ABSTRACT
Margaret Boden, in her book on Piaget, observes that ‘a baby sucking is constructing a world of suckable things and not merely finding things that he (or she) can do’ (Boden 1979:30). Boden is not being patronising to that infant; she sees it as taking first, early steps in the furnishing of its own conceptual space with meaningful objects. This is what the young Helen Keller achieves in a rare, all-embracing vision in an episode quoted later in this chapter.
