Do Children and Other Animals Think Like Scientists?

For decades, psychologists have characterised children as little scientists. This view holds that kids and nonhuman animals navigate the physical world by building broad, abstract theories, much like physicists searching for universal laws. Modern philosophy of science, however, tells a different story about how actual science works. In our complex and tangled world, universal laws often fail outside the highly controlled environment of a laboratory. Because the real world is messy and unpredictable, successful scientists frequently adopt a ‘case-worker’ approach. They sift through a toolbox of models to find the one that fits the specific, local situation at hand.

If professional scientists act more like case-workers than general theorists, we must reconsider how children and animals learn about the causal world. This talk explores what happens when we view everyday reasoning through this highly local, context-driven lens. Drawing on the idea that our brain acts as a continuous prediction machine, I will discuss how organisms adapt to a noisy world not by finding an overarching theory, but by actively testing the environment and dynamically adjusting their confidence in which local patterns are reliable right here and right now.

From the flight of the hawkmoth to the problem-solving strategies of chimpanzees, this approach reveals that a failure to apply a general rule to a new situation is not necessarily a lack of understanding. Rather, it is often a smart, adaptive strategy for surviving in an ever-changing environment. Ultimately, we might need to ask not whether the child acts like a scientist, but exactly what kind of scientist the child actually is.