Are scientists just big children?

“Over the past ten years, developmental psychologists have increasingly used the model of scientific theory change to characterize cognitive development. [Here there is a long list of references.] I have called this idea the “theory theory. [More references.] It has been consistently productive in explaining the child’s developing understanding of the mind and the world. … The analogy to science has two aspects. First, children’s knowledge is structured in a theory-like way, and second, that knowledge changes in a way that is analogous to theory change in science.
“This theory formation system may have evolved specifically to allow human children to learn. Human beings’ evolutionary advantage stems from our ability to adapt our behavior to a very wide variety of environments. In turn, this depends on our ability to learn swiftly and efficiently about the particular physical and social environment we grow up in. Their long, protected immaturity gives human children an opportunity to infer the particular structure of the world around them. The powerful and flexible theory formation abilities we see in childhood may have evolved to make this learning possible. In this view, science takes advantage of these basic abilities in a more socially organized way and applies them to new types of problems and domains. Science is thus a kind of epiphenomenon of cognitive development. It is not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children.”

—From “Explanation as Orgasm and the Drive for Causal Knowledge: The Function, Evolution, and Phenomenology of the Theory Formation System,” by Alison Gopnik, in Explanation and Cognition.