ABSTRACT
Learning to do something is of course acquiring a skill. A child that learns the operation of opening locked doors acquires a skill in the exercise of which it performs a series of operations. It turns the key in the lock, turns the knob and pulls or pushes, as the case may be. In the case of each of these actions, it performs certain bodily movements. And in point of fact what psychologists often have in mind when they apply 'learning' to the changes that take place in the case of the very young infant is nothing more or less than the physiological development or maturation that takes place in the nervous system. There is nothing intrinsically objectionable in radical alterations of the uses of terms borrowed from everyday discourse; the history of the sciences affords us many examples of this phenomenon.
