Alison Gopnik
About Alison Gopnik
Speech topics
The Science of Imagination and Imagination as Science
Children spend many of their waking hours off in the crazy world of pretend play. What function does the wild imagination of childhood serve? Alison Gopnik shows how the imagination of children’s play underpins adult science, culture and technology.
Speaking videos
Books by Alison Gopnik
“The Gardener And The Carpenter: What The New Science Of Child Development Tells Us About The Relationship Between Parents And Children” (2016)
Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call "parenting" is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the multibillion dollar industry surrounding it have transformed child care into obsessive, controlling, and goal-oriented labor intended to create a particular kind of child and therefore a particular kind of adult. In The Gardener and the Carpenter, the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong--it's not just based on bad science, it's bad for kids and parents, too.
“The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life” (2010)
In the last decade there has been a revolution in our understanding of the minds of infants and young children. We used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Now Alison Gopnik ― a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother ― explains the cutting-edge scientific and psychological research that has revealed that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined. And there is good reason to believe that babies are actually smarter, more thoughtful, and more conscious than adults. In a lively and accessible tour of the groundbreaking new psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical developments, Gopnik offers new insight into how babies see the world, and in turn promotes a deeper appreciation for the role of parents in shaping the lives of their children.
“The Scientist In The Crib: Minds, Brains, And How Children Learn” (1999)
This book combines two worlds -- children and science -- in an entirely unique way that yields exciting discoveries about both. The authors show that by the time children are three, they've solved problems that stumped Socrates with an agility computers still can't match. The Scientist in the Crib explains just how, and how much, babies and young children know and learn, and how much parents naturally teach them. In fact, The Scientist in the Crib argues that evolution designed us to both teach and learn. Nurture is our nature, and the drive to learn is our most important instinct.
“Words, Thoughts, and Theories (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change)” (1998)
Words, Thoughts, and Theories articulates and defends the "theory theory" of cognitive and semantic development, the idea that infants and young children, like scientists, learn about the world by forming and revising theories, a view of the origins of knowledge and meaning that has broad implications for cognitive science.
At a glanceAlison Gopnik
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