Children, Psychology, and the History of Science
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23309727 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jamie Cohen-Cole, Jamie Cohen‐cole (0000-0003-0246-0126, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Pages | 264-283 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Osiris (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0369-7827 • E-ISSN: 1933-8287 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/740591 |
| OpenAlex | W7171823933 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 37 |
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.
Cognitive development · Conceptual change · Conceptual history · Developmental Science · Field (mathematics) · History of psychology · History of science · Ideal (ethics) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · History and Philosophy of Science · History of Science and Medicine · History of Science and Natural History
The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn
How we think.
Young Minds in Social Worlds
Why the Child's Theory of Mind Really Is a Theory
On perceptual readiness.
Conceptual dependency
Basic objects in natural categories
Sex Differences in Intrinsic Aptitude for Mathematics and Science?
Origins of knowledge.
Struggling with Complexity
Domain-specific knowledge and conceptual change
The Essential Tension
Repeating the Race Experience
The Scientist as Child
Does Scientific Discovery Have a Logic
State of the Field
Where is psychology going? Structural fault lines revealed by psychologists' use of Kuhn
The Hawthorne experiments and the introduction of Jean Piaget in American industrial psychology, 1929-1932
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |