The Child is a Theoretician, Not an Inductivist*

For a number of years, I have argued that the child i s a spontaneous theoretician, i.e. that the way in which children go about discovering how the world functions (the physical, social and linguistic worlds) is by building theories, not by simply observing facts (Karmiloff-Smith, 1975, 1979a, 1984; Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder, 1974/5; see, also, Brown, 1986, Carey, 1985, Gelman & Brown, 1985, Gillieron, 1982, Gopnik, 1982, Keil, 1988, Leslie, 1988). And children go about their spontaneous discovery task by behaving like the typical scientist. Kuhn (1977) was right in his view that only on the very rare occasions when scientists must actually choose between comFeting theories do they reason like philosophers or logicians! Both for the child and the adult researcher, scientific progress does not stem from the use of logical criteria on the basis of rational induction from observations. Indeed, as Lakatos (1977) has pointed out, the still widely held opinion that science progresses by repeated overthrow of theories on the basis of observational data is based on two false assump-