We explore the developmental paradox of false belief understanding. This paradox follows from the claim that young infants already have an understanding of false belief, despite the fact that they consistently fail the elicited-response false belief task. First, we argue that recent proposals to solve this paradox are unsatisfactory because they (i) try to give a full explanation of false belief understanding in terms of a single system, (ii) fail to provide psychological concepts that are sufficiently fine-grained to capture the (...) cognitive requirements for the various manifestations of false belief understanding, and (iii) ignore questions about system interaction. Second, we present a dual-system solution to the developmental paradox of false belief understanding that combines a layered model of perspective taking with an inhibition-selection-representation mechanism that operates on different levels. We discuss recent experimental findings that shed light on the interaction between these two systems, and suggest a number of directions for future research. (shrink)

In recent years, the human ability to reasoning about mental states of others in order to explain and predict their behavior has come to be a highly active area of research. Researchers from a wide range of fields { from biology and psychology through linguistics to game theory and logic{ contribute new ideas and results. This interdisciplinary workshop, collocated with the Thirteenth International Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK XIII), aims to shed light on models of social (...) reasoning that take into account realistic resource bounds. People reason about other people's mental states in order to understand and predict the others' behavior. This capability to reason about others' knowledge, beliefs and intentions is often referred to as theory of mind. Idealized rational agents are capable of recursion in their social reasoning, and can reason about phenomena like common knowledge. Such idealized social reasoning has been modeled by modal logics such as epistemic logic and BDI (belief, desire, intention) logics and by epistemic game theory. However, in real-world situations, many people seem to lose track of such recursive social reasoning after only a few levels. The workshop provides a forum for researchers that attempt to analyze, understand and model how resource-bounded agents reason about other minds. (shrink)

Within the philosophy of language, pragmatics has tended to be seen as an adjunct to, and a means of solving problems in, semantics. A cognitive-scientific conception of pragmatics as a mental processing system responsible for interpreting ostensive communicative stimuli (specifically, verbal utterances) has effected a transformation in the pragmatic issues pursued and the kinds of explanation offered. Taking this latter perspective, I compare two distinct proposals on the kinds of processes, and the architecture of the system(s), responsible for the recovery (...) of speaker meaning (both explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning). (shrink)

This article provides a critical overview of competing theories of conceptual structure (definitional structure, probabilistic structure, theory structure), including the view that concepts have no structure (atomism). We argue that the explanatory demands that these different theories answer to are best accommodated by an organization in which concepts are taken to have atomic cores that are linked to differing types of conceptual structure.

In this paper we provide an account of the structural underpinnings of self-awareness. We offer both an abstract, logical account.

The ability to engage in and recognize pretend play begins around 18 months. A major challenge for theories of pretense is explaining how children are able to engage in pretense, and how they are able to recognize pretense in others. According to one major account, the metarepresentational theory, young children possess both production and recognition abilities because they possess the mental state concept, PRETEND. According to a more recent rival account, the Behavioral theory, young children are behaviorists about pretense, and (...) only produce and recognize pretense as a sort of behavior--namely, behaving 'as-if'. We review both the metarepresentational and Behavioral accounts and argue that the Behavioral theory fails to characterize very young children's abilities to produce and to recognize pretense. Among other problems, the Behavioral theory implies that children should frequently mis-recognize regular behavior as pretense, while certain regular forms of pretend play should neither be produced nor recognized. Like other mental states, pretense eludes purely behavioral description. The metarepresentational theory does not suffer these problems and provides a better account of children's pretense. 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Since the publication of Premack and Woodruff’s classic paper introducing the notion of a ‘theory of mind’ :515–526, 1978), interdisciplinary research in social cognition has witnessed the development of theory–theory, simulation theory, hybrid approaches, and most recently interactionist and perceptual accounts of other minds. The challenges that these various approaches present for each other and for research in social cognition range from adequately defining central concepts to designing experimental paradigms for testing empirical hypotheses. But is there any approach that promises (...) to dominate future interdisciplinary research in social cognition? Is social cognition witnessing a gradual paradigm shift where hitherto grounding notions such as theory of mind are no longer viewed as explanatorily necessary? Or have we simply lost our way in attempting to devise adequate experimental setups that could sway the debate in favour of one of the contending accounts? This special issue addresses these questions in an attempt to discover what the future holds for interdisciplinary research in social cognition. (shrink)

Dans la première partie de cet article, je presente une thèse parapluie — la thèse de l'«exhaustion» — qui cerne bien l'élément central des diverses positions déflationnistes au sujet de la vérité : l'idée que le contenu du prédicat de vérité s'épuise entièrement dans le contenu de ce à quoi le prédicats'applique. Je soutiens que cette thèse n'est supportée que d'une manière triviale par l'idée courante que la vérite résiste à une analyse substantielle, car les prédicats en général ne se (...) prêtent guere à ce genre d'analyse. J'examine ensuite deux élaborations positives de la thèse de l'exhaustion; et je soutiens que ni l'une ni l'autre ne commence même à montrer que la thèse en question soit explicativement adéquate. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an account of linguistic content based on the active inference framework. While ecological and enactive theorists have rightly rejected the notion of content as a basis for cognitive processes, they must recognize the important role that it plays in the social regulation of linguistic interaction. According to an influential theory in philosophy of language, normative inferentialism, an utterance has the content that it has in virtue of its normative status, that is, in virtue of the (...) set of commitments and entitlements that the speaker undertakes by producing this utterance. This normative status is determined by the normative attitudes shared by members of the utterer’s linguistic community. I propose here an account of such normative attitudes based on the ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. I explain how social normativity can be understood in that framework as the way in which members of a group shape their social niche to make it more predictable. Finally, I apply this account of social normativity to basic communicative practices, thereby explaining how social normative expectations can emerge to regulate these communicative practices, eventually leading to the institution of the sort of normative statuses constitutive of linguistic content. (shrink)

Internalism is an explanatory strategy that makes the internal structure and constitution of the organism a basis for the investigation of its external function and the ways in which it is embedded in an environment. It is opposed to an externalist explanatory strategy, which takes its departure from observations about external function and mind-environment interactions, and infers and rationalizes internal organismic structure from that. This paper addresses the origins of truth, a basic ingredient in the human conceptual scheme. I suggest (...) the necessity of pursuing an internalist line of explanation for it, as adopted in the biolinguistic program and generative grammar at large. According to this view, the concept of truth is a presupposition for the way language is used in relation to the world, rather than a function of that use or a consequence of language-world relations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present a challenge to the received view in folk psychology. According to this challenge, the semantic assumption behind the received view, which considers that propositional attitude ascriptions are descriptions of the internal causally efficacious states underlying behavior, cannot account for the main function of reasons in terms of mental states.

Prominent accounts of language use (those of Grice, Lewis, Stalnaker, Sperber and Wilson among others) have viewed basic communicative acts as essentially involving the attitudes of the participating agents. Developmental data poses a dilemma for these accounts, since it suggests children below age four are competent communicators but would lack the ability to conceptualise communication if philosophers and linguists are right about what communication is. This paper argues that this dilemma is quite serious and that these prominent accounts would be (...) undermined if an adequate more minimal alternative were available. Just such a minimalist account of communication is offered, drawing on ideas from relevance theory and situation theory. (shrink)

Theorists of oppression commonly accept that unfair social power disparities result in a variety of harms. In particular, oppression is characterized by a loss of open-mindedness in the oppressors, and negative internalization in the oppressed. That is, while oppressors are often unable or unwilling to consider the points of view of the oppressed, the oppressed often come to internalize conditions of oppression by experiencing them as indicative of their own alleged shortcomings. Nevertheless, the psychological mechanisms behind these phenomena have remained (...) underexplored. This is unfortunate, since understanding the psychological processes behind these phenomena could help us understand how they could be reversed. In this work, I aim to fill this lacuna by extending debates on mechanisms of mindreading to show how close-mindedness and negative internalization come about. I synthesize empirical findings to show that while theorizing fosters emotional insulation by “reframing” affective cues from a third-person point of view, simulation fosters feelings of emotional vulnerability and psychological continuity. As a result, while theorizing allows oppressors to take a somewhat detached attitude during self and other interpretation, involuntary simulation fosters negative internalization on the part of the oppressed. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a battery of empirical findings on the relationship between cultural context and theory of mind that show great variance in the onset and character of mindreading in different cultures; discuss problems that those findings cause for the largely-nativistic outlook on mindreading dominating in the literature; and point to an alternative framework that appears to better accommodate the evident cross-cultural variance in mindreading. We first outline the theoretical frameworks that dominate in mindreading research, then present the (...) relevant empirical findings, and finally we come back to the theoretical approaches in a discussion of their explanatory potential in the face of the data presented. The theoretical frameworks discussed are the two-systems approach; performance-based approach also known as modularity-nativist approach; and the social-communicative theory also known as the systems, relational-systems, dynamic systems and developmental systems theory. The former two, which both fall within the wider modular-computational paradigm, run into a challenge with the cross-cultural data presented, and the latter - the systemic framework - seems to offer an explanatorily potent alternative. The empirical data cited in this paper comes from research on cross-cultural differences in folk psychology and theory-of-mind development; the influence of parenting practices on the development of theory of mind; the development and character of theory of mind in deaf populations; and neuroimaging research of cultural differences in mindreading. (shrink)

It has been speculated, by Chomsky and others, that our capacity for scientific understanding is not only enabled but also limited by a biologically endowed science forming faculty . I look at two sorts of consideration for the SFF thesis and find both wanting. Firstly, it has been claimed that a problem‐mystery distinction militates for the SFF thesis. I suggest that the distinction can be coherently drawn for cases, but that the purported‘evidence’for even a fairly lose general demarcation of problems (...) and mysteries is not best explained by a SFF. Secondly, I consider in detail a range of cognitive considerations for the SFF thesis and contend that it is at best moot whether science can be so construed as to make it feasible that it is a faculty competence. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Analyticity and Meaning Realism Logical Truths Conclusion Addendum.