Presented by: RICHARD J.KOSCIEJEW
Carl Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist, who founded the analytical school of psychology. Jung broadened Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical approach, interpreting mental and emotional disturbances as an attempt to find personal and spiritual wholeness.
Born on July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland, the son of a Protestant clergyman, Jung developed during his lonely childhood an inclination for dreaming and fantasy that greatly influenced his adult work. After graduating in medicine in 1902 from the universities of Basel and Zürich, with a wide background in biology, zoology, palaeontology, and archaeology, he began his work on word association, in which a patient's responses to stimulus words revealed what Jung called ‘complexes’— a term that has since become universal. These studies brought him international renown and led him to a close collaboration with Freud. With the publication of Psychology of the Unconscious (1912; trans. 1916), however, Jung declared his independence from Freud's narrowly sexual interpretation of the libido by showing the close parallels between ancient myths and psychotic fantasies and by explaining human motivation in terms of a larger creative energy. He gave up the presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Society and co-founded a movement called analytical psychology.
During his remaining 50 years Jung developed his theories, drawing on a wide knowledge of mythology and history; travels to diverse cultures in New Mexico, India, and Kenya; and especially the dreams and fantasies of his childhood. In 1921 he published a major work, Psychological Types (trans. 1923), in which he dealt with the relationship between the conscious and unconscious and proposed the now well-known personality types, extrovert and introvert. He later made a distinction between the personal unconscious, or the repressed feelings and thoughts developed during an individual's life, and the collective unconscious, or those inherited feelings, thoughts, and memories shared by all humanity. The collective unconscious, according to Jung, is made up of what he called ‘archetypes,’ or primordial images. These correspond to such experiences as confronting death or choosing a mate and manifest themselves symbolically in religions, myths, fairy tales, and fantasies.
Jung's therapeutic approach aimed at reconciling the diverse states of personality, which he saw divided not only into the opposites of introvert and extrovert, but also into those of sensing and intuiting, and of feeling and thinking. By understanding how the personal unconscious integrates with the collective unconscious, Jung theorized, a patient can achieve a state of individuation, or wholeness of self.
Jung wrote voluminously, especially on analytical methods and the relationships between psychotherapy and religious belief. He died on June 6, 1961, in Küsnacht.
A theory is an organized set of principles that is designed to explain and predict something. Over the years, psychologists and other scientists have devised a variety of theories with which to explain observations and discoveries about child development. In addition to providing a broader framework of understanding, a good theory permits educated guesses—or hypotheses—about aspects of development that are not yet clearly understood. These hypotheses provide the basis for further research. A theory also has practical value. When a parent, educator, therapist, or policymaker makes decisions that affect the lives of children, a well-founded theory can guide them in responsible ways.
Theories can also limit understanding, such as when a poor theory misleadingly emphasizes unimportant influences on development and underestimates the significance of other factors. It is therefore essential that theories are carefully evaluated and tested through research, whose results often lead to improvements in theoretical claims. In addition, when theories are compared and contrasted, their strengths and limitations can be more easily identified.
There are four primary theories of child development: psychoanalytic, learning, cognitive, and sociocultural. Each offers insights into the forces guiding childhood growth. Each also has limitations, which is why many developmental scientists use more than one theory to guide their thinking about the growth of children.
Sigmund Freud was responsible for developing theories central to psychoanalysis, the psychology of human sexuality, and dream interpretation. Although his theories, published in the late 1800s, were quite controversial during his day, acceptance of his work did take place later in his life. Perhaps his most important contributions dealt with the connection between aberrant human behaviour and the unconscious mind.
At the end of the 19th century, Austrian physician Sigmund Freud developed the theory and techniques of psychoanalysis; it formed the basis for several later psychoanalytic theories of human development. Psychoanalytic theories share an emphasis on personality development and early childhood experiences. In the psychoanalytic view, early experiences shape one’s personality for an entire lifetime, and psychological problems in adulthood may have their origins in difficult or traumatic childhood experiences.
In addition, psychoanalytic theories emphasize the role of unconscious, instinctual drives in personality development. Some of these drives are sexual or aggressive in quality, and their unacceptability to the conscious mind causes them to be repressed in the unconscious mind. Here, they continue to exert a powerful influence on an individual’s behaviour, often without his or her awareness.
Most psychoanalytic theories portray development as a series of stages through which all children proceed. According to Freud, child development consists of five psychosexual stages in which a particular body region is the focus of sensual satisfactions; the focus of pleasure shifts as children progress through the stages.
German-born American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson proposed a theory of human development that stressed the interaction between psychological and social forces. Unlike Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, Erikson viewed development as lifelong.
During the oral stage, from birth to age one, the mouth, tongue, and gums are the focus of sensual pleasure, and the baby develops an emotional attachment to the person providing these satisfactions (primarily through feeding). During the anal stage, from ages 1 to 3, children focus on pleasures associated with control and self-control, primarily with respect to defecation and toilet training. In the phallic stage, from ages 3 to 6, children derive pleasure from genital stimulation. They are also interested in the physical differences between the sexes and identify with their same-sex parent. The latency phase, from ages 7 to 11, is when sensual motives subside and psychological energy is channelled into conventional activities, such as schoolwork. Finally, during the genital stage, from adolescence through adulthood, individuals develop mature sexual interests.
An American psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, proposed a related series of psychosocial stages of personality growth that more strongly emphasize social influences within the family. Erikson’s eight stages span the entire life course, and, contrary to Freud’s stages, each involves a conflict in the social world with two possible outcomes. In infancy, for example, the conflict is ‘trust vs. mistrust’ based on whether the baby is confident that others will provide nurturance and care. In adolescence, ‘identity vs. role confusion’ defines the teenager’s search for self-understanding. Erikson’s theory thus emphasizes the interaction of internal psychological growth and the support of the social world.
Psychoanalytic theories offer a rich portrayal of personality growth that emphasizes the complex emotional—and sometimes irrational—forces within each person. These theories are hard to prove or disprove, however, because they are based on unconscious processes inaccessible to scientific experimentation.
Classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an animal’s natural response to one object or sensory stimulus transfers to another stimulus. This illustration shows how a dog can learn to salivate to the sound of a tuning fork, and an experiment first carried out in the early 1900s by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. For conditioning to occur, the pairing of the food with the tuning fork must be repeated many times, so that the dog eventually learns to associate the two items.
Learning theorists emphasize the role of environmental influences in shaping the way a person develops. In their view, child development is guided by both deliberate and unintended learning experiences in the home, peer group, school, and community. Therefore, childhood growth is significantly shaped by the efforts of parents, teachers, and others to socialize children in desirable ways. According to learning theories, the same principles that explain how people can use a bicycle or computer also explain how children acquire social skills, emotional self-control, reasoning strategies, and the physical skills of walking and running.
American psychologist B.F.Skinner became famous for his pioneering research on learning and behaviour. During his 60-year career, Skinner discovered important principles of operant conditioning, a type of learning that involves reinforcement and punishment. A strict behaviourist, Skinner believed that operant conditioning could explain even the most complex of human behaviours.
One kind of learning occurs when a child’s actions are followed by a reward or punishment. A reward, also called a reinforcer, increases the probability that behaviour will be repeated. For example, a young child may regularly draw pictures because she receives praise from her parents after completing each one. A punishment decreases the probability that behaviour will be repeated. For example, a child who touches a hot stove and burns his fingertips is not likely to touch the stove again. American psychologist B. F. Skinner devoted his career to explaining how human behaviour is affected by its consequences - a process he called operant conditioning - and to describing the positive and constructive ways that reinforcement and punishment can be used to guide children’s behaviour.
People learn much of what they know simply by observing others. Here a child learns to use a lawnmower by observing his father’s behaviour and imitating it with a toy lawnmower.
Another kind of learning, classical conditioning, occurs when a person makes a mental association between two events or stimuli. When conditioning has occurred, merely encountering the first stimulus produces a response once associated only with the second stimulus. For example, babies begin sucking when they are put in a familiar nursing posture, children fear dogs whose barking has startled them in the past, and students cringe at the sound of school bells that signal that they are tardy. Classical conditioning was first studied by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900s and later by American psychologist John B. Watson.
A third kind of learning consists of imitating the behaviour of others. A boy may acquire his father’s style of talking, his mother’s tendency to roll her eyes, and his favourite basketball player’s moves on the court. In doing so, he also acquires expectations about the consequences of these behaviours. This type of learning has been studied extensively by American psychologist Albert Bandura. His social learning theory emphasizes how learning through observation and imitation affects behaviour and thought.
Learning theories provide extremely useful ways of understanding how developmental changes in behaviour and thinking occur and, for some children, why behaviour problems arise. These theories can be studied scientifically and practically applied. Critics point out, however, that because of their emphasis on the guidance of the social environment, learning theorists sometimes neglect children’s active role in their own understanding and development.
A child in the second grade successfully completes part of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, a widely used intelligence test for children. In this part of the test, the child is shown a picture of an abstract design and then asked to reconstruct that design using red and white blocks.
Understanding how children think is crucial to understanding their development because children’s perceptions of life events often determine how these events affect them. For example, a five-year-old who believes that her parents’ marital problems are her fault is affected much differently than an adolescent who has a better understanding of marriage and relationships. Cognitive theorists focus on the development of thinking and reasoning as the key to understanding childhood growth.
Gifted children’s master subjects much earlier and learn more quickly than average children do, psychologists say. But these same gifts, which set them apart from other children, may lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness. In this Scientific American article, psychologist Ellen Winner describes the educational and emotional challenges that gifted children face.
The best-known theory of cognitive development was developed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who became interested in how children think and construct their own knowledge. Based on his studies and observations, Piaget theorized that children proceed through four distinct stages of cognitive development: the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete-operational stage, and the formal-operational stage.
During the sensorimotor stage, which lasts from birth to about age 2, understanding is based on immediate sensory experience and actions. Thought is very practical but lacking in mental concepts or ideas. In the pre-operational stage, which spans the preschool years (about ages 2 to 6), children’s understanding becomes more conceptual. Thinking involves mental concepts that are independent of immediate experience, and language enables children to think about unseen events, such as thoughts and feelings. The young child’s reasoning is intuitive and subjective. During the concrete-operational stage, from about 7 to 11 years of age, children engage in objective, logical mental processes that make them more careful, systematic thinkers. Around age 12 children attain the formal-operational stage, when they can think about abstract ideas, such as ethics and justice. They can also reason about hypothetical possibilities and deduce new concepts.
According to Piaget, children progress through these four stages by applying their current thinking processes to new experiences; gradually, they modify these processes to better accommodate reality. This occurs not through direct instruction, but rather through the child’s own mental activity and internal motivation to understand.
Information-processing theories are based on similarities between the human mind and a computer, both of which are high-speed information-processing devices. These theories describe cognitive growth as the gradual acquisition of more sophisticated strategies for organizing information, solving problems, storing and retrieving knowledge, and evaluating solutions. Like Piaget, information-processing theorists believe that children acquire these skills through their everyday efforts to understand and master intellectual challenges.
Cognitive theories provide insights into how a child’s mental processes underlie many aspects of his or her development. However, critics argue that Piaget underestimated the sophistication of the cognitive abilities of young children. Information-processing theorists have also been faulted for portraying children as little computers rather than as inventive, creative thinkers.
Many developmental scientists believe that children do not proceed through universal stages or processes of development. To sociocultural theorists, children’s growth is deeply guided by the values, goals, and expectations of their culture. In this perspective, children acquire skills valued by their culture—such as reading, managing crops, or using an abacus—through the guidance and support of older people. Thus, developmental abilities may differ for children in different societies, and development cannot be separated from its cultural context.
One of the pioneers of sociocultural theory was Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, whose writings in the 1920s and 1930s emphasized how children’s interaction with adults contributes to the development of skills. According to Vygotsky, sensitive adults are aware of a child’s readiness for new challenges, and they structure appropriate activities to help the child develop new skills. Adults act as mentors and teachers, leading the child into the zone of proximal development—Vygotsky’s term for the range of skills that the child cannot perform unaided but can master with adult assistance. A parent may encourage simple number concepts, for example, by counting beads with the child or measuring cooking ingredients together, filling in the numbers that the child cannot remember. As children participate in such experiences daily with parents, teachers, and others, they gradually learn the culture’s practices, skills, and values.
Sociocultural theory highlights how children incorporate culture into their reasoning, social interaction, and self-understanding. It also explains why children growing up in different societies are likely to have significantly different skills. Theorists like Vygotsky are sometimes criticized, however, for neglecting the influence of biological maturation, which guides childhood growth independently of culture.
Scientists employ many different methods to learn how young children act and think. This laboratory experiment tests how infants attend to visual images.
Studying children presents many challenges. Young children cannot easily put their understanding into words, and their attention span is limited, so scientists must find creative ways of discovering what they know. In addition, all human development involves change, so scientists must study how behaviour and thinking change over time to derive conclusions about childhood growth.
Developmental scientists often study children in their everyday settings—at home, at school, on the playground, in a child-care center, or in the neighbourhood—because they seek to understand children’s behaviour in these natural contexts. Furthermore, children act more typically in these settings. For some research questions, however, the controlled environment of a laboratory is required—particularly when children’s responses to experimental procedures must be carefully studied. Sometimes laboratories are designed to resemble a living room at home so that children feel more comfortable and respond more typically.
There are many methods researchers use to learn about how children act and think. They can simply observe children without intruding on their actions. They can interview children face-to-face or use questionnaires to survey older children about their thoughts, knowledge, and reactions. Researchers may also learn about children by collecting information from others who know them well, such as their parents. These secondary source reports can be quite informative when children are too young to give reliable information about themselves. Sometimes scientists administer psychological tests—such as tests of intelligence or memory ability—to evaluate what children can do on occasion, researchers conduct case studies of specific individuals, usually children who have unusual characteristics or exceptional experiences, in the hope of generalizing their findings to a larger population.
Experiments are carefully designed procedures, usually conducted in a laboratory setting, that measure children’s reactions to specific events. Because their conditions are so carefully controlled, experiments are well suited to understanding the causes of behaviour and development. The experimenter manipulates one factor in a situation, keeping all other variables constant, to determine the effect of that manipulation. An experiment could be designed, for example, to study how the facial expressions of mothers influence their infants when an unfamiliar adult suddenly appears. In one experimental condition, the mother might be instructed to look cheerful, and in another condition she might be instructed to look frightened. By observing the infant’s reaction to the stranger in each condition, and keeping all other aspects of the situation the same, the experimenter could determine the effect of the mother’s facial expression.
Collection of physiological data is common in many experiments. For example, experimenters may measure heart rate to determine whether children are excited or emotionally aroused, monitor the brain waves of infants to detect changes in mental state, or track the eye movements of babies to determine exactly how long they gaze at particular objects.
To learn about how children change over time, scientists use one of two basic research designs: longitudinal research and cross-sectional research. In longitudinal research, the same children are repeatedly observed and tested as they age, enabling researchers to identify the later consequences of early influences on them. However, such studies take years to complete, are expensive, and run the risk that the subjects (or researchers) will die, drop out of the study, or become unavailable. In cross-sectional research, different groups of children are observed at each of several ages. This enables scientists to study development more quickly and easily, but the long-term effects of early influences cannot be identified because each child is studied at only one point in time.
In conducting research, developmental scientists must take care to ensure that their studies are objectively designed with procedures that children can understand, and that children are free from stress or coercion when they participate. Considerable thought and creativity are required to balance the needs and perspectives of children with the goals of the scientific study.
Human development begins with conception, the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. Over the next nine months, astounding advances in physical growth occur. The fertilized egg becomes a complex newborn capable of surviving (with assistance) outside of the womb. The prenatal months are not only a time of dramatic developmental changes, but also the most hazardous period of the life course. A developing being is the most vulnerable to harm during periods of very rapid growth. However, hazards to prenatal development can be reduced through the mother’s conscientious care of herself and her developing child.
A new human being progresses from a single cell to an embryo, and from an embryo to a fetus during the first eight weeks of development. In this brief time, the developing human changes dramatically from one cell to a recognizable human form in which the rudimentary nervous, digestive, respiratory, and other body systems have been established.
The nine months of prenatal development are usually divided into three stages. These are the germinal period, the embryonic period, and the fetal period.
During the germinal period, which lasts from conception until day 14, the fertilized egg, called a zygote, undergoes rapid cell division and growth. At the same time, its cells begin to differentiate and cluster to assume specialized roles. For example, some cells begin to form the support structures of the placenta, which will provide food and oxygen to the fetus, while others begin to form structures of the developing human. Another significant achievement of the germinal stage is implantation of the cell mass, now called the blastocyst, into the inner wall of the mother’s uterus, where it will remain for the duration of prenatal development. Implantation also triggers hormonal changes in the mother’s body that enables it to nurture the developing human.
As a fertilized egg goes through its first divisions, the daughters’ cells become progressively smaller. When there are a hundred or more cells, they form a hollow ball of cells, called a blastula, surrounding a fluid-filled cavity. Later divisions produce three layers of cells—endoderm (inner), mesoderm (middle), and ectoderm (outer)—from which the principal features of the animal will differentiate.
The embryonic period lasts from day 14 through the eighth week. During this time, major structures and organ systems begin to form. During the fourth week, for example, the brain begins to develop, a primitive heart starts to beat, and the eyes, ears, and mouth begin to form. By eight weeks after conception, the embryo has most of its basic organ systems, facial features have formed, and even fingers and toes have appeared.
During the fetal period, from the ninth week until birth, major organs grow in size and complexity, the muscular and nervous systems develop, and the sex organs form. By the fourth or fifth month, mothers can begin to feel the fetus moving within them. The fetus startles in response to sudden, loud noises outside the womb, and its hiccupping can be detected. Brain development is dramatic. Nearly all nerve cells that the brain will use throughout life are formed, and brain regions become specialized in function. As birth approaches, the fetus grows significantly in size and adds protective fat stores in preparation for life outside the womb.
Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is a set of birth defects caused by heavy consumption of alcohol during pregnancy. Children with this condition typically have a misproportioned head, facial deformities, mental retardation, and behavioural problems. FAS is the leading known cause of mental retardation in the Western Hemisphere.
Although the mother’s protective womb and the structures of the placenta provide considerable protection to the developing human organism, there are many potential hazards to prenatal growth. These hazards can have a devastating impact on the embryo or fetus, especially in the early months of development, when organ systems and body structures are the most unstable and vulnerable. Substances that can harm the embryo or fetus and cause birth defects or death is called teratogens (pronounced ter-AT-oh-jins).
Two factors are important in determining the impact that a particular teratogens might have on the developing human. First, the timing of exposure determines how the body is harmed or if, in fact, any damage occurs at all. Physical systems that are especially vulnerable early in prenatal growth, such as the heart and major limbs, may not be significantly affected later in development when they have matured more. Second, the amount of exposure determines the extent of harm that may occur. The frequency and severity of exposure to teratogens often directly predict the extent of damage to the fetus. Moreover, hazards can interact with one another, so that limited exposures to several potential harms can have a compounding effect.
There are many kinds of potential harms. Viruses and bacteria that cause disease in the mother can cross the placental barrier to infect and damage the fetus. These include the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the organisms that cause syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections. German measles (rubella) in the mother in early pregnancy can cause severe defects in the fetus, such as blindness, deafness, heart problems, and brain damage.
Certain medicinal drugs, such as aspirin and antidepressants, may harm the fetus, and maternal use of psychoactive drugs like heroin, cocaine, and marijuana can cause long-term behavioural problems or learning disabilities in the child. Moderate or heavy consumption of alcoholic beverages during pregnancy can cause serious damage to the fetus, including fetal alcohol syndrome, and use of tobacco can impair fetal growth and lead to other complications. The mother’s exposure to lead, mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and other industrial chemicals—through, for example, drinking contaminated water or eating fish from polluted waters—can harm prenatal growth and cause birth defects because these substances are absorbed by the fetus.
Finally, nutritional deficiencies in the mother’s diet can harm the growing fetus. Folic acid deficiency, for example, can lead to neural tube defects such as spina bifida. As knowledge of potential hazards to prenatal development grows, expectant mothers and their partners can better develop healthy habits that increase their chances of having a healthy baby.
Helpless to survive on their own, newborn babies nevertheless possess a remarkable range of skills that aid in their survival. Newborns can see, hear, taste, smell, and feel pain; vision is the least developed sense at birth but improves rapidly in the first months. Crying communicates their need for food, comfort, or stimulation. Newborns also have reflexes for sucking, swallowing, grasping, and turning their head in search of their mother’s nipple.
The full-term newborn, or neonate, has remarkable competencies for surviving in the outside world. Many of these are reflexes—automatic or involuntary responses. The sucking reflex, for example, causes newborns to begin to suck on anything touching their lips, and the rooting reflex causes them to turn their heads toward anything that touches the cheek and to attempt to suck on it. A surprisingly strong grasping reflex causes newborns to clasp their hands around anything put in their palms. In addition, newborns are highly attentive to the events around them. They look toward moving objects and listen closely to the sound of voices—especially their mother’s voice, which they heard inside the womb. These characteristics deepen parents’ emotional attachments to their newborns.
Caring for a newborn can be challenging, however, because it takes time for the child to become physiologically organized for life outside the womb. Parents observe this in the newborn’s erratic sleeping patterns, unexplained fussiness, and unpredictable behavioural states—for example, changing from focused attention to deep sleep almost unexpectedly.
Adapting to life with a newborn is especially difficult for parents if the child is premature (born too early) or of low birth weight, because such newborns can require days or weeks of hospitalization until they are ready to go home. Advances in medical technology have increased the survival rates of children born very early. Most hospitals now allow parents to become involved in the care of their newborn so that family relationships can begin to form.
A period of dramatic growth, infancy lasts from birth to around two years age. By the end of infancy children can walk, run, and speak in simple sentences. Infancy is also a time when children form emotional attachments to their caregivers.
Although birth is the culmination of months of prenatal development, people commonly regard infancy, from birth to age two, as a time of beginnings. Infancy is when personality, social attachments, thinking, and language first take shape. In two short years, the helpless newborn grows into a toddler with an impressive range of physical, cognitive, and social skills.
Infants develop motor skills in a highly predictable sequence, but they differ in the age at which they achieve these skills. The bars in this chart show the age span at which most children reach a particular developmental milestone. Some children will attain these milestones earlier or later than the ranges shown.
The child grows faster in infancy than at any later time. Physical size increases and body proportions change as the top-heavy newborn evolves into a toddler with a body more closely resembling an adult. These changes in body proportions help to account for significant improvements in motor coordination, balance, and physical dexterity during infancy.
A child takes her first steps. Most children learn to walk by 15 months of age, although some normal children do not begin to walk until 18 months. Mastery of walking soon leads to running and jumping.
By the age of two, children can walk, run, jump in place, pick up small objects with their fingers, and build towers with blocks. Improvements in sensory ability also contribute to these accomplishments. Changes in the eye, ear, and other sense organs, together with developments in brain organization, enable two-year-olds to see, hear, and respond with greater discrimination than ever before.
Human beings grow faster in infancy than at any other time of life. On average, infant boys are slightly taller and heavier than infant girls. Growth charts like these help health-care providers assess whether physical growth is proceeding normally. Percentiles indicate the percentage of the population a specific individual would equal or exceed. For example, a one-year-old girl whose weight is at the 10th percentile weighs the same or more than only 10 percent of girls the same age.
The brain grows significantly in size and complexity in infancy. Although most of the brain’s neurons (nerve cells) develop prenatally, organization and interconnection of these neurons depend significantly on experiences after birth. Normal visual stimulation, for example, organizes the infant brain’s visual pathways to facilitate proper sight and perception. Hearing everyday sounds and speech organizes the brain regions related to sound and language. Thus, ordinary experiences over a broad period of time naturally provoke the developing brain to organize itself. There is no evidence that special or rare experiences are required for the brain’s growth, or that enhanced early stimulation will yield improvements in brain capacity. However, infants who are deprived of normal stimulation and care is at risk of impaired brain development.
Normal physical development in infancy requires a nutritionally adequate diet, immunizations to guard against infectious diseases, and protections from environmental hazards (such as lead-based paints) and from dangerous drugs. Infants also need the vigilant attention of caregivers because accidents are the leading cause of injury and death for the very young. Finally, early vision and hearing screenings are imperative to identify any deficiencies that could deprive the developing brain of essential stimulation.
Do babies have a basic ability to count? In one test of five-month-old infants, American psychologist Karen Wynn placed two Mickey Mouse dolls on a stage, hid the dolls behind a screen, then added another doll behind the screen as the infant watched. The screen was then removed to reveal two, not three, dolls. Infants in the study, like this five-month-old, stared longer at the incorrect outcome than when three dolls were revealed, indicating surprise at the outcome and suggesting that they expected to see three dolls. Some researchers interpret these findings as evidence that young infants have a simple understanding of quantity.
The dramatic pace of brain development in infants helps to explain their hunger for stimulation. Infants crave novelty and become bored with familiarity. They integrate knowledge from different senses, such as looking toward the source of an interesting sound. They can make sophisticated inferences about an object’s shape, size, and physical properties just by watching its actions. These characteristics illustrate one of the most important features of cognitive development: Young children do not passively wait to be taught about the world’s mysteries. The young mind is remarkably active and self-organizing.
Infants’ cognitive abilities develop rapidly. After only a few months infants can mentally group similar objects into a simple category, such as round, square, soft, or flat. They also show special interest in objects that look or feel different from familiar ones. Early in the first year, infants appreciate object permanence—the concept that objects and people continue to exist even when they cannot be seen.
Infants’ long-term memory for specific events is very fragile at a few months of age. However, studies have demonstrated that infants can retrieve memories when given appropriate cues, such as sounds and objects that were present at the original event. By eight or nine months of age, the memory abilities of infants have improved. For example, they can imitate behaviour they witnessed a day earlier. By the end of the first year, infants can discriminate between male and female faces (based on features like hair length) and between different categories of animals (understanding, for example, that a parakeet is more like a hawk than a horse).
Despite his mother’s beckoning, an infant hesitates to cross the ‘visual cliff’— an apparent steep drop that is actually covered by transparent glass. Psychologists in the 1960s found that most infants 6 to 14 months of age were reluctant to crawl over the cliff, suggesting they had the ability to perceive depth. Most psychologists believe that the ability to perceive depth is partly innate and partly a product of early visual experience.
Cognitive growth is also motivated by infants’ fascination with ‘making things happen’ through their own efforts, by which they learn about causes and effects. Parents observe their baby’s mealtime experiments with gravity (dropping food on the floor), physical force (pushing a toy against the baby food jar), and movement (pulling on a tablecloth to reach the milk). Beneath these apparently casual activities is an active mind that is learning about the consequences of actions.
Infancy is also when the basics of language development occur. At birth, infants have a natural ability—surpassing that of adults—to hear the differences between speech sounds in any of the world’s languages, even sounds they have never previously heard. They lose this capacity by the end of the first year, when their speech perception becomes specific to the language sounds they hear at home. By this time, their babbling has also started to become language-specific, as babies practice the speech sounds they hear and will use.
An infant’s first recognizable word, usually spoken around the first birthday, is preceded by several months during which he or she clearly comprehends many simple sentences and expressions. For example, a ten-month-old baby who is asked ‘Where’s Mommy?’ will usually look in her direction? A baby’s first words are not used very precisely. Depending on context and inflection, for example, a single word, ‘Daddy,’ may refer to a specific person, many people (all male adults), an inquiry (‘Where is Daddy?’), an explanation (‘Daddy’s there’), or have other meaning. Vocabulary growth is slow early in the second year, but by 18 months a typical toddler’s vocabulary begins to explode. New words are learned weekly, and later, daily. By the end of the second year, most toddlers combine words into simple phrases and sentences, such as ‘More juice.’
A toddler’s everyday social interaction with caregivers provides rich opportunities for language development. Adults’ ‘baby talk’—marked by a high and varied pitch, simple words, and a slower rate of speech—is well suited to early language learning. When caregivers talk to toddlers about shared experiences, they contribute to vocabulary growth, conversational skills, and understanding and memory of events.
A five-month-old boy delights in his mother’s smile and voice. Warm, responsive care helps babies to develop emotional attachments to their parents and to develop trust in others.
Close relationships with people are vital for the infant’s personality and social growth. Even newborns seem to appreciate the importance of people. They pay special attention to faces and voices, and social stimulation provokes greater interest and emotion than does interaction with objects.
In early infancy, social relationships are important for helping to manage the baby’s emotions and temperamental individuality. Young infants exhibit a variety of emotions—including joy, distress, surprise, interest, and sadness—but have difficulty managing these feelings, and rely on caregivers to soothe and regulate emotional arousal. As they later develop a broader emotional repertoire, they turn to adults for cues about situations that might be scary or dangerous, such as encountering an unfamiliar adult. In this way, emotional development is guided by parents and other caregivers.
Young children vary in their temperamental qualities. Inborn characteristics like mood, adaptability, activity level, and ‘sooth
-ability’ affect the child’s responses to situations, emotional tendencies, and tolerance of stress. Caregivers influence personality development by how they respond to a baby’s temperament. Sensitive caregivers who can adapt their child rearing practices to the child’s individuality—such as providing a high-activity-level child with plenty of opportunities to expend energy—encourage more positive, constructive personality characteristics, regardless of temperament. By contrast, when caregivers cannot accommodate to a child’s temperamental qualities, children may develop behavioural difficulties because their emerging personality conflicts with social expectations and demands.
As infants mature in the early months, they participate more with their parents in face-to-face play that has no other purpose than mutual delight. This coordinated interaction of gazing, smiles, vocalizations, movement, and touch is built on the baby’s recognition of the parents as familiar people, and the parents’ awareness that their child responds in special ways to them alone. By the end of the first year, infants have developed emotional attachments to their parents (and other regular caregivers) and rely on them for security and confidence, especially in unfamiliar settings.
Attachments can vary in their degree of security for the baby. Secure attachments arise from sensitive, responsive care and provide a foundation of trust that an infant may generalize to other relationships. Insensitive or inconsistent care may instead cause infants to develop insecure attachments that are characterized by uncertainty or distrust in the attachment figure. Secure attachments are thus an important foundation for social and personality development arising from the baby’s experience of early care. Sensitive, responsive care remains, but a continuing need throughout childhood.
Social relationships in infancy also influence the growth of self-awareness and self-understanding. A baby’s awareness of the responses of other people contributes to a dawning sense of individuality. In the second year, toddlers become capable of self-recognition in a mirror and begin to adopt others’ evaluations of them when feeling proud or guilty (for example, ‘Me big!’ after a mother has applauded her child’s success at using a spoon). In these and other ways, close relationships help very young children begin to understand who they are.
The word infancy comes from the Latin word infans, meaning ‘without speech.’ Although children are indeed speaking words by age two, early childhood (ages two to six) is when language revolutionizes children’s thinking, remembering, and understanding of emotions, self, and the social world. Once regarded as ‘egocentric,’ preschoolers are now viewed by developmental scientists as deeply interested in how others’ beliefs, feelings, and desires compare with their own.
Boys and girls grow at a similar rate until adolescence, when, on average, boys become taller and heavier. Health-care providers use growth charts such as these to help evaluate the physical growth of children and adolescents. Percentiles indicate what percent of the population a specific individual would equal or exceed. For example, a 10-year-old boy whose weight is at the 90th percentile weighs the same or more than 90 percent of all 10-year-old boys.
Between ages two and six, children with adequate nutrition and health care typically grow 8 cm (3 in) and add nearly 2 kg (4.4 lbs) annually, but the range of variation for normal height and weight is broad. Rapid physical development is combined with changes in body proportions, strength, and coordination that enable preschoolers to skip, throw a ball, ride a tricycle, draw with a crayon, and perform other feats that are beyond any toddler. Children become taller, slimmer, heavier, and less top-heavy and, by age six, their body proportions resemble those of the adults. However, their high activity level and exuberance, together with limited judgment, make accident prevention a major concern of caregivers.
As the brain continues to mature throughout early childhood, there are dramatic improvements in thinking, language, memory, emotion regulation, and self-control. For example, early childhood witnesses growth in brain areas governing self-regulation, which is why six-year-olds are so much more skilled than toddlers at sitting still and playing games like ‘Simon Says.’ Advances in memory, language, and other abilities are also based on the connection and refinement of brain pathways in early childhood.
American linguist, writer, teacher, and political activist Noam Chomsky believes the human brain is especially constructed to detect and reproduce language and that the ability to form and understand language is innate to all human beings. According to Chomsky, young children learn and apply grammatical rules and vocabulary as they are exposed to them and do not require initial formal teaching.
The mind’s growth during early childhood is unmistakable. Preschoolers constantly ask ‘Why?’ They animatedly share the day’s events and proudly display their knowledge of animals and other interests. Their mushrooming language ability supports further cognitive growth, giving them access to the knowledge of others and enabling them to share their thoughts and learn more. Adults are inevitably impressed with the fantastic imaginations of preschoolers and with their deep interest in understanding the world, especially people.
The intellectual achievements of early childhood are remarkable, although many abilities remain limited or only partially developed. In the area of memory, preschoolers’ recall of specific past experiences is notoriously unreliable and incomplete. For example, they may recall events out of sequence or fail to remember key parts. Yet a skilled questioner can often help preschoolers reveal accurate memories by asking them about specific parts of an experience and helping them reconstruct the event. One reason why preschoolers sometimes seem to have poor memories is that they often remember only the features of an experience that capture their attention, rather than aspect’s adults consider relevant. For example, a child who attended a baseball game might remember eating peanuts, standing up, and singing, but not who won the game. Preschoolers are better at remembering the general sequence of familiar events. For example, four-year-olds understand that going to the grocery store involves getting a shopping cart, selecting food, paying the cashier, and loading the groceries in the car.
Preschoolers are adept at solving practical problems, like moving a step stool in front of the sink to reach the faucet. Most lack the logical reasoning skills that support formal or abstract problem solving. Simple mathematics is beyond them, for example, because of the mental flexibility and abstraction it requires. Nevertheless, they show remarkable solutions to informal challenges. For example, many five-year-olds can figure out how a bird’s nest is constructed, especially with an adult’s guidance, by observing its ingredients and imagining where the bird found them. Proper use of numbers comes gradually. At age three, most children have difficulty following basic number rules. They may count an object more than once and may count in the wrong order. By age five, most children have mastered these basic principles of counting.
One of the compelling interests of young children is people–especially what goes on in people’s minds. As children mature, they begin to grasp how mental processes work. At age two, children have a simple awareness that intentions guide people’s actions. At age three, children can appreciate how beliefs and desires are subjective, private mental experiences that differ between people. By age five, children realize that thoughts may not accurately reflect reality—people can be mistaken or fooled. As young children continue to grow and develop their ‘theory of mind,’ they can better understand others and themselves, and become more skilled social partners.
Early childhood is a time of amazing strides in language development. By age three, children are already putting words together into simple sentences, mastering grammar, and undergoing a ‘vocabulary explosion’ that will result, by age six, in a vocabulary of more than 10,000 words. Preschoolers acquire new words at a staggering rate—five to six new words daily - as they employ intuitive rules for understanding the word meanings on their first exposure to them. Young children also show considerable grammatical awareness in how they put words together into sentences. Sometimes this causes children to overextend the meanings of words beyond their appropriate use or to over regularize grammatical rules by applying them to irregular forms. For example, a four-year-old might say ‘Grandpa bought a toy for me,’ misapplying the rule for adding ed to make a verb past tense. When adults demonstrated correct usage—for example, by responding ‘Really, Grandpa bought a toy for you?’—children master grammar more rapidly.
Very young children, such as these two-year-olds, tend to play alongside one another rather than with each other. They also do not understand the concept of sharing their possessions. As children grow older, they learn to interact more with their playmates and to consider the interests of others.
The cognitive accomplishments of early childhood—particularly, communication through language and a developing concept of how others think and feel—transform preschoolers’ social interaction and self-understanding. By age two or three, a child’s emotional repertoire broadens to include self-referential emotions such as pride, guilt, shame, and embarrassment, and the evaluations of others begin to influence the preschooler’s self-concept. The three-year-old’s insistence on ‘doing it myself’ also reveals developing self-awareness. Throughout early childhood, preschoolers correct themselves as they are drawing, tying shoelaces, and performing other skills, demonstrating their growing capacity for self-monitoring and their motivation to be competent.
Beginning at age three, moreover, preschoolers begin to remember events in terms of their personal significance. These ‘autobiographical memories’ help to provide a continuous sense of identity throughout life. Awareness of being a boy or a girl is also an important facet of developing identity, as children begin to enact gender roles and stereotypes around age three. By the end of the preschool years, children are adept at describing themselves not only in physical terms (big, fast) but also in psychological terms (friendly, shy).
As young children develop their own sense of self, they increasingly come into conflict with their parents. The way parents handle these conflicts’ influences the quality of their relationship with their children.
The emotional attachments of young children to their parents (and other caregivers) remain a cornerstone of psychological well-being in early childhood. But as young children develop their sense of self and learn to negotiate, compromise, resist, and assert their own preferences, they are likely to come into conflict with their caregivers. At the same time, caregivers increasingly set limits and expect compliance, based on the child’s developing capacities for self-control.
The parents’ approach to discipline and to conflict resolution has important effects on the quality of the parent-child relationship and the child’s early personality growth. Generally, developmental scientists have found that when parents frequently exercise power and authority to overcome their children’s assertiveness, the children comply but are also likely to become angry and frustrated—and to be defiant when the parent is not present. Often, children of parents who use physical punishment act aggressively toward others. Parental strategies that emphasize communicating firm and consistent expectations and their rationale, as well as listening receptively to the child’s views, foster the child’s cooperation and a more harmonious parent-child relationship. An affectionate parent-child relationship, in turn, enhances the child’s compliance and cooperation. Young children are motivated to comply with an adult’s expectations when they are emotionally committed to maintaining a strong, warm relationship with that person.
Conflicts with others can be valuable sources of social and emotional understanding for young children. Nothing focuses a child’s attention on what another is thinking or feeling more than the realization that conflict must be resolved. For example, a young boy who turns to his mother for comfort after a fight with his brother may learn from her why his brother felt as he did. With such guidance, preschoolers can better comprehend and empathize with other people’s feelings and perspectives. This knowledge also helps them cope with their own emotions and deal with future conflicts.
During middle childhood, from about ages 6 to 12, children acquire heightened capacities for judgment, reasoning, social understanding, emotion management, and self-awareness. At the same time, the social world of middle childhood broadens beyond the family to include the school, neighbourhood, peer group, and other influences. Children begin to perceive themselves in multiple roles and relationships besides those of the family, even though family relationships remain central.
By contrast to the rapid physical development of the earlier years, children grow more slowly and gradually during middle childhood. Even so, children who are well nourished gain about 6 cm (2.5 in) in height and 1.8 to 2.3 kg (4 to 5 lb) in weight each year. Children typically become slimmer as their body proportion’s change. Muscular growth and better coordination enable children to ride a bicycle, run faster and for longer distances, participate in organized sports, write neatly with a pencil, learn to sew, and acquire other skills that require greater strength, endurance, or precision than younger children can manage. Brain growth contributes to these physical achievements, especially as brain pathways governing sensation, action, and thinking become speedier.
Children vary in physical size, weight, and coordination. During middle childhood, these differences can affect social and personal adjustment as children compare their characteristics and capabilities to those of their peers. Although many variations in physique are attributable to individual differences in rate of maturation and are not necessarily enduring, some can foreshadow potentially long-term difficulties for children. Childhood obesity, for example, can signal a broader problem if it arises from inactivity (such as watching too much television) or poor eating habits. Moreover, obesity in middle childhood can be damaging and self-perpetuating if it caused a child to be teased and rejected by friends and to develop a self-image as unattractive, inactive, and isolated.
Conservation is the principle that the physical properties of an object remain the same despite changes in its appearance. In the test of conservation pictured, the child was first asked to compare identical amounts of liquid in the two short glasses. Then liquid from the middle glass was poured into the taller, skinnier glass. The child has indicated that the amounts of liquid in the two different glasses are still the same, indicating that she understands conservation. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget believed that the ability to understand conservation marks an important developmental milestone for children.
It is no accident that throughout most of the world, children begin formal education at age six or seven. The intellectual skills of middle childhood are well suited for school. Children become capable of reasoning logically and systematically, whether about a lunar eclipse, chess, or the motives of story characters. Their thinking is also more fluid and flexible: A grade-schooler can follow a line of reasoning—say, solving an equation—and, realizing that an error has been made, mentally reverse course and start from the beginning again. A grasp of logical principles helps older children readily understand science, math, and many other subjects. They can concentrate better, and longer, than before.
A seven-year-old girl receives help from her mother as she learns to read Chinese. Reading ability, vocabulary, and grammar skills improve greatly during a child’s elementary school years.
Older children also begin to master and enjoy their intellect. They become more consciously aware of their mental processes—such as what it takes to memorize a spelling list or remember a specific past event—and can deliberately enlist their cognitive powers to accomplish their goals. For example, they enlist memory strategies that strengthen their recall of experiences and information. Older children seem to think more quickly than younger children (and many adults) because they know how to do so. They spontaneously monitor and evaluate their progress and thus correct and improve their work. They are more likely to use external aids, such as writing things down, to help them think. These qualities make older children more capable and motivated learners.
Students in an elementary school classroom raise their hands to answer a teacher’s question. Participation in classroom activities helps children develop the social, intellectual, and cultural skills they need to function in society.
Many other cognitive skills also improve. Reading and mathematical ability advances significantly, along with vocabulary and grammatical skills. Many children begin to learn a second language in middle childhood. Children’s knowledge of many specific topics that interest them expands dramatically, whether of planets, dinosaurs, or rock stars. Capacities to read music and master a musical instrument grow significantly. Although children at this stage are still rather, concrete thinkers—that is, abstractions and hypothetical issues are hard for them to understand—they have the intellectual skills to function competently in the adult world.
The cognitive achievements of middle childhood both contribute to school success and are, in part, a result of schooling. Effective classroom instruction strengthens children’s capacity for logical, objective reasoning through well-designed activities that promote active learning. Children also benefit from group projects as peers sharpen each other’s intellectual skills. However, intellectual growth in middle childhood is not just a result of the growth of the mind in combination with classroom practices; parental support is another crucial ingredient. Parents who value learning, have high expectations for their children’s academic success, and supervise homework and other school-related activities contribute significantly to their children’s cognitive growth and school success.
Because learning is more formalized in middle childhood, achievement is evaluated more objectively and publicly. Schoolchildren receive formal and informal evaluations of their work in the classroom and in school-wide achievement testing. Consequently, children quickly learn how their abilities measure up with their peers and with teacher expectations. In comparing themselves to their peers, older children develop a more balanced view of their intellectual strengths and weaknesses. In contrast to optimistic preschoolers, who tend to believe they can improve their intellectual skills through effort and practice, but older children begin to view their intellectual abilities as relatively permanent traits. They may conclude that they are ‘good at’ some subjects but that they ‘can’t do’ others. These self-evaluations tend to make older children less confident and more self-critical, causing some of them to give up too early when faced with intellectual tasks that are challenging but within their reach.
During middle childhood, from about ages 6 to 12, friendships become closer and more exclusive. Children develop a small circle of friends and begin to rely on them for companionship, advice, and understanding of social relationships. Acceptance by peers becomes important to children and to their self-esteem.
Children begin to develop a more complex, balanced self-image in middle childhood. Grade-schoolers view themselves as unique people with distinct strengths and weaknesses in their different roles of family member, student, teammate, and friend. They also begin to perceive themselves as skilled in different domains—such as academic, social, athletic, and recreational—with capabilities and weaknesses in each. When asked to describe themselves, therefore, older children often provide perceptive judgments that closely match how they are viewed by others.
As they move in different social worlds, older children begin to grasp the informal rules for each setting and manage themselves accordingly. Children act differently at home and in the classroom, for example, calibrating their behaviour to the expectations of others in each setting. They also learn to manage their emotions in social settings, looking undisturbed in the face of a peer’s taunting and laughing appropriately at a teacher’s joke. Social understanding develops in other ways also, as older children perceive family members, friends, and others as psychologically complex beings with their own emotions, motives, and perspectives.
Peer relationships become richer and more complicated in middle childhood. Whereas preschoolers master basic social skills as they play with friends, older children begin to face issues of acceptance, fitting in, exclusion, and social comparison in their peer groups. The nature of friendship changes in middle childhood to incorporate psychological closeness as well as shared activities, and friendships thus become more intense and exclusive. Children create a smaller circle of close friends and are more upset when friendships end. Friendships also coalesce into larger peer groups or clubs with their own norms for dress, vocabulary, hair style, activities, and behaviour. These norms distinguish those who are included (and excluded) from the group and create strong pressures on group members to conform. At the same time, such groups can help children build self-esteem and social skills.
Socializing in middle childhood requires considerable social understanding and self-awareness, especially when conflict occurs. Older children can negotiate, bargain, cajole, compromise, and redirect conflict—such as through humour—in ways that reflect developing psychological understanding and social maturity. Not all children are so successful, however, and some become rejected by peers because of their aggressive, confrontational behaviour. Developmental researchers have found that peers rejected for aggressiveness are impulsive and deficient in social problem-solving skills, often misinterpreting casual social encounters as hostile and considering few alternatives to reacting confrontationally. They also develop negative reputations. A rejected child’s lack of acceptance can, unfortunately, foreshadow long-term social difficulties if these problems are not remedied in childhood.
The social and cognitive achievements of middle childhood also provoke advances in moral development and altruistic behaviour - behaviour performed for the benefit of others without expectation of a reward. As American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg theorized in the mid-1960s, children begin to perceive themselves as responsible to others because of the importance of getting along and of being a good citizen. They seek to act appropriately because people matter to them, not just to avoid punishment. Children’s developing psychological understanding heightens their sensitivity to human needs and contributes to empathy for others. Whereas a preschooler may sympathize with another but not know what to do, older children are more likely to assist a classmate who is attacked by a bully or to raise money to help children in a developing country.
Parents remain central in the expanding social world of middle childhood. Although it is common to view peers as replacing parents in importance to older children, parents continue to support their children’s self-esteem, define and reinforce values, promote academic success, enable participation in neighbourhood and community activities, and offer a sensitive ear and perceptive judgment. They are reliable cheerleaders as their children face the challenges of middle childhood and adolescence.
The onset of puberty marks the beginning of adolescence. Physical growth and development, including sexual maturation, is an important part of adolescence. But this period of life is also shaped by other changes: entry into middle schools that are larger and more impersonal than elementary schools, peer groups that include older children, and greater independence in extracurricular activities. Adolescents achieve new cognitive skills permitting highly abstract thinking, engage in new kinds of social intimacy with peers, and embark on a search for identity that results in greater awareness of the self. Adolescence includes risks for psychological turmoil, but most children make their way through this period without undue stress.
People continue to develop through adolescence and, indeed, throughout adulthood. As people age, they may continue to be influenced by childhood experiences, positively or negatively. The lasting influence of childhood on a person’s relationships, self-esteem, and well-being is one reason why efforts to improve the lives of children are so important. Few developmental scientists believe, however, that one’s behaviour and personality as an adult are inevitably determined by earlier influences. Childhood sets the stage, but a person’s traits may be changed by subsequent events and experiences.
Influenced by evolutionary theory and the social nature of experience and behaviour, Mead emphasized the natural emergence of the self and mind within the social order. The self, he argued, emerges out of a social process in which the organism becomes self-conscious. This self-consciousness arises as a result of the organism's interaction with its environment, including communication with other organisms. The vocal gesture (language) is the mechanism through which this development occurs. Mind too is a social product. The mind, or intelligence, is an instrument developed by the individual to ‘make possible the rational solution of, . . . problems.’ Mead emphasized the application of the scientific method in social action and reform.
Descartes resolved to reconstruct all human knowledge on an absolutely certain foundation by refusing to accept any belief, even the belief in his own existence, until he could prove it to be necessarily true. In his so-called dream argument, he argued that our inability to prove with certainty when we are awake and when we are dreaming makes most of our uncertain knowledge. Ultimately he concluded that the first thing of whose existence one can be certain is oneself as a thinking being. This conclusion forms the basis of his well-known argument, ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’). He also argued that, in pure thought, one has a clear conception of God and can demonstrate that God exists. Descartes argued that secure knowledge of the reality of God allowed him to have his earlier doubts about knowledge and science.
French thinker René Descartes applied rigorous scientific methods of deduction to his exploration of philosophical questions. Descartes is probably best known for his pioneering work in philosophical skepticism. Author Tom Sorell examines the concepts behind Descartes’s work Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; Meditations on First Philosophy), focusing on its unconventional use of logic and the reactions it aroused.
Despite his mechanistic outlook, Descartes accepted the traditional religious doctrine of the immortality of the soul and maintained that mind and body are two distinct substances, thus exempting mind from the mechanistic laws of nature and providing for freedom of the will. His fundamental separation of mind and body, known as dualism, raised the problem of explaining how two such different substances as mind and body can affect each other, a problem he was unable to solve that has remained a concern of philosophy ever since. Descartes’s thought launched an era of speculation in metaphysics as philosophers made a determined effort to overcome dualism—the belief in the irreconcilable difference between mind and matter—and obtain unity. The separation of mind and matter is also known as Cartesian dualism after Descartes.
English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes is best known for his treatise Leviathan. Written during the mid-17th century amidst the tumult of the English Revolution, Leviathan outlines Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty (political authority).
The 17th–century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his effort to attain unity, asserted that matter is the only real substance. He constructed a comprehensive system of metaphysics that provided a solution to the mind-body problem by reducing mind to the internal motions of the body. He also argued that there is no contradiction between human freedom and causal determinism—the view that every act is determined by a prior cause. Both, according to Hobbes, work in accordance with the mechanical laws that govern the universe.
Seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s view of human nature is often characterized as deeply pessimistic. In the famous phrase from Leviathan (1651), Hobbes’s best–known work, ‘the life of man is nasty, brutish, and short.’ This excerpt from a study of Hobbes’s work by author Richard Tuck makes it clear, however, that Hobbes developed his theory of human morality and social relations from the humanist tradition prevalent among intellectuals of his time.
In his ethical theory Hobbes derived the rules of human behaviour from the law of self-preservation and justified egoistic action as the natural human tendency. In his political theory he maintained that government and social justice are artificial creations based on social contract (voluntary agreement between people and their government) and maintained by force. In his most famous work, Leviathan (1651), Hobbes justified political authority on the basis that self-interested people who existed in a terrifying ‘state of nature’—that is, without a ruler—would seek to protect themselves by forming a political commonwealth that had rules and regulations. He concluded that absolute monarchy is the most effective means of preserving peace.
A member of the rationalist school of philosophy, Baruch Spinoza pursued knowledge through deductive reasoning rather than induction from sensory experience. Spinoza applied the theoretical method of mathematics to other realms of inquiry. Following the format of Euclid’s Elements, Spinoza’s Ethics organized morality and religion into definitions, axioms, and postulates.
Whereas Hobbes tried to oppose Cartesian dualism by reducing mind to matter, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza attempted to reduce matter to divine spiritual substance. He constructed a remarkably precise and rigorous system of philosophy that offered new solutions to the mind-body problem and to the conflict between religion and science. Like Descartes, Spinoza maintained that the entire structure of nature can be deduced from a few basic definitions and axioms, on the model of Euclidean geometry. However, Spinoza believed that Descartes’s theory of two substances created an insoluble problem of the way in which mind and body interact. He concluded that the ultimate substance is God and that God, substance, and nature are identical. Thus he supported the pantheistic view that all things are aspects or modes of God.
Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza is regarded as the foremost Western proponent of pantheism, the belief that God and nature are one and the same. This idea is the central thesis of Spinoza’s most famous and influential work, the 1674 Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (Ethics Demonstrated with Geometrical Order). Author Roger Scruton examines Spinoza’s assertion that God is the ‘substance’ of everything.
Spinoza’s solution to the mind-body problem explained the apparent interaction of mind and body by regarding them as two forms of the same substance, which exactly parallel each other, thus seeming to affect each other but not really doing so. Spinoza’s ethics, like the ethics of Hobbes, was based on a materialistic psychology according to which individuals are motivated only by self-interest. But in contrast with Hobbes, Spinoza concluded that rational self-interest coincides with the interest of others.
English philosopher John Locke explained his theory of empiricism, a philosophical doctrine holding that all knowledge is based on experience, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke believed the human mind to be a blank slate at birth that gathered all its information from its surroundings—starting with simple ideas and combining these simple ideas into more complex ones. His theory greatly influenced education in Great Britain and the United States. Locke believed that education should begin in early childhood and should proceed gradually as the child learns increasingly complex ideas.
English philosopher John Locke responded to the challenge of Cartesian dualism by supporting a commonsense view that the corporeal (bodily or material) and the spiritual are simply two parts of nature that remain always present in human experience. He made no attempt to rigorously define these parts of nature or to construct a detailed system of metaphysics that attempted to explain them; Locke believed that such philosophical aims were impossible to carry out and thus pointless. Against the rationalism of Descartes and Spinoza, who believed in the ability to achieve knowledge through reasoning and logical deduction, Locke continued the empiricist tradition begun by Bacon and embraced by Hobbes. The empiricists believed that knowledge came from observation and sense perceptions rather than from reason alone.
In 1690 Locke gave empiricism a systematic framework with the publication of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Of particular importance was Locke’s redirection of philosophy away from the study of the physical world and toward the study of the human mind. In so doing he made epistemology, the study of the nature of knowledge, the principal concern of philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In his own theory of the mind Locke attempted to reduce all ideas to simple elements of experience, but he distinguished sensation and reflection as sources of experience, sensation providing the material for knowledge of the external world, and reflection the material for knowledge of the mind.
Locke greatly influenced the skepticism of later British thinkers, such as George Berkeley and David Hume, by recognizing the vagueness of the concepts of metaphysics and by pointing out that inferences about the world outside the mind cannot be proved with certainty. His ethical and political writings had an equally great influence on subsequent thought. During the late 18th century the founders of the modern school of utilitarianism, which makes happiness for the largest possible number of people the standard of right and wrong, drew heavily on the writings of Locke. His defence of constitutional government, religious tolerance, and natural human rights influenced the development of liberal thought during the late 18th century in France and the United States as well as in Great Britain.
Efforts to resolve the dualism of mind and matter, a problem first raised by Descartes, continued to engage philosophers during the 17th and 18th centuries. The division between science and religious belief also occupied them. There, the aim was to preserve the essentials of faith in God while at the same time defending the right to think freely. One view called Deism saw God as the cause of the great mechanism of the world, a view more in harmony with science than with traditional religion. Natural science at this time was striding ahead, relying on sense perception as well as reason, and thereby discovering the universal laws of nature and physics. Such empirical (observation-based) knowledge appeared to be more certain and valuable than philosophical knowledge based upon reason alone.
After Locke philosophers became more sceptical about achieving knowledge that they could be certain was true. Some thinkers who despaired of finding a resolution to dualism embraced skepticism, the doctrine that true knowledge, other than what we experience through the senses, is impossible. Others turned to increasingly radical theories of being and knowledge. Among them was German philosopher Immanuel Kant, probably the most influential of all because he set Western philosophy on a new path that it still follows today. Kant’s view that knowledge of the world is dependent upon certain innate categories or ideas in the human mind is known as idealism.
Considered a genius by his 17th-century contemporaries, German-born Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz made important contributions to mathematics and philosophy.
German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, like Spinoza before him, worked in the rationalist (reason-based) tradition to produce a brilliant solution to the problems raised by dualism. Leibniz, a mathematician and statesman as well as a philosopher, developed a remarkably subtle and original system of philosophy that combined the mathematical and physical discoveries of his time with the organic and religious conceptions of nature found in ancient and medieval thought. Leibniz viewed the world as an infinite number of infinitely small units of force, called monads, each of which is a closed world but mirrors all the other monads through its activity, which is perception. All the monads are spiritual entities, but they can combine to form material bodies. Leibniz conceived of God as the Monad of Monads, which creates all other monads and predestines their development.
Leibniz’s theory of the predestination of monads, also called the theory of preestablished harmony, entailed a radical rejection of causality—the view that every effect must have a cause. According to Leibniz, monads do not interact with each other at all, and the appearance of mechanical causality in the natural world is unreal, akin to an illusion. Likewise, there is no room in the universe for free will: Even though we enjoy the illusion of acting freely, all human actions are predetermined by God. Despite these gloomy conclusions, Leibniz’s philosophy was profoundly optimistic because he argued that ours was the best of all possible worlds. He based this belief on considerations about the nature of truth and necessity. French writer Voltaire mocked this viewpoint in Candid (1759), a satirical novel that examines the woes heaped on the world in the name of God.
Irish philosopher George Berkeley is considered the founder of idealism, the philosophical view that all physical objects are dependent on the mind for their existence. According to Berkeley's early 18th-century writings, an object such as a table exists only if a mind is perceiving it. Hence, objects are ideas.
In the 18th century Irish philosopher and Anglican churchman George Berkeley, like Spinoza before him, rejected both Cartesian dualism and the assertion by Hobbes that only matter is real. Berkeley maintained that spirit is substance, and that only spiritual substance is real. Extending Locke’s doubts about knowledge of an external world, outside the mind, Berkeley argued that no evidence exists for the existence of such a world, because the only things that we can observe are our own sensations, and these are in the mind. The very notion of matter, he maintained, is incoherent and impossible. To exist, he claimed, means to be perceived (‘esse est percipi’), and in order for things to exist when we are not observing them, they must continue to be perceived by God. By claiming that sensory phenomena are the only objects of human knowledge, Berkeley established the view known as phenomenalism, a theory of perception that suggests that matter can be analyzed in terms of sensations.
Irish-born philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley (1685-1753) argued that everything that human beings conceive of exists as an idea in a mind, a philosophical focus which is known as idealism. Berkeley reasoned that because one cannot control one’s thoughts, they must come directly from a larger mind: that of God. In this excerpt from his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, written in 1710, Berkeley explained why he believed that it is ‘impossible’, . . . that there should be any such thing as an outward object.’
Irish philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley set out to challenge what he saw as the atheism and skepticism inherent in the prevailing philosophy of the early 18th century. His initial publications, which asserted that no objects or matter existed outside the human mind, were met with disdain by the London intelligentsia of the day. Berkeley aimed to explain his ‘immaterialism’ theory, part of the school of thought known as idealism, to a more general audience in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). This passage is from the close of the third dialogue.
Scottish philosopher David Hume is considered one of the greatest skeptics in the history of philosophy. Hume thought that one can know nothing outside of experience, and experience—based on one’s subjective perceptions—never provides true knowledge of reality. Even the law of cause and effect was, for Hume, an unjustified belief: If one drops a ball, one cannot be certain it will fall to the ground. Rather, it is only possible to recognize through past experience that certain pairs of events (dropping a ball, the ball striking the ground) have always accompanied one another.
Whereas Berkeley argued against materialism by denying the existence of matter, 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume questioned the existence of the mind itself. Hume’s sceptical philosophy also cast doubt on the idea of cause as understood in all previous philosophies and seriously disputed earlier arguments for the existence of God. His most important philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature, was published in three volumes in 1739 and 1740.
English philosopher David Hume’s an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) distilled the ideas of his earlier work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740). The Enquiry demonstrates Hume’s extreme skepticism toward ‘objective’ thinking. Like English philosopher George Berkeley, Hume rejected the idea that humans could gain an objective knowledge of facts and events. In this excerpt, Hume drew a contrast between ideas and impressions. Impressions, he argued, are the experiences that come directly from our senses. Ideas are ‘less lively’ experiences that are derived from our previous impressions or experiences. Therefore, despite the power of human imagination, ‘ideas’ are still not as forceful as actual sensation or experience.
All metaphysical assertions about things that cannot be directly perceived are equally meaningless, Hume claimed, and should be ‘committed to the flames.’ In his analyses of causality and induction, Hume revealed that there is no logical justification for believing that any two events which occur together are connected by cause and effect or for making any inference from past to future. Hume noted that we depend on our past experience whenever we form beliefs about anything that we do not directly perceive and whenever we make predictions about the future. According to the empiricist doctrine of Bacon, Locke, and Berkeley, we can do this because experience teaches us what particular things belong together as causes and effects. Hume, however, argued that this attempt to learn from experience is not at all rational, thus calling into question the reliability of our memories, our reasoning processes, and our ability to learn from past experiences or to make even the smallest predictions about the future—for example, that the sun will rise tomorrow. Though extreme, Hume’s skepticism about philosophical empiricism raised problems about the possibility of knowledge that contemporary philosophers still struggle to resolve.
Eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant explored the possibilities of what reason can tell about the world of experience. In his critiques of science, morality, and art, Kant attempted to derive universal rules to which, he claimed, every rational person should subscribe. In Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued that people cannot understand the nature of the things in the universe, but they can be rationally certain of what they experience themselves. Within this realm of experience, fundamental notions such as space and time are certain.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant was among the first to appreciate Hume’s skepticism, and in response he published the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), widely considered the greatest single work in modern philosophy. In this work Kant made a thorough and systematic analysis of the conditions for knowledge. As an example of genuine knowledge, he had in mind the contributions to physics of English scientist Isaac Newton. In the case of Newtonian physics, reason seemed to have done an effective job of understanding the data supplied by the senses and to have succeeded in postulating universal and necessary laws of nature, such as the law of gravitation and the laws of motion. Kant proposed to explain how such knowledge is possible, thereby providing a complete reply to Hume’s skepticism and answering many of the problems that had plagued Western philosophers since the time of Descartes.
The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant published his influential work The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Three years later, he expanded on his study of the modes of thinking with an essay entitled ‘What is Enlightenment?’ In this 1784 essay, Kant challenged readers to ‘dare to know,’ arguing that it was not only a civic but also a moral duty to exercise the fundamental freedoms of thought and expression.
Kant started by making a fresh analysis of the elements of knowledge, asking for the first time an extremely basic question, ‘How is our experience possible in the first place?’ Kant’s predecessors had taken experience for granted. Thus Descartes agreed that we seem to have sensory knowledge of the world but asked whether this knowledge was true or the result of a dream. Similarly, Hume’s skepticism about causation arose when he concluded that we do not encounter causality in our ordinary experience of the world and that any inferences about it, beyond immediate experience, were questionable. Kant’s answer to the skepticism of Descartes and Hume involved certain categories, such as space, time, substance, and causality, which he maintained are essential to our thinking and to our experience of phenomena in the world. These categories he called transcendental. All objects of our knowledge, he concluded, must conform to the human mind’s essential ways of perceiving and understanding—ways that involve the transcendental categories—if they are to be knowable at all. Kant maintained that he had developed a revolutionary hypothesis about knowledge and reality that he believed to be as significant for the future of philosophy as the hypothesis of Copernicus—that the planets orbit the Sun—had been for science.
Kant’s claim that causality, substance, space, and time are forms imposed by the mind gave support to the idealism of Leibniz and Berkeley. Kant, however, made his view a more critical form of idealism by granting the empiricist claim that things-in-themselves—that is, things as they exist outside human experience - are unknowable. Kant therefore limited knowledge to the ‘phenomenal world’ of experience, maintaining that metaphysical beliefs about the soul, the cosmos, and God (the ‘noumenal world’ transcending human experience) are matters of faith rather than of scientific knowledge.
In his ethical writings Kant held that moral principles are categorical imperatives, absolute commands of reason that permit no exceptions and are not related to pleasure or practical benefit. Kant argued that human beings should act as members of an ideal ‘kingdom of ends’ in which every person is treated as an end in himself or her, and never as a means to someone else’s ends. In addition, everyone should govern their conduct as if their actions were to be made law - a law that applies equally to all without exception. Kant thereby postulated a freedom of action based on moral order and equality. His moral philosophy contributed to modern political ideas about freedom and democracy. Kant was a leading figure of the movement for reason and liberty against tradition and authority, and in his religious teachings he emphasized individual conscience and represented God primarily as a moral ideal.
Kant’s writings constituted a high point of the Enlightenment, a fertile intellectual and cultural period that helped stimulate the social changes that produced the French Revolution (1789-1799). Other leading thinkers of this movement included Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot. Voltaire, developing the tradition of Deism begun by Locke and other liberal thinkers, reduced religious beliefs to those that can be justified by rational inference from the study of nature. Rousseau criticized civilization as a corruption of humanity’s nature and developed Hobbes’s doctrine that the state is based on a social contract with its citizens and represents the popular will. Diderot published a 35-volume work known as the Encyclopaedia to which many scientists and philosophers contributed. Diderot and his Encyclopaedists, as they were known, associated the progress and the happiness of humankind with science and knowledge, whereas Rousseau criticized such ideas along with the very notion of civilization.
Philosophers of the 19th century generally developed their views with reference to the work of Kant. In Germany, Kant’s influence led subsequent philosophers to explore idealism and ethical voluntarism, a philosophical tradition that places a strong emphasis on human will. Whereas philosophers before Kant had explored the objects of knowledge, German philosophers who followed Kant on the path of idealism turned to the subject of knowledge—known variously as the ego, the I, the mind, and human consciousness.
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