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Here's a first attempt to understand the ‘building blocks’ metaphor. Let's suppose that categorical perception of colour amounts to having colour concepts. This way of thinking concords with Leslie's view about modular cognition.

So the first view can't be right. It can't be right that having categorical perception of colour (or X) amounts to having colour (or X) concepts. And the same applies in other cases of categorical perception as well. (Of course a defender of the view that categorical perception is or entails concept possession might insist that subjects have concepts but cannot use them, at least not in the sort of task I have just described. This is possible, of course, but it seems to be a desperate defence.) How else might we understand the ‘building blocks’ metaphor?

Consider Mandler's claim that ‘the earliest conceptual functioning consists of a redescription of perceptual structure’ (Mandler 1992)

Indeed, the extensions of colour terms vary quite radically between languages. Ongoing research concerns whether there is any kind of universal prinicple behind the pattern.

So the second view probably isn't right either. For whatever redescription amounts to, it should surely involve there being some kind of match between the perceptual categories and the concepts. And, on the face of, it there is no match at all.

How might the idea of development as rediscovery apply in the case of knowledge of colour?

One effect of categorical perception is phenomenological. Consider the (a) difference between an experience of the first blue and the second blue; and (b) the difference between an experience of the second blue and the green. Phenomenally, the second pair of experiences is more different than the first. There is some kind of phenomenological marker of categorical colour properties. To put it colourfully, there is something that it is like for you to experience blue, and something else that it is like for you to experience green. So, to return to the two problems, this is why I think categorical perception might be important for identifying the dimension.

The question for this lecture was, how do we come to know things about colour. The answer, I think, is this. We have categorical perception of colour from early in infancy, certainly from around four months of age. Having categorical perception is not by itself sufficient for having colour concepts. But it does play an important role, because it means that there is a correspondence between (i) changes on the relevant dimension, and (ii) changes in one phenomenal aspect of our experience. I conjecture that this helps us to identify the relevant dimension, colour not shape or size, in acquiring colour words and concepts. But by itself this is not enough. As we've seen, acquiring colour concepts also depends on having some colour words. I speculate that this is because words function as a tool for marking categories prior to knowing where they start and end. The word allows you to re-identify a category without knowing where it begins or ends.

So this is my picture. Acquiring knowledge of colour depends on an interaction between categorical perception, something developmentally quite primitive, and social interaction, in particular the negotiation of words for colour categories.

[SKIP --- just left here as placeholder] [Also note that there’s a simpler walkthrough of the core idea here at the start of lecture_08 Would include that here but TIME!]

[Diagram: years bewteen early capacities (core knowlegde) and knowledge proper.] Relate this to the gap between Core Knowledge and Knowledge Knowledge.