4 Core Knowledge and Piagetian Construction

Core knowledge, categorical truth, assimilation, and accommodation

There is a danger in translating a psychological theory into category theory. Every collection of states and transformations can be placed in some category after the fact. That observation alone says nothing about infant cognition and supplies no evidence for Spelke’s hypothesis. A categorical reconstruction becomes scientifically meaningful only when its structure excludes alternatives, predicts invariances, and explains how separately available capacities compose.

This chapter therefore asks a deliberately demanding question: in what sense could there be a categorical truth to the core-knowledge hypothesis? The answer cannot be that a category can be fitted to the data. It must be that a comparatively small categorical doctrine captures stable organization in the data and earns its restrictions through successful identification, composition, and repair.