How children approach the false belief test: social development, pragmatics, and the assembly of Theory of Mind
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How children approach the false belief test: social development, pragmatics, and the assembly of Theory of Mind Marco Fenici 1 Accepted: 29 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract 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. Keywords Diverse belief . False belief . Knowledge access . Mindreading . Social
cognition . Social understanding . Socio-cultural constructivism . Sociopragmatics . Theory of mind . Usage-based theory of language acquisition
* Marco Fenici [email protected]
1
Department of Literature and Philosophy, University of Florence, Via della Pergola, 60, 50121 Florence, Italy
M. Fenici
1 Introduction Over the last forty years, cognitive scientists and philosophers have debated the origin and development of mindreading or Theory of Mind (ToM)—that is, the capacity to attribute mental states to ourselves and to others in order to predict and explain behaviour (Dennett 1987; see Fenici 2017a for a brief review). Although interest in ToM originated in an investigation about primates’ understanding of intentions (Premack and Woodruff 1978), the debate has quickly come to focus on children’s acquisition of what has been considered the most distinctive concept of human psychology—i.e., belief. In particular, in the experimental procedure known as the (elicited-response) false belief test (FBT, Baron-Cohen et al. 1985; see also Wimmer and Perner 1983), a child is presented with a scene in which a puppet, Sally, puts a ball in a basket and leaves the room to play. While Sally is away, another character, Anne, moves the ball from the basket to a box. When Sally returns, the child is asked: “Where will she look for the ball?” Succeeding in the task requires the child to bear in mind the fact that Sally does not
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