Epigenesis of Mind

<p>Reflecting the focus of a Jean Piaget Symposium entitled <em>Biology and Knowledge: Structural Constraints on Development</em>, this volume presents many of the emergent themes discussed.</p><p>Among these themes are:</p><ul> <li>Structural constraints on cognitive development and learning come in many shapes and forms and involve appeal to more than one level of analysis.</li> <li>To postulate innate knowledge is not to deny that humans can acquire new concepts.</li> <li>It is unlikely that there is only one learning mechanism, even if one prefers to work with general as opposed to domain-specific mechanisms.</li> <li>The problems of induction with respect to concept acquisition are even harder than originally thought.</li> </ul> <p><b>Contents: </b>Preface. <b>Part I: </b><i>Biological Contributions to Cognition.</i><b>C.R. Gallistel, A.L. Brown, S. Carey, R. Gelman, F.C. Keil,</b> Lessons From Animal Learning for the Study of Cognitive Development. <b>P. Marler,</b> The Instinct to Learn. <b>A. Diamond,</b> Neuropsychological Insights into the Meaning of Object Concept Development. <b>E.L. Newport,</b> Contrasting Concepts of the Critical Period for Language. <b>Part II: </b><i>Innate Knowledge and Beyond.</i><b>E.S. Spelke,</b> Physical Knowledge in Infancy: Reflections on Piaget's Theory. <b>A. Karmiloff-Smith,</b> Beyond Modularity: Innate Constraints and Developmental Change. <b>K.W. Fischer, T. Bidell,</b> Constraining Nativist Inferences About Cognitive Capacities. <b>F.C. Keil,</b> The Emergence of Theoretical Beliefs as Constraints on Concepts. <b>S. Carey,</b> Knowledge Acquisition: Enrichment or Conceptual Change? <b>R. Gelman,</b> Epigenetic Foundations of Knowledge Structures: Initial and Transcendent Constructions.</p>