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[PDF] The missing link between core knowledge and language: Review of Elizabeth Spelke's What babies know, volume 1
(onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
Summary made by Quivr/GPT-4
This document is a critical commentary on Elizabeth Spelke's book "What babies know, volume 1". The authors, Barbu Revencu and Gergely Csibra, review Spelke's two main hypotheses about human cognition.
The first hypothesis is that humans and other species are born with "core knowledge systems". These are innate structures in our brains that use abstract concepts to understand different aspects of our environment. This core knowledge helps us learn about our surroundings quickly and efficiently. The authors agree with this hypothesis.
The second hypothesis is that only humans can learn natural languages, and this ability allows us to create new concepts by combining the outputs of our core systems. Spelke suggests that this language acquisition is what makes human cognition so productive. However, the authors disagree with this point. They argue that language acquisition alone can't explain the complexity of human cognition. They particularly dispute the idea that infants use language to develop a new understanding of other people.
The authors conclude that while Spelke's book provides a clear answer to what is built into our cognition from birth, they are not convinced by her explanation of how we learn beyond this. They believe that there must be something more than just language acquisition that allows us to build new domains of knowledge.
In simple terms, this document is a review of a book about how we understand the world around us. The authors agree with the idea that we're born with some basic understanding, but they don't think that learning language is the only way we develop more complex understanding as we grow.