Theories of children's developing understanding of mind tend to emphasize either individualistic processes of theory formation, maturation, or introspection, or the process of enculturation. However, such theories must be able to account for the accumulating evidence of the role of social interaction in the development of social understanding. We propose an alternative account, according to which the development of children's social understanding occurs within triadic interaction involving the child's experience of the world as well as communicative interaction with others about (...) their experience and beliefs (Chapman 1991; 1999). It is through such triadic interaction that children gradually construct knowledge of the world as well as knowledge of other people. We contend that the extent and nature of the social interaction children experience will influence the development of children's social understanding. Increased opportunity to engage in cooperative social interaction and exposure to talk about mental states should facilitate the development of social understanding. We review evidence suggesting that children's understanding of mind develops gradually in the context of social interaction. Therefore, we need a theory of development in this area that accords a fundamental role to social interaction, yet does not assume that children simply adopt socially available knowledge but rather that children construct an understanding of mind within social interaction. Key Words: language; Piaget; social interaction; theories of mind; Vygotsky; Wittgenstein. (shrink)

We naturally evaluate the beliefs of others, sometimes by deliberate calculation, and sometimes in a more immediate fashion. Epistemic intuitions are immediate assessments arising when someone’s condition appears to fall on one side or the other of some significant divide in epistemology. After giving a rough sketch of several major features of epistemic intuitions, this article reviews the history of the current philosophical debate about them and describes the major positions in that debate. Linguists and psychologists also study epistemic assessments; (...) the last section of the paper discusses some of their research and its potential relevance to epistemology. (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)

We defend the Simulation Theory of Mind against a challenge from the Theory Theory of Mind. The challenge is that while Simulation Theory can account for Theory of Mind errors, it cannot account for their systematic nature. There are Theory of Mind errors seen in social psychological research with adults where persons are either overly generous or overly cynical in how rational they expect others to be. There are also Theory of Mind errors observable in developmental data drawn from Maxi-type (...) false belief tests. We provide novel responses to several examples showing that Simulation Theory can answer these challenges. (shrink)

For decades, philosophers and psychologists have assumed that children understand other people’s behavior on the basis of Belief Reasoning (BR) at latest by age 5 when they pass the false belief task. Furthermore, children’s use of BR in the true belief task has been regarded as being ontogenetically prior. Recent findings from developmental studies challenge this view and indicate that 4- to 5-year-old children make use of a reasoning strategy, which is cognitively less demanding than BR and called perceptual access (...) reasoning (PAR), in true belief tasks. I appeal to research on fluency to explain these findings. On my account, 4- to 5- year-old children understand other people’s behavior by means of BR if they experience cognitive strain (such as in false belief tasks) but they revert to simpler heuristics PAR when such an experience is missing (such as in true belief tasks). (shrink)

Theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to ourselves and others, is crucial for human social interaction and has been argued to fully develop around the age of 4. However, recent research suggests that children can perform rudimentary, preverbal ToM inferences at an earlier age, indicating a discrepancy between this early, implicit ToM and a later mastery of explicit ToM tasks. Already in the second year of life children show competence in grasping what an agent knows and does (...) not know in preverbal communication, whereas explicit performance on ToM tasks can only be observed around the age of 4. One possible explanation is that children require an additional representational resource in order to be able to associate their preverbal understanding with explicit terms that can be used to denote it in standard ToM tasks. The purpose of this thesis is to extend research on ToM in the third year of life by investigating one possible representational resource, namely mental state language. Mental state language is considered crucial for ToM development as it is the first explicit means by which children can verbalize mental states and it plays an important role for both precursors and subsequent mastery of explicit ToM tasks. However, how exactly mental state language production reflects children's awareness and comprehension of mental states remains understudied. Harris, Yang, and Cui have argued that children use mental state terms early on and possess basic representations of their own knowledge and ignorance. Since both mental state terms and basic representations appear to be present at the same time, one might assume that children already possess associations between them. However, experimental tasks that investigate mental state verbs like `know' and `think' are only able to find competence to differentiate between them around the age of 5. Thus, the extent to which the appropriate use of mental state terms in conversation reflects comprehension of the denoted mental states remains unclear. Given that mental state language develops around the second and third year of life, one may gain insight into the role it plays for a transition from implicit to explicit competence by investigating abilities which, according to our current understanding, develop around the same time and show both preverbal and verbal aspects. Perspective-taking and implicit false-belief understanding are such abilities. Children show early preverbal perspective-taking competence at the age of 24 months, but only develop verbal perspective-taking competence around the age of 3. Previous work has identified a relationship between mental state language and verbal perspective-taking at the age of 30 months, but no study has investigated this relationship in connection to preverbal perspective-taking. Also in the area of falsebelief understanding studies have mostly investigated the relationship between mental state language and explicit false-belief tasks, but no study has examined how mental state language may relate to an implicit false-belief task. Finally, mental state language has been found to correlate with a number of different competencies, among them inhibitory control and general language, but no study has systematically investigated which of these competencies serve as precursors that predict children's later mental state language production. Determining precursors is relevant for understanding crucial aspects of mental state language development and how it might relate to children's preverbal representations of mental states. The aims of the present thesis were thus to investigate the relationship between children's mental state language production and their comprehension of mental state terms and mental states, to determine the role that mental state language production may play in preverbal and verbal perspective-taking and implicit false-belief understanding and finally, to identify the basic linguistic and cognitive skills that contribute to the development of mental state language. These aims were pursued through 2 studies. In study 1, children were assessed at two time-points. Once they were tested at the age of 24 months with measures of general language, cognitive and motoric development and inhibition skills. An additional time they were tested at 27 months in order to assess children's mental state language production, their preverbal and verbal perspective-taking skills, meta-cognitive awareness of ignorance, implicit false-belief understanding and finally a task that measured their ability to infer a speaker's need for information from a statement about knowing or not knowing the location of an item and a speaker's desire for an object from statements about wanting or not wanting a particular object. The aim was to determine the concurrent relationship of children's mental state language production and their ability to comprehend and use these terms on experimental tasks, to identify the concurrent relationship between mental state language and preverbal and verbal perspective-taking and implicit false-belief understanding and finally to determine which developmental skills at the age of 24 months are significant predictors of children's later mental state language production. Study 1 showed that 27-month-olds were already able to produce mental state terms and showed a basic understanding of their own knowledge and ignorance, but failed to show comprehension of epistemic mental state terms in experimental tasks. Thus, despite their early competence in producing epistemic mental state terms, children's comprehension of these terms appeared to be limited. The results of the first study also identified that mental state language production was related to children's own verbal level-1 visual perspective-taking, in particular to usage of the verb `know/don't know' in several naturalistic contexts, independent of general language. There was also continuity from children's preverbal understanding of perspectives to their ability to report their own perspective in a verbal task. However, there was no relationship between preverbal understanding of perspectives and mental state language production according to a parental questionnaire, suggesting that early preverbal understanding of perspectives is not related to the mere production of mental state terms unless children already produce these terms in appropriate contexts. In relation to implicit false-belief understanding, children's performance suggested that they followed a simple strategy of looking at the last object location instead of demonstrating false-belief understanding. Finally, study 1 also identified sentence production, inhibition and fine motor skills at 24 months as significant predictors of children's later production of mental state language at 27 months. In study 2, children's ability to infer a speaker's need for information was investigated further by administering a pragmatic inference task from study 1 to 2-, 3- and 5-year-olds and determining at which age children showed competence. Study 2 showed that despite being able to draw the right pragmatic inferences for the mental state verb `want' at the age of 2, only at the age of 5 children were able to draw the right pragmatic inferences for the mental state verb `know/don't know'. The overall results of this thesis implied that the crucial aspect of mental state language is not mere production of the verbs, but children's experience with a variety of contexts in which mental state verbs can be used, corresponding with a socioconstructivist approach to cognitive development. The number of naturalistic contexts related to children's metarepresentations of their own ignorance, to their ability of inferring a speaker's desire and their ability to verbalize their own perspective, thus suggesting that the conversational input children receive is one of the main ways in which mental representations become explicit. Furthermore, the theoretical view that children's preverbal competence may be better explained by a production rule approach instead of early conceptual understanding is discussed. (shrink)

There have been major developments in the understanding of children’s nonhuman concepts, particularly God concepts, within the past two decades, with a body of cross-cultural studies accumulating. Relatively less research has studied those of non-Christian faiths or children’s concepts of popular occult characters. This paper describes two studies, one in Spain and one in England, examining 5- to 10-year-olds’ human and nonhuman agent beliefs. Both settings were secular, but the latter comprised a Muslim majority. Children were given a false-belief task (...) in which they were asked to infer about three humans, three animals and three supernatural beings. Similar false beliefs about humans, with subtle differences in inferences about animals and supernatural beings, were found between the two locations. In London different patterns for God between participants with a family religion, in particular Muslims, and non-affiliates, were identified as well as an association between religious beliefs and practice and inferences about God. Findings are discussed in the light of theory and research on the role of sociocultural inputs in children’s theory of mind development and understanding of agency. (shrink)

Immediate striking feelings without any conscious inference are viewed as one of the sources of truth by many philosophers. It is often claimed that there is a long tradition in philosophy of viewing intuitive propositions as true without need for further justification, since the intuitiveness, for traditional philosophy, suggests that the proposition is self-evident. In philosophical discussions, it was extremely common for philosophers to argue for the intuitiveness of their theories. Contemporary philosophers have put increasing attention and effort into the (...) study of this methodology in philosophy. They explicitly use the term ‘intuition’ and ‘appealing to intuition’ to refer to such common practice in philosophy. Recently there are numerous papers discussing the topic of intuition, its reliability, evidential status, and what philosophy ought to be. These disputes have lasted for several decades and it seems the disputes may even continue for several more decades. Despite the excessive usage of the term ‘intuition’, there are still polarized attitudes towards intuition: not only on the question of whether we should appeal to intuition in doing philosophy, but also on what ‘intuition’ means. The latter problem, the divergence of understanding on ‘intuition’, seems to be the main factor causing endless disputes of this topic and it should be the problem primarily solved. There are philosophers who notice the problem that there is no general agreement on the accounts of intuition. However, surprisingly, most of them have not attempted to solve the problem, but just simply give their own accounts of intuition, or claim that it is improbable to have general agreement on the definition of ‘intuition’ instead. In fact, it is possible to have a general acceptable theory of intuition. The main aims of the thesis are to provide the method of seeking the good candidates for a general acceptable theory of intuition and to use the method in seeking one of the good theories. In order to achieve the goals, the thesis will provide the ground for the discussion, by specifying several features of intuition as the desiderata of a good theory; and examine several theories of intuition that have been offered in recent literature as example. We will find that, unfortunately, among the theories selected in philosophy, there still seems to be no satisfactory account of intuition. Nevertheless, there seems a promising account of intuition offered in psychology. The thesis will argue the psychological account is one of the good candidates of general acceptable theory of intuition. If not, we at least have a method of seeking the good theories of intuition. (shrink)

In contrast with the two dominant views in Theory of Mind development, the Perceptual Access Reasoning hypothesis of Fabricius and colleagues is that children don’t understand the mental state of belief until around 6 years of age. Evidence for this includes data that many children ages 4 and 5, who pass the standard 2-location false belief task, nonetheless fail the true belief task, and often fail a 3-location false belief task by choosing the irrelevant option. These findings can be explained (...) by the PAR hypothesis but pose challenges for the two dominant views. I argue against an alternate hypothesis which is proposed by Anika Fiebich in a recent paper. According to Fiebich, PAR is not a distinct transitional stage in children’s theory of mind development, but is a fast and frugal System 1 heuristic which fades once children become fluent in social reasoning. However, I point out a number of problems with Fiebich’s proposal and argue for the superiority of the PAR hypothesis. I also present five reasons to be skeptical about the findings of Perner and Horn which purportedly show that 4- and 5-year-olds can pass the 3-location false belief task when suitably modified. This is a further difficulty for Fiebich’s proposal, since she relies on these findings in her fluency theory. Finally, I sketch a dual systems theory of mind account based upon the PAR hypothesis which is different from Fiebich’s. (shrink)

Beyond their linguistic and rhetorical uses, the mental epistemic verbs to knowand to believe reveal a basic conceptual system for human intentionality and the theory of representational mind. Numerous studies, particularly in the field of child development, have been devoted to the conditions under which knowledge and belief are acquired. Upstream of this empirical approach, this paper proposes a topological model of the conceptual structure underlying the linguistic use of to know and to believe. A cusp model of catastrophe theory (...) is chosen to model the formation of epistemic states. Its main characteristic is considering to believe as an intermediate state which lacks stability and presents the delayed effect of hysteresis. The attribution of mental states to the other (viewpoint of the third person) is obtained by the crossing of first and third person knowledge and belief, which gives rise to new categories (to know if and to falsely believe) and closes the system. Another merging of the beliefs of persons A and B, using the butterfly catastrophe, provides a model of interpersonal belief appreciated by an independent observer along a potential evolving from agreement to disagreement. (shrink)