ABSTRACT
In attempting to understand how humans first come to know simple facts about particular physical objects, one important discovery is that 4-month-olds can segment objects, represent them as persisting and track their causal interactions. This chapter investigates a leading attempt to solve it by postulating something called 'core knowledge'. The Core Knowledge View is consistent with the puzzling pattern of findings about infants' abilities concerning physical objects. The Core Knowledge View offers an improvement over the idea that 4-month-olds know facts about briefly unperceived objects insofar it does not generate incorrect predictions. As the Core Knowledge View neither explains puzzling patterns in infants' abilities nor generates fine-grained novel predictions, there is no way of knowing whether it solves the Linking Problem. According to the Core Knowledge View, infants' earliest representations of physical objects are representations in core systems.
