There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. ~ Mark Twain, 1883 Twain meant it as a witticism of course but there is something fascinating about science. From a few bones, scientists infer the existence of dinosaurs, from a few spectral lines, the composition of nebulae, and from a few fruit flies, the
... [Show full abstract] mechanisms of heredity. From a similarly trifling investment, some of us presume to conjecture even about the mechanisms of conjecture itself. Why does science, at least some of the time, succeed? Why does it generate accurate predictions and effective interventions? With due respect for our accomplished colleagues, we believe it may be because getting wholesale returns out of minimal data is a commonplace feature of human cognition. Indeed, we believe the most fascinating thing about science may be its connection to human learning in general, and in particular, to the rapid, dramatic, learning that takes place in early childhood. This view, the theory theory, suggests that starting in infancy, continuing through the life span, and canalized in scientific inquiry, many aspects of human learning can be best explained in terms of theory formation and theory change. Theories have been described with respect to their structural, functional, and dynamic properties (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997). Thanks to several decades of work in developmental psychology, we now know a great deal about the structural and functional 2 aspects of children's theories. That is, in many domains, we know that children have abstract, coherent, causal, representations of events, we know something about the content of those representations, and we know what types of inferences they support.
