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Some of the most exciting research in recent cognitive science has involved the demonstration that young infants possess a remarkable array of discriminative abilities. Infants a few months old have been shown to have a substantial amount of" initial knowledge" about objects, in domains such as physics and arithmetic (for recent reviews and overviews, see Baillargeon 1995; Carey 1995; Spelke 1994; Spelke et al. 1995a; Spelke et al. 1995c). In this chapter we will be concerned with what such results tell us about the structure of the infant's mind in other words, with what the phrase" initial knowledge" means in terms of the underlying cognitive architecture. For the duration of this chapter, we will adopt Spelke's phrase" initial knowledge" without scarequotes, having recognized that it is precisely the meaning of this phrase which is at issue.