Until fairly recently, young infants were thought to be as cognitively incompetent as they were morally innocent. They were epistemological ‘tabulae rasae’, helpless ‘bundles of reflexes’ who spent all of their time sleeping, crying and sucking. In the famous words of William James, infants lived in “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”.

Upshot: Michael Tomasello is Director of the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology and Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He completed his PhD with Ernst as his supervisor in 1980. In his reminiscence essay he describes the “total enculturation” he experienced on encountering Ernst von Glasersfeld.

Key words: Ernst von Glasersfeld

Key words: cognition, semiotics, development