Since Spidey has realized that his basis for claiming that children do not have rights is fundamentally flawed, but doesn’t have the courage to admit, I ask the following question to the rest of the forum:
Can children reason?
comment: that’s a very broad class, not least because a 90year old is still someone’s child. If specifically, ‘the young’ is meant, well, that’s still a very broad class…
I was once a child. As a child, I was able to reason. Maybe not all the time, but often. I think that children can reason. They might not be mature, or have a very balanced temperament, but they can reason.
Ah! Further destroying Spidey claim.
Of course they can reason. It is not something that suddenly makes a nest in someone’s mind at some arbitrary age. The young have the ability to reason (some are more capable of it than others), it is simply in a stage of crucial development that grows and learns as they make decisions, mistakes, take actions and then experience consequences.
There is a problem of precision when we try to boil down complex ideas into just a few words.. hence my suggestions of refinement.
Spidey and I have actually discussed these issues privately at some length and we have surprisingly close positions.
You’ll be surprised how well they can reason, if you treat them in a way that assumes they can.
And if they reason wrongly, you’re still there to overlook them if necessary. But if you don’t guide them to self-responsible understanding, they will pick it up far later than otherwise.
From my own experience I can tell you that I was utterly disappointed in my parents’ ability to offer sound reasoning for their directives; which is probably why their directives were stupid.
can parents reason? [;)]
Fine. Spidey says that children cannot reason. I asked him how he knows that. He says that they haven’t been proven to reason. I ask him what evidence he requires to prove that children can reason? In other words, what proof is there that non-children can reason. But he keeps dodging this.
Or is it self-evident that children cannot reason?
If they are given an incentive to be reasonable. If they can command a child to do what they are told, knowing that if the child tries to leave he will be brought back to their property like a slave who tried to leave his master’s plantation, then they have far less reason to… well, reason.
If this is about what Spidey thinks, the impression I got from him was that he has a similar understanding to mine, i.e. that fetuses don’t reason, and that more mature ‘children’ do reason, and that ‘a child’ can span the continuum between the two and therefore there can be a child that is particularly young and so more like the non-reasoning fetus than the older child that takes instruction in mathematics. As such the sweeping statement that ‘children do not reason’ seems overly strong. I don’t know whether I have misunderstood spidey or he has changed his opinions or what have you, but in the hope that my reflections on our conversations might help, there it is…
Yeah, I reject the notion that there is an age that determines whether or not a person can reason. Perhaps a 3-year-old can reason or perhaps it cannot. All I want to know is what evidence is needed to prove that anyone can reason. Otherwise, how else would we or do we know that anyone can reason?
I offer the following not as an ‘answer’ but as data to be interpreted
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_cognitive_development
I think this stuff is useful to consider, also I have a paper I uploaded to the community files here on the topic of Sorites Paradox’s of which it seems to me ‘growing into rationality’ is an exemplar
Can babies/toddlers understand property rights?
I would guess a child psychologist or pediatrician would have a better answer for you.
Hmm, so I wonder at what age a person generally understands property rights? As I have stated before, I would guess sometime between the ages of 6-12, depending on the child.
Which child psychologists or pediatrician do you recommend?
Perhaps. Can they not?
The crazy socialists obviously don’t understand property rights. Do they have rights?