Book review: The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

EARLY CHILDHOOD IS BOTH fsmiliar and mysterious. Everyone was a baby once, and most adults have spent plenty of time talking to small children. But we simply can't remember what it was like to be younger than five or six, and conversation between an adult and a preschool child is far from a dialogue between equals.

Our mental development is, Alison Gopnik argues in this thoughtful study of children's minds, more like a metamorphosis than an incremental process of growth, so we butterflies can boast precious little understanding of the caterpillars in our prams. To see what is really happening in young children's heads, we need grown-up science, in the form of cunningly designed and rigorously executed experiments – supplemented, where possible, with brain scans.

Thanks to such work, it seems we can now get over some of the false or misleading ideas about childhood inherited from Freud and Piaget, who maintained, for example, that small children cannot discriminate between truth and fiction. You might think this is true, but toddlers actually turn out to be very good at telling pretence from reality.

When children are playing, they know they are just playing. Yet play is a very serious business, as Montaigne recognised: without the luxury of a uniquely long period of dependence on adults, in which we can afford to explore the world with unfettered imaginations, we would never learn how to be the most knowledgeable and powerful creatures on the planet.

Gopnik argues that this immersion in freely conjured hypothetical worlds is what teaches us how to make sense of the real one. She describes, for instance, how small children's grasp of "counterfactual" situations enables them to calculate the probabilities of alternative courses of action. She also discusses the invisible friends – most often found in the imaginations of children between the ages of two and six – who seem to help youngsters learn how to interpret the actions of others. Children who have imaginary friends tend to be better at predicting the thoughts and feelings of actual people. Autistic children almost never create imaginary friends or engage in any kind of pretend play.

It used to be held that small children are not only irrational but also immoral and egotistical. Again, we may have been doing them an injustice. The notion that moral ideas develop only in adolescence – as Piaget, for one, claimed – appears to be wrong.

Even children as young as two can grasp the difference between moral rules, which are intended to avoid harm ("Don't hurt other kids"), and merely convenient regulations ("Take off your dirty shoes at the door"). Tellingly, small children recognise that it would not be OK to hurt another child even if a teacher said it was: bad behaviour seems to be a matter of undeveloped self-control rather than a psychopathic lack of moral concepts. In a section that is heartening news for optimists, Gopnik reports that children are naturally empathetic from birth and tend to exhibit altruism (though fitfully) from the age of one.

More contentious, however, is Gopnik's surprising claim that thinking about children can somehow provide the answers philosophy professors are looking for.

The reason this has never been taken up, she argues, is because most of them have been (often childless) men. It's a tempting idea, but I'm still not convinced

that the history of philosophy would have found more useful inspiration from the study of children if only its luminaries had included Mrs Plato, Emmanuelle Kant, Renata Descartes and Joan Locke.

Indeed, Gopnik hints at the beginning of the argument against her thesis when she notes how, now that the extended family plays less of a role in the formerly unremarkable activity of child-rearing, many parents now make such a song and dance about it.

One might go further and regard our absorption in our own offspring as a flimsily disguised form of narcissism. Either way, the notion that children's minds have much to tell us about the meaning of life seems rather a fond exaggeration.