These systems have some built-in knowledge, and they have to do some learning, but the learning pattern varies from system to system and there's a separateness to them.
Why should we take this view seriously?
Well, one reason is that there are developmental disorders that seem to involve damage to one system but not to another. And the classic case of this is a disorder known as autism. And autism is something I've always found a fascinating disorder for many reasons. And it could be taken as a striking illustration of how the social part of your brain is distinct from other parts of your brain.
So, what autism is, is a disorder that strikes about one in a thousand people, mostly boys. And the dominant problems concern — consist of a lack of social connectedness, problems with language, problems dealing with people, and more generally, a problem of what the psychologist, Simon Baron-Cohen has described as "mind blindness." In that autistic people show no impairments dealing with the physical world, they show no impairments on — they don't necessarily show any impairments on mathematical skills or spatial skills, but they have a lot of problems with people.
Now, many autistic children have no language; they're totally shut off from society. But even some of them who'd learned language and who managed to get some sort of independent life, nevertheless will suffer from a severe social impairment.
(...)
The answer is that the majority of people with autism have severe problems, and will not, and at this stage, with this level of therapy, will not lead a normal life."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007
An alternative, though, is that there's separate modules, and this is a view developed, again, by Noam Chomsky, and also by the philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor, who claimed that the whole idea of a child developing as a single story is mistaken. What you get instead is there are separate pre-wired systems for reasoning about the world. These systems have some built-in knowledge, and they have to do some learning, but the learning pattern varies from system to system and there's a separateness to them.
Why should we take this view seriously?
Well, one reason is that there are developmental disorders that seem to involve damage to one system but not to another. And the classic case of this is a disorder known as autism. And autism is something I've always found a fascinating disorder for many reasons. And it could be taken as a striking illustration of how the social part of your brain is distinct from other parts of your brain.
So, what autism is, is a disorder that strikes about one in a thousand people, mostly boys. And the dominant problems concern — consist of a lack of social connectedness, problems with language, problems dealing with people, and more generally, a problem of what the psychologist, Simon Baron-Cohen has described as "mind blindness." In that autistic people show no impairments dealing with the physical world, they show no impairments on — they don't necessarily show any impairments on mathematical skills or spatial skills, but they have a lot of problems with people.
Now, many autistic children have no language; they're totally shut off from society. But even some of them who'd learned language and who managed to get some sort of independent life, nevertheless will suffer from a severe social impairment.
(...)
The answer is that the majority of people with autism have severe problems, and will not, and at this stage, with this level of therapy, will not lead a normal life."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment