Map Reading Versus Mind Reading

Abstract

Any study pursuing questions of conceptual development has to position itself with respect to the more general questions of how to conceive human cognition. At one level this study thus presents a contribution to this age-old debate about the nature of human thinking and learning. At another level — the empirical — it pro vides a discussion ofthe difficulties that children face when reasoning about the shape of the earth and gravity. The study reported is part of a project that explores issues of how people use physical artefacts, embodying conceptual distinctions of considerable complexity, when thinking and reasoning. The results suggest that even very young children are familiar with sophisticated knowledge about how to interpret a map. Furthermore, using it as a mediational tool, they can accomplish rather complicated reasoning about the shape ofthe earth and gravity. This is a demonstration of the flexible and tool-dependent nature of cognition. It is, however, inconsistent with a more formal stage theory or a theory in which children’s reasoning is characterised by means of distinctively different conceptions. It is also at odds with a dualist perspective on human cognition in which the embeddedness of physical tools in human reasoning is not taken seriously. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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