Does a baby already have a preconceptual worldview?

Philosophy of Mind
1

A common assumption is that, at birth, a baby has only sensations and needs, and that a worldview is constructed only later.

My claim is that a baby already has a worldview.

But it is not conceptual.

It is preconceptual and experiential-structural.

A baby does not encounter an empty world that is only later organized into meaning.

The world already appears in an organized way.

To the baby, the world appears through the relations between proximity, distance, intensity, relief, continuity, disruption, responsiveness, and non-responsiveness.

Not as concepts, but as experiences.

Sensations and needs are not absent, but it is mistaken to describe early life as if it consisted only of sensations and needs.

The difficulty in recognizing that a baby has a worldview lies in a misdefinition of the term “worldview”.

Does the claim fail, and if so, where exactly does it fail?

2

We could point to sensory-motor schemes of action, which imply an embodied system of expectations on the basis of which the affordances and constraints the world imposes are organized. This system may be pre-conceptual in a formal sense, but not pre-interpretive. Sensations and needs are never raw, but relative to larger systems of sense-making.

3

I don’t think the baby is aware of the world. It’s aware of its needs and whether they are met. I don’t think we have any good empirical reason to think otherwise. There is currently no evidence that newborns can distinguish, tout court but more importantly, between themselves and the world around them.
This would then preclude a “worldview” in concept (I am not talking about your claim to ‘pre-conceptual’ here, but that the claim of a “worldview” in a newborn is inherently precluded if this fact obtains).

4

I don’t think any knowledgeable people today believe humans are born without inborn capacities, predispositions, limitations, instincts, and temperament. We are not blank slates.

Although I don’t disagree with you, I think here is where you need to provide some evidence. Here’s an article I really like.

5

I would say that babies are born with archtypes (per Jung), which structure how their experience is imagined or sympbolized. That is, they don’t have actual beliefs (like they lean toward capitalism and not Marxism), but, as Jung says, “We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology.”

Under this theory, a child has a set of archtypes that structure his world. Some archtypes he speaks of would be the hero, the trickster, or the shadow. If a child fears the monster under his bed, that is an expression of the innate archtype of the shadow, the fear of the unknown, which means his formation of the monster arises from that fear (which he imagines as monster). If a child views his mother a nuturing being, that is a presentation of the way his mind is structured, which is that there is a pattern for for experiencing nuturing. If a child looks for protection, he would reveal that with hero mythology.

By comparison, the dog barks because he’s territorial, he chases the ball because he’s predatory, and he sits in your lap because he’s loyal. It’s very obvious if you own a dog, you can see the difference between a shepherd dog that protects and a terrier that kills vermin.

Humans express their innate drives symbolically and logically, which means we form entire stories within us that explain our inner drives and life.

Contrast to Locke: " -2.All ideas come from sensation or reflection . Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:- How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring."

The cite is from Hanover.edu, entirely a coincidence, or, perhaps, syncronicity.

6

If I understand you correctly, you are saying one of two things.

Either you mean that there is already an organized sensorimotor structure of experience, but that this still does not justify calling it a worldview.

Or you mean that such an organized structure already amounts to something like a worldview.

In addition, you are pointing out that this structure should not be described as pre-interpretive.

Which of these is closer to what you mean?

7

@AmadeusD
I am not claiming reflective awareness of the world, nor a developed distinction between self and world.

My point is narrower:
Early experience is not just raw sensations and needs, but already has structure.

That is why I describe it as a preconceptual worldview.

So the question is not whether the baby has adult-like awareness, but whether early experience is already organized in a way that goes beyond mere sensation and need.

8

I have no problem calling this a worldview. For me a worldview is a functionally normative anticipatory structure of sense-making.

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9

My response pretty clearly deals with this. There was no suggestion of anything “adult-like”. The claim is that babies cannot distinguish. They have only needs and “yes/no” impulses in terms of those needs being met.
If that is hte case, there is absolutely no room for what you posit. I thikn this is correct. Newborns do not have a worldview, and I also reject the archetypes concept above. That is myth-making in itself.

Have you had kids?

10

There’s solid evidence that very young infants (well under a year) can discriminate between self and other at a perceptual and sensorimotor level. For example, studies using looking-time and face discrimination show that by around 3–8 months, infants can visually distinguish their own face from another infant’s face, often by showing a novelty preference for the other face. Even earlier, they can detect contingencies, whether movements they see are synchronized with their own actions, which is a primitive form of distinguishing “what I control” from “what I don’t.”

This isnt the same thing as an abstract conceptual sense of ‘I-ness’, but it shows that perception is geared toward making pragmatic distinctions and discriminations as well as integrations and pattern recognition. And these integrations and distinctions are not fragmentary, disconnected responses. They are systematically intercorrelated relative to meaningful goals and needs, which themselves are modified in response to the successes and failures of perceptual and motor activity. One can think of this global perceptual normativity as an incipient ‘worldview’.

11

I agree with the latter, not the former. Newborns (infants are a psychologically different category, the meaning of which sort of supports my contention here) routinely fail mirror tests up to 18 months. This indicates they cannot tell that that are not the other objects in an image presented. I am, however, groking that this doesn’t move anything in the OP because

There is absolutely reflexive activity in a newborn’s behaviour, but this does not suggest distinguishing objects or themselves from other objects or people. This seems to occur from about 10 months - into the infant area.
So I was probably rash in my over-application of this but it seems pretty clear that a pre-conceptual world-view doesn’t quite work in this context.

I would also suggest that a worldview requires working memory. While newborns do technically have this, it functions more like a dog in that retaining information only occurs across very short periods until further neurological development occurs.

So, I definitely take your point and resile from the height at which I put my own. But I do not thnk this indicates any kind of “worldview” on the part of a being which doesn’t seem to have that capacity, prima facie.

I do not think this is the case. mimicry seems to be something more akin to reflexive “Oh, that’s me” type behaviour at the newborn stage, but I wont argue that. I don’t know quite enough.

From what I can tell, they do seem to be fragmentary, not retained and changeable in a way that belies much of what comes after this quote. We may just disagree on interpretation.

I wouldn’t count what amounts to an inconsistent and possible incoherent response facility as a worldview personally.

12

A worldview seems to be a conception that goes beyond immediate perception. In that case, I doubt that an infant has a worldview, since, I would say, they are focused on the most immediate aspects of experience. For an infant, the full scope of experience is not yet present, as they are constantly experiencing new things and broadening their horizons.

Hegel said that the sensible is not an error that the concept corrects from the outside; it is a necessary stage that the spirit must pass through in order to recognise itself in its own negativity. The concept does not impose itself upon the sensible: it emerges from the internal collapse of the claim to immediacy.

In other words, the moment the child speaks betrays his immediate sensibility, and it is here that the concept emerges. This would be the case when the child forms a view of the world.

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13

As in
.instinctive?

But instinct isn’t technically a worldview, even though it is sufficient causality for sensations and needs.

As far as the baby is concerned, insofar as “the world already appears in an organized way”, wouldn’t that necessarily presuppose an a priori conceptual framework?

By the same token, what would the definition of “worldview” become, such that a human baby might be in possession of one that isn’t grounded in conceptual associations?

Having been one myself, I’d say for human babies, instinct, yes; worldview

.nahhhh. But in all fairness to those who perhaps claim to have constructed a worldview before, say, 3rd grade
..good for you.

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14

Worldview is an abstract concept. Even many adults would have no clue on what worldview or world means.

Also the concept of world has many different meanings and interpretations which are all vague and abstract, and even the highly influential philosophers fail to agree on what it is.

Without knowing what the world means, it would be impossible to have a worldview.

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15

The infant inherits structures which give it the capacity to construct perceptual and cognitive meaning. These innate structures act as constraints or biases in relation to the organized forms of meaning the baby builds over the course of development. The important point is that what is innate, or what you are calling ‘instinctive’ is not specific behavior but the guided capacity to synthesize forms of behavior. The key here is the baby’s actual processes of meaning-formation, which are integrated and coordinated on the basis of its active explorations of its environment. Even the youngest infant approaches its world with expectations that it constantly tests and adjusts in response to events. Without the ability to interact with and explore their environment, babies do not develop normal perceptual abilities like vision.

So from the early stages of development, the child is creating organized normative sensory-motor schemes, which are precursors to cognitive schemes, whose organization provides a perspective on the world, or worldview.

16

The question should be: is the emergence of the phenomenon nothing?

So, if I speak of the child, in what sense am I speaking of consciousness, and therefore of appearing — not mere appearance, but the coming-to-appearance of what gives itself?

Is the dream willed? In what sense?

Is there intention in the mad person, or in the drunk person?

What does “intention” mean?

Let us set aside, for a moment, our confessional society.

What matters is not appearing in its totality, as if we could possess it from outside, but its emergence as the taking-hold of a certain kind of traversal.

The question itself does not merely pre-conceptualize consciousness. It also pre-conceptualizes a certain idea of the infant, and of public organization, as a priori concepts.

But are we sure that this is how things are?

Or do we perhaps live within local agreements, within certain public traversals, where “human”, “child”, and “consciousness” are local statutes: real, but partial and overlapping?

How can I intercept a certain phenomenon, make it coherent with my own appearing, and sustain it publicly?

To think that there exists “the child in itself”, and that “consciousness in itself” is planted inside a stable object, is already a learned, mediated, negotiated concept.

Unfortunately, no one has a radar for souls.

La domanda dovrebbe essere. L’emergere del fenomeno Ă© nulla? Quindi se io parlo di bambino in che senso parlo di coscienza e quindi il presentarsi dell’apparire?

Il sogno Ă© voluto? In che senso?

CĂ© intenzione nel folle o nell’ubrico?

Che significa intenzione?

Mettendo da parte un attimo la nostra societa confessionale.

CiĂČ che conta non Ă© l’apparire nella sua totalita, ma il suo emergere come presa di un certo tipo di attraversamento.

Non solo la domanda del tema preconcettualizza coscienza ma anche una certa idea di infante e di organizzazione pubblica, come concetti a priori.

Ma siamo sicuri sia cosi?

O forse noi viviamo in accordi locali, in certi attraversamenti pubblici, dove umano, bambino, coscienza, sono statuti locali reali ma parziali e sovrapposti?

Come posso intercettare un certo fenomeno e renderlo coerente col mio apparire e sostenerlo pubblicamente?

Pensare che in se esista bambino, e in se la coscienza, sia piantata in un oggetto stabile, Ă© un concetto appreso, mediato, negoziato
 purtroppo nessuno ha un radar di anime.

17

All of us make sense of our world by consulting an integrated system of constructs, which is what allows us to anticipate events on the basis of similarities and differences. We recognize and categorize new events on the basis of their familiarity at some level. We have seen something like them before. Without this ability to recognize and anticipate events on the basis on schemes of sense-making, we would be plunged into utter chaos and confusion. The smallest and most trivial details of daily life constantly present us with novel aspects, but we are able to embrace these events because our construct system allows us to assimilate the subordinate variations within a more superordinate category of likeness.

This ability to make sense of small variations, novelties and surprises on the basis of higher level schemes of understanding applies not just to perception but to the most complex
aspects of our belonging to a social
world. We are capable of coping with others in casual, and more importantly, in intimate relationships due of our ability to construe not only their behavior but their construal of our behavior. This gives us a sense of how we are regarded by others, the role we play in their lives.

These are the most core aspects of our construct system, forming our ethical understanding as well as making possible political and philosophical perspectives. Our more trivial goals and purposes are tied to and guided by these higher level motivators, the way we see ourselves in relation to others and our ability to anticipate their behavior.

In sum, we all walk around ever day with a hierarchically organized system of constructs designed to anticipate events in the world. Everyone’s system is unique to them, even as it allows us to understand each other. In other words, our construct system make it possible for us to anticipate events in our world form our own perspective. It produces in all of us a world-view, whether or not we can explicitly articulate this worldview. For many, it is only in psychotherapy that the fact they have a consistent, organized system of interpretation unique to them becomes evident.

18

In a sense it is really just a matter of when in the timeline you claim the new baby comes into being. At conception, at birth, at first self-awareness, and first projection of self against the world (intention).

There is the time before I existed at all, when my parents were kids. Then they met and conceived a new set of 46 chromosomes, and my mom became pregnant. At that moment “I” was arguably still not even in existence; there was nothing there to generate a worldview. But if you claim that this one-day-old conceptus is a “baby”, then yes, “I” was a blank slate, and I began with zero worldview. This moment in the timeline has to be accounted for.

But if, instead, you think “I” come into being later, say, sometime at or after my first consciousness of sensation, then, just like “vision” is pre-populated within its domain that necessarily includes light, eyeballs and objects that reflect light into eyeballs, and brains attached to eyeballs that organize all of these in matter-space-time, then similarly yes, “I” was never a blank slate; when I first became aware of me in the world, a worldview already had some rudimentary shape along with my first awareness of me.

But equating the platform that allows for human experience (the pre-cognitive, or conditions), with a worldview, that certainly depends on what you think a worldview is.

Exactly. I don’t think newborns can have a worldview (because I think a worldview is too complex a structure), just like I don’t think newly conceived fetuses can see colors (because they don’t have eyeballs or brains). A worldview involves much more developed parts and wholes than a newborn baby has capacity to generate. It seems to me (and as I can’t recall the day I was born, I could be wrong, but maybe my lack of recollection is the evidence of my lack of worldview).

My sense is that, just like human eyeballs and the light and reflective objects will tend to generate similar visual sense perceptions in perceivers (we all have similar reactions when looking at the sun for instance), human minds will tend to generate similar ranges of worldviews. So my individual worldview, in one sense, came from nothingness and a blank slate (since there was a time when I was nothing)- but since I was nevertheless born and came to exist to grow, as a human being, along with me, over time, comes a worldview, my worldview, which is similar to other thinking, experiencing human beings and their worldviews. (Sort of like the Jung idea discussed above, or in more sterile form, Kant.)

But directly to the point (as I see it), a worldview is learned from experience and the sheer use of language and time spent reflecting on these, reflecting in these. Worldviews are fairly particular things (we each can specify our own), unlike pre-conditions of thought itself, which are more universalizable and can be thought of as pre-cognitive, or extra-cognitive features of cognition.

Simply put, I think you are conflating worldview (which is a product), with the structure of the mind (which is the producer).

And I sympathize with this. Because if you take time out of the equation, once I exist, being a whole, adult human being, I include a worldview. But because I come to be over time, and don’t just pop into existence as and adult, and because I can be said to exist in certain form before I even know I exist, I can’t see how I immediately exist with a worldview, or even that such worldview existed when I was a baby. What exists pre-worldview is the structure of the mind, the learning power and use of language, the experiences of the world and sense perceptions, and my assertion of my mind back into the world and other people (communication) - yelling “get me my mommy” comes before a worldview. And only after these functions play out, does a worldview then start to take shape and come into being.

So if you said we first become babies at say the age of 9, then yes, we are born with a worldview.

19

Is there a structure of the mind without functioning, activity, exploration? Isnt structure a verb when it comes to a baby, that the infant structures itself itself in relation to its environment, and on the basis of capacities it inherited? It seems to me that two issues are central to the question. of worldview.
1.) How globally integrated is a baby’s perceptual and cognitive schemes. Is there a kind of meta-schematic level?

2.)How crucial and primordial is the role of active engagement, exploration, experimentation and anticipation in the development of sensory-motor, perceptual and cognitive structures? The concept of ‘view’ won’t make much sense if one doesnt beleive a baby constructs its world via proactive expectations, questioning, testing and exploring.

20

I’m ok with all that; as long as such precursors aren’t taken as a preconceptual worldview.

Granted human babies come equipped with the inherited structures that give it the capacity to construct perceptual and cognitive meaning, which is just to say that baby doesn’t come with them already.

Ehhhh
..it’s a fine line between the idea that “the youngest infant approaches its world”, or, the poor thing is at the mercy of a world foisted upon it.