No facts without perspectives
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No facts without perspectives Ramiro Glauer1
· Frauke Hildebrandt1
Received: 21 May 2020 / Accepted: 11 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Perner and Roessler (in: Aguilar J, Buckareff A (eds) Causing human action: new perspectives on the causal theory of action, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 199–228, 2010) hold that children who do not yet have an understanding of subjective perspectives, i.e., mental states, explain actions by appealing to objective facts. In this paper, we criticize this view. We argue that in order to understand objective facts, subjects need to understand perspectives. By analysing basic fact-expressing assertions, we show that subjects cannot refer to facts if they do not understand two types of perspectivity, namely, spatial and doxastic perspectivity. To avoid conceptual confusion regarding different ways of referring to facts, we distinguish between reference to facts de re and de dicto. Keywords Theory of mind · Reference · Objectivity · Subjective perspectives · Facts
1 Introduction Perner, Roessler, and collaborators have presented a developmental account of how young children understand intentional action that has gained considerable traction over the last few years. In particular, Perner and colleagues hold that children who do not yet have an understanding of mental states explain actions in terms of objective facts (e.g., Perner and Roessler 2010; Perner and Esken 2015; Perner et al. 2018). Such explanations of actions are called teleological, and subjects employing such explanations are called teleologists. The claim is that in explaining why, for instance, a subject goes to one box rather than to another to retrieve an object, teleologists assume that the subject goes to that box partly because of the fact that the object is there.
Authors have made an equal contribution to the article and appear in alphabetical order.
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Ramiro Glauer [email protected] Frauke Hildebrandt [email protected]
1
University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Kiepenheuerallee 5, 14469 Potsdam, Germany
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Synthese
According to Perner and colleagues, children who do not yet have an understanding of mental states assume that the objective fact that the object is where it is is part of explaining that action. More generally, these children “see [only] objective facts as providing the reasons for action” (Priewasser et al. 2018, p. 71, also cf. Perner and Roessler 2010, p. 203, Perner and Roessler 2012, p. 521). Objective facts play a unique role for the teleological account because “[f]rom the perspective of deliberation, only true propositions—facts—can provide genuine reasons. […] Young children find intentional actions intelligible in terms of ‘objective’ practical reasons [i.e., facts]” (Perner and Roessler 2010, p. 203). 3-Year-olds make sense of what one is doing “simply in terms of the worldly facts that constitute good reasons for your action, with no regard to your perspective on your reasons” (Perner et al. 2018, p. 100). “[C]hildren find actions intelligibl
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