Commentary Human Development 1999;42:297–299 Are We All Gradualists at Heart? Mary Gauvain University of California, Riverside, Calif., USA Mary Gauvain Department of Psychology University of California, Riverside, CA 92521 (USA) Tel. +1 909 787 4690, Fax +1 909 787 3985 E-Mail mary.gauvain@ucr.edu ABC Fax + 41 61 306 12 34 E-Mail karger@karger.ch www.karger.com © 1999 S. Karger AG, Basel 0018–716X/99/0426–0297$17.50/0 Accessible online at: www.karger.com/journals/hde Key Words Belief and context W Mind and context W Sociocultural psychology and developmental change In his article, Schwitzgebel makes the claim that children’s developing knowledge may be best described as a gradual process. This implies that at any given point a child may not have full knowledge but, rather, partial understanding of something. This par- tial understanding may be what accounts for findings that show discrepancies across situations in children’s understanding of seemingly similar concepts. This article touches on several topics of current interest to those who study cognitive development. These include the fact that while there is mounting evidence of the competencies of infants and young children there is, at the same time, increasing demonstration of the incompetence of adults. These observations are not merely contradictory. They suggest a world turned upside down, one that questions the very nature of maturation. Another topic touched on here pertains to the underlying explanations of intellectual growth. Several views on this currently vie for prominence in the field, namely nativist, contex- tual, and constraint views. Schwitzgebel does not adhere strongly to any of these views, but his proposal suggests a set of questions that each of these approaches needs to address in order to provide a full account of cognitive development. The most important part of the paper is the idea that all of the hullabaloo among developmental psychologists regarding whether knowledge is present or absent at any given age is, at the very least, misguided, and, at its worst, destined to lead research and theory astray. Although this general point has been made elsewhere [Haith, 1998], Schwitzgebel provides an interesting description of an alternative way of characterizing the developing mind. This approach stresses gradualism or the state of ‘in-between’ understanding, a notion he links with Ryle’s [1949] philosophical account of belief