Eric wrote
On the other hand, as Reid noted, children learn on the premise of truthfulness. If as children, we do not accept that the adults around us are, for the most part, telling the truth, we cannot learn anything.
I think (knowing nothing about Reid) that children must understand the difference between truth and falsehood /before/ they could 'accept' this. For example, they couldn't wonder if adults were telling the truth unless they believed that they might not be. It might be clearer to say that children (before
they eat the forbidden fruit) accept what adults say.From experience, I'd say that children become skeptics at an early age, e.g., when an adult says that the Teddy bear ate all the cookies. Well---this involves some pretty advanced concepts, and suggests that the skeptical child (who doesn't believe Ted ate the cookies) although the dog might have) must, as I suggested in the first paragraph, be able to grasp that either x, or not-x, are possibilities in many
cases, something that infants might not be able to do.Reid seems to believe that it would be possible to systematically deceive a child, but what such
deception would look like isn't at all clear to me. Robert Paul, somewhere south of Reed College
