Children, Psychology, and the History of Science

Since 1970 the field of developmental psychology has sought to better understand how children think, learn, and grow by comparing them to scientists. To understand the nature of science, developmental psychologists turned to Thomas Kuhn and succeeding works in the history and philosophy of science and in science studies. These fields’ explanations of how scientific concepts change in communities over historical time provided psychologists with tools for explaining conceptual development in individuals from infancy onward. Following historians who questioned progressive narratives, developmental psychologists rejected notions that children were incomplete adults and even treated infants as having more capacity for science and conceptual development than adults have. In the process, developmental psychology made an egalitarian agreement that all children are scientists and cast them as ideal model systems for studying cognition in humans of all ages.