from day 10/05/2010

camphor – ammonia = anniseed x peppermint

How can we count? Where does our arithmetic capacity come from? A lot of progress has been made on this question, thanks, in no small part, to the work of cognitive scientists like Susan Carey and Stanislas Dehaene. The picture that emerges from this kind of work looks something like this: many ...

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The Moral Life of Babies

In Today's New York Times Magazine, Paul Bloom has a long interesting and easy-read piece (freely available here) on "The Moral Life of Babies" that concludes: "Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. Babies possess ...

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