In How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition, Shannon Spaulding develops a novel account of social cognition with pessimistic implications for mindreading accuracy: according to Spaulding, mistakes in mentalizing are much more common than traditional theories of mindreading commonly assume. In this commentary, I push against Spaulding’s pessimism from two directions. First, I argue that a number of the heuristic mindreading strategies that Spaulding views as especially error prone might be quite reliable in practice. Second, I argue that current (...) methods for measuring mindreading performance are not well-suited for the task of determining whether our mental-state attributions are generally accurate. I conclude that any claims about the accuracy or inaccuracy of mindreading are currently unjustified. (shrink)

Henry Wellman and colleagues have provided evidence of a robust developmental progression in theory-of-mind (or as we will say, “mindreading”) abilities, using verbal tasks. Understanding diverse desires is said to be easier than understanding diverse beliefs, which is easier than understanding that lack of perceptual access issues in ignorance, which is easier than understanding false belief, which is easier than understanding that people can hide their true emotions. These findings present a challenge to nativists about mindreading, and are said to (...) support a social-constructivist account of mindreading development instead. This article takes up the challenge on behalf of nativism. Our goal is to show that the mindreading-scale findings fail to support constructivism because well-motivated alternative hypotheses have not yet been controlled for and ruled out. These have to do with the pragmatic demands of verbal tasks. (shrink)

The traditional approach to the analysis of knowledge sees it as a true belief meeting further conditions. I discuss an empirical challenge to this traditional approach, which I call the argument from development. Briefly, the argument is that belief cannot be conceptually prior to knowledge because children acquire the concept of knowledge first. Several prominent scientists and philosophers have argued that this latter claim is supported by many findings with infants and young children. Here, I defend the traditional approach by (...) raising three challenges to the argument from development: the competence-performance challenge, the double-standard challenge, and the underdetermination challenge. I conclude that the developmental data are fully compatible with children acquiring the concept of belief first. In closing, I also argue that further research is needed to investigate when children acquire a concept of knowledge. (shrink)

A recent focus on philosophical methodology has reinvigorated ordinary language philosophy with the contention that philosophical inquiry is better served by attending to the ordinary use of language. Taking cues from findings in the social sciences that deploy methods utilizing language, various ordinary language philosophers embrace a guiding mandate: that ordinary language usage is more reflective of our linguistic and conceptual competencies than standard philosophical methods. We analyze two hypotheses that are implicit in the research from which ordinary language approaches (...) take their cues. This pair of optimistic assumptions (a) bind word meanings to properties of their corresponding concepts and (b) regard language as a direct reflection of our underlying cognitive processes and competencies. Polysemy and pragmatics complicate each assumption. Because the ordinary language philosopher’s methodological mandate compels us to consider how individuals process the utterances they encounter in deciphering the communicative intentions of speakers, failing to attend to the import of polysemy and pragmatics in philosophical and empirical methods has the potential to frustrate the aims of their insightful mandate. The significance of those two complications is worked out with the case study of knowledge. (shrink)

Rationalist accounts of the development of folk-psychology maintain that the acquisition of this capacity is aided by special-purpose mechanisms rich in innate structure. Rationalists have typically maintained that false-belief understanding (FBU) emerges very early on, before the age of two. To explain why young children nonetheless fail the false-belief task, rationalists have suggested that they may have troubles expressing their FBU. Here I do two things. First, I argue that extant proposals about what might prevent children from expressing their FBU (...) cannot explain some of the relevant data. Second, I put forward a new rationalist proposal, the processing-time account, according to which young children fail because they cannot carry out all the required processing in the time available. I argue that the processing-time account overcomes the challenges extant rationalist accounts face while being compatible with the evidence in their support, thereby providing a compelling explanation of the development of FBU. (shrink)

Recent accounts of mindreading—i.e., the human capacity to attribute mental states to interpret, explain, and predict behavior—have suggested that it has evolved through cultural rather than biological evolution. Although these accounts describe the role of culture in the ontogenetic development of mindreading, they neglect the question of the cultural origins of mindreading in human prehistory. We discuss four possible models of this, distinguished by the role they posit for culture: (1) the standard evolutionary psychology model (Carruthers), (2) the individualist empiricist (...) model (Wellman, Gopnik), (3) the cultural empiricist model (Heyes), and (4) the radical socio-cultural constructivist model, which we favor. We motivate model (4) by arguing that many forms of mental state ascription do not serve the function of simply describing inner states causally responsible for the behavior of a cognitive agent; rather, they relate the agent to her environment by characterizing her practical commitments. Making these practical commitments explicit has an important regulatory function in that it supports action coordination and alignment on joint goals. We propose a model of how the ascription of mental states may have evolved as a linguistic device to perform exactly this function of making agents’ practical commitments explicit. (shrink)

I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of (...) ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk. (shrink)

Growing evidence indicates that our higher rational capacities depend on social interaction—that only through engaging with others do we acquire the ability to evaluate beliefs as true or false, or to reflect on and evaluate the reasons that support our beliefs. Up to now, however, we have had little understanding of how this works. Here we argue that a uniquely human socio-linguistic phenomenon which we call ‘joint attention to mental content’ plays a key role. JAM is the ability to focus (...) together in conversation on the content of our mental states, such as beliefs and reasons. In such conversations it can be made clear that our attitudes to beliefs or reasons may conflict—that what I think is true, you might think is false, or that what I think is a good reason for believing something, you might think is a bad reason. We argue that through JAM, children discover that mental contents can be evaluated under various attitudes, and that this discovery transforms their mind-reading and reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Pretend play is generally considered to be a developmental landmark in Theory of Mind acquisition. The aim of the present paper is to offer a new account of the role of pretend play in Theory of Mind development. To this end I combine Hutto and Gallagher’s account of social cognition development with Matravers’ recent argument that the cognitive processes involved in engagement with narratives are neutral regarding fictionality. The key contribution of my account is an analysis of pretend play as (...) interaction with fictions. I argue that my account offers a better explanation of existing empirical data on the development of children’s pretend play and Theory of Mind than the competing theories from Leslie, Perner and Harris. (shrink)

The litmus test for the development of a metarepresentational Theory of Mind is the false belief task in which children have to represent how another agent misrepresents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief control tasks. Pragmatic accounts assume that the TB task is pragmatically confusing because it poses a trivial academic test question about a rational agent’s (...) perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse about subjective mental perspectives unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviance. The lack of such an obvious possibility in the TB task implicates that there might be some hidden perspective difference and thus makes the task confusing. In the present study, we test the pragmatic account by administering to 3- to 6-year-olds TB and FB tasks and structurally analogous true and false sign tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and metarepresentational complexity; the crucial difference is that TS tasks do not implicate an alternative non-mental perspective and should thus be less pragmatically confusing than TB tasks. The results show parallel and correlated development in FB and FS tasks, replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, but show no trace of this in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance account. (shrink)

Theorizing about children’s early development is beset with interpretational complexities. I argue that there is a general tendency to over-interpret the experimental findings, and that one of the main causes of this is the difficulty of disengaging from our adult frame of reference when theorizing about the young child’s mind. One domain where this holds is children’s ability to differentiate themselves from others. In relation to this I first critically analyze some cases of interpretational complexities, and then apply my methodological (...) and conceptual concerns to children’s perspective-taking abilities. This has a specific bearing on the classical false-belief task, which is a perspective-taking task. Part II proposes a new, what I call, a ‘Piagetian reading’ of the false-belief test. My new interpretation of the test suggests two different ways of perspective-taking of which one is egocentric in Piaget’s sense. Concluding Part III elaborates on some implications of the proposed reading of the test for a number of findings in the Theory-of-Mind field. (shrink)

Recent accounts of mindreading—i.e., the human capacity to attribute mental states to interpret, explain, and predict behavior—have suggested that it has evolved through cultural rather than biological evolution. Although these accounts describe the role of culture in the ontogenetic development of mindreading, they neglect the question of the cultural origins of mindreading in human prehistory. We discuss four possible models of this, distinguished by the role they posit for culture: the standard evolutionary psychology model, the individualist empiricist model, the cultural (...) empiricist model, and the radical socio-cultural constructivist model, which we favor. We motivate model by arguing that many forms of mental state ascription do not serve the function of simply describing inner states causally responsible for the behavior of a cognitive agent; rather, they relate the agent to her environment by characterizing her practical commitments. Making these practical commitments explicit has an important regulatory function in that it supports action coordination and alignment on joint goals. We propose a model of how the ascription of mental states may have evolved as a linguistic device to perform exactly this function of making agents’ practical commitments explicit. (shrink)

Evidence from the knowledge access task and the diverse belief task suggests that, before age four, children may find it difficult to attribute false beliefs to others, despite demonstrating a basic comprehension of the concept of belief. Challenging this view, this article assumes a sociopragmatic perspective on language to argue that even children younger than four may not understand at all the concept of belief but may nevertheless master naïvely the pragmatics of belief reports in specific conversational contexts. The proposal (...) suggests a novel interpretation of both the reasons behind younger children’s difficulty with (elicited-response) false belief tasks, and the critical factors enabling children’s success in them. On the one hand, it proposes that younger children fail (elicited-response) false belief tasks because they do not understand the importance of focusing on an agent’s (verbally ascribed) mental states to infer her practical commitments. On the other hand, it suggests that children’s active engagement in conversations where the caregiver credits an agent with a belief is the critical factor integrating their initially scattered mastery of the pragmatics of belief reports, teaches them to track belief reports across contexts, and accordingly shapes their understanding of belief as a representational mental state. (shrink)

This mini configurative review links theory of mind research with school-based social skills interventions to reframe theoretical understanding of ToM ability based on a conceptual mapping exercise. The review’s aim was to bridge areas of psychology and education concerned with social cognition. Research questions included: how do dependent variables in interventions designed to enhance child social-cognitive skills map onto ToM constructs empirically validated within psychology? In which ways do these mappings reframe conceptualization of ToM ability? Thirty-one studies on social-cognitive skill (...) with typically-developing children ages 3–11 were included as opposed to explicit ToM trainings in light of an identified performance plateau on ToM tasks in children. Intervention DVs mapped onto the following ToM constructs in at least 87% of studies: “Representation of Others and/or Self,” “Knowledge/Awareness of Mental States,” “Attributions/Explanations of Mental States,” “Social Competence,” “Predicting Behavior,” and “Understanding Complex Social Situations.” The absence of false-belief understanding as an intervention DV indicated a lack of direct training in ToM ability. A hierarchy to further organize the review’s ToM framework constructs as either skills or competences within the construct of ‘Representation of Others and/or Self’ is proposed. Implications for the conceptualization of ToM and social-cognitive research as well as educational practice are discussed, namely how school social skill interventions conceptualize skill along a continuum in contrast to the common artificial dichotomous assessment of ToM skill, yet the development of ToM can nevertheless be supported by the school environment. (shrink)

Contemporary research on mindreading or theory of mind has resulted in three major findings: There is a difference in the age of passing of the elicited-response false belief task and its spontaneous–response version; 15-month-olds pass the latter while the former is passed only by 4-year-olds. Linguistic and social factors influence the development of the ability to mindread in many ways. There are cultures with folk psychologies significantly different from the Western one, and children from such cultures tend to show different (...) timetables of mindreading development. The traditional accounts of the data are nativism, rational constructivism, and two-systems theory. In this paper, we offer criticism of these traditional cognitivist accounts and explore an alternative, action-based framework. We argue that even though they all seem to explain the above empirical data, there are other, theoretical reasons why their explanations are untenable. Specifically, we discuss the problem of foundationalism and the related problem of innateness. Finally, we explore an alternative, action-based framework that avoids these theoretical limitations and offer an interpretation of the empirical data from that perspective. (shrink)

The poor performances of typically developing children younger than 4 in the first-order false-belief task “Maxi and the chocolate” is analyzed from the perspective of conversational pragmatics. An ambiguous question asked by an adult experimenter (perceived as a teacher) can receive different interpretations based on a search for relevance, by which children according to their age attribute different intentions to the questioner, within the limits of their own meta-cognitive knowledge. The adult experimenter tells the child the following story of object-transfer: (...) “Maxi puts his chocolate into the green cupboard before going out to play. In his absence, his mother moves the chocolate from the green cupboard to the blue one.” The child must then predict where Maxi will pick up the chocolate when he returns. To the child, the question from an adult (a knowledgeable person) may seem surprising and can be understood as a question of his own knowledge of the world, rather than on Maxi's mental representations. In our study, without any modification of the initial task, we disambiguate the context of the question by (1) replacing the adult experimenter with a humanoid robot presented as “ignorant” and “slow” but trying to learn and (2) placing the child in the role of a “mentor” (the knowledgeable person). Sixty-two typical children of 3 years-old completed the first-order false belief task “Maxi and the chocolate,” either with a human or with a robot. Results revealed a significantly higher success rate in the robot condition than in the human condition. Thus, young children seem to fail because of the pragmatic difficulty of the first-order task, which causes a difference of interpretation between the young child and the experimenter. (shrink)

How should knowledge be analyzed? Compositionally, as having constituents like belief and justification, or as an atomic concept? In making arguments for or against these perspectives, epistemologists have begun to use experimental evidence from developmental psychology and developmental linguistics. If we were to conclude that knowledge were developmentally prior to belief, then we might have a good basis to claim that belief is not a constituent of knowledge. In this review, I present a broad range of developmental evidence from the (...) past decade and discuss some of the implications it has for the proper analysis of knowledge. The orthodox perspective from the developmental literature was one where children fail to understand belief and knowledge concepts until later in childhood, with typical asymmetries in belief attribution and knowledge attribution. But what emerges from both a discussion of newer findings and a contextualization of older findings is a picture of development whereby core competence with belief and knowledge concepts emerges much earlier than previously thought that apparent failures in later childhood may be explained by other aspects of development than conceptual development and that there is no clear evidence that knowledge attributions emerge earlier than belief attributions. (shrink)

How can we solve the paradox of false-belief understanding: if infants pass the implicit false belief task by nonverbal behavioural responses why do they nonetheless typically fail the explicit FBT till they are 4 years old? Starting with the divide between situational and cognitive accounts of the development of false-belief understanding, we argue that we need to consider both situational and internal cognitive factors together and describe their interaction to adequately explain the development of children’s Theory of Mind ability. We (...) then argue that a further challenge is raised for existing accounts by helping behaviour versions of the FBT. We argue that the common two-stage accounts are inadequate: we need to allow for three central stages in a continuous development. Furthermore, drawing on Perner et al.’s and Perner and Leahy’s : 491–508, 2016) recent mental files account, we provide a new account of the development of these three stages of ToM ability by describing the changes of the structure and organisation of mental files including the systematic triggering role of types of situations. Thereby we aim to establish a situational mental file account as a new and adequate solution to the paradox of false-belief understanding. (shrink)