Does the cat know it is a cat? Doing philosophy with children at the kitchen table

My son was six when he asked whether our cat knows that she is a cat. He asked it while she was asleep on the windowsill, in the tone he uses for questions he expects to be answered by teatime. I said I didn't know. He said: "But she knows she's not a dog." And then, after a pause: "Does she know she's not me?"

I left accountancy to raise two children, and I expected the work to be tiring and repetitive. Much of it is. What I did not expect was to spend so much of it doing philosophy, badly, with people who cannot yet tie their shoes. This essay is about what I have learned, mostly from getting it wrong.

Children ask the real questions

The cat question is a question about self-awareness and about other minds. Since then my children have asked, in no particular order: whether a Lego castle is still the same castle if you replace every brick, where they were before they were born, whether it is lying to tell the baby the medicine tastes nice, and why we say "the sun rises" when it doesn't move.

The castle is the ship of Theseus. The question about before birth is the one Lucretius used to argue that death should not frighten us: if the time before we existed was nothing to us, the time after will be nothing too. The medicine is a question about lying for someone's good, which troubles nurses and doctors as much as parents. My children did not need to read anything to arrive at these. They arrived at them because they are new to the world and nothing yet seems obvious.

Plato has Socrates say, in the Theaetetus, that wonder is the feeling of the philosopher and that philosophy has no other beginning. I used to read that as a pleasant compliment to philosophers. Now I read it as a description of my kitchen at half past six.

The American philosopher Gareth Matthews spent years collecting conversations like these, and his book Philosophy and the Young Child (1980) argued that small children's puzzlement is often genuinely philosophical, not just cute. Around the same time Matthew Lipman began writing short philosophical novels for children and building a school programme around them, in which a class becomes what he called a community of inquiry: children reasoning together about a question, with the teacher guiding the conversation rather than supplying the answer. I have read about this work only as a parent, not as a teacher, but it gave me permission to take my children's questions seriously.

Three mistakes I made

I answered too quickly. When my daughter asked whether numbers are real, I said "of course", because I used to count other people's money for a living. She looked disappointed. I had closed the question before she had finished opening it. Now I try to answer a question with a question: "What would it mean if they weren't?" Usually she has an idea, and it is usually more interesting than mine.

I gave them the names too early. Once I learned that the castle was "the ship of Theseus", I told them so, and the conversation died. A name can feel like an answer. Children seem to need to hold the puzzle in their own words for a while before they are told that someone in Athens had it first. Later the name becomes a gift: "You thought of the same thing as a Greek philosopher." Earlier, it is a full stop.

I turned it into a performance. For a few weeks I asked them "philosophical questions" at dinner, and they could tell. My son started giving answers he thought I wanted. Philosophy with children seems to work best when the question is theirs and the adult is a fellow puzzler, not a quizmaster. The card on philosophy of education describes a long argument about whether education draws out what is already in a learner or puts in what is not. My dinner-table experiment was a small, failed vote for the second.

What the Kural says

We read the Tirukkural together in Tamil, a couplet or two at bedtime. One of the couplets on learning, from the chapter of that name, compares knowledge to a well dug in sand: the deeper you dig, the more water comes. The more you learn, the more understanding rises to meet you. Another, at the start of the same chapter, says to learn thoroughly what ought to be learned, and then to live by it.

The second couplet is the harder one. A child can learn that it is wrong to lie about the medicine. Living by it, while her baby brother screams and the medicine really does taste terrible, is another matter. That gap between knowing and doing is where most of our family philosophy now happens. It is not abstract. It is about whether you can tell your brother the truth and still get the spoon in.

Should every child do philosophy?

I am not sure. My children enjoy it partly because nobody grades it. I worry that if it became one more school subject, with a syllabus and a test, it would become exactly the thing that turns wonder into homework. On the other hand, I had the time to listen. Many parents, especially those working two jobs, do not, and a classroom might be the only place a child's question about the cat is taken seriously.

What I am sure of is smaller. When a child asks a question you cannot answer, the honest reply, "I don't know, let's think about it", is not a failure. It may be the most important thing you teach them that day: that adults also do not know, and that not knowing is where thinking starts.

As for the cat, she still sleeps on the windowsill. My son has decided she knows she is a cat "but not in words". I have not found a philosopher who has put it better.