Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

argue that children construct a naive understanding of the world which gradually becomes modified to conform to adult-scientific views. This naive understanding consists of a number of discrete ontological beliefs, such as that the ground is flat, that things fall down, and that stars are small objects. Children are capable of synthesizing their ontological beliefs to form relatively consistent conceptual structures. However, they also seem to be operating under an epistemological constraint according to which these ontological beliefs represent the true state of affairs about the world. In the process of conceptual change children replace their ontological beliefs with a different explanatory framework.