Assertion and false-belief attribution

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Jary
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
False Belief ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Belief Attribution ◽  
Michael Dummett ◽  
Robert Brandom ◽  
Linguistic Ability ◽  
Representational Format ◽  
Representational Theory Of Mind

The ability to attribute false-beliefs to others — the hallmark of a representational theory of mind — has been shown to be reliant on linguistic ability, specifically on competence in sentential complementation after verbs of communication and cognition such as ‘say that’ and ‘think that’. The reason commonly put forward for this is that these structures provide a representational format which enables the child to think about another’s thoughts. The paper offers an alternative explanation. Drawing on the work of the philosophers Michael Dummett and Robert Brandom, it argues that the available data better fits an account that grounds the notion of representation in the commitments undertaken by asserters. The competence in sentential complementation that precedes false-belief attribution is viewed as a result of the child developing a meta-awareness of the syntactic forms employed in assertion. This meta-awareness gives the child access to discourse about the commitments undertaken by speakers and the consequences of these for their behaviour. This understanding constitutes the child’s grasp of the representational nature of discourse and thought. The paper thus offers an illocutionary account of theory-of-mind development.

Do children understand desires before they understand beliefs? A comparison of 3-year-olds’ grasp of incompatible desires, competitive games and false beliefs

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Proft ◽  
Cornelia Hoss ◽  
Katharina Manfredini Paredes ◽  
hannes rakoczy
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
False Belief ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
False Belief Understanding ◽  
Active Choice ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Competitive Games ◽  
Cognitive Attitudes

A long-standing dispute in theory of mind research concerns the development of understanding different kinds of propositional attitudes. The asymmetry view suggests that children understand conative attitudes (e.g., desires) before they understand cognitive attitudes (e.g., beliefs). The symmetry view suggests that notions of cognitive and conative attitudes develop simultaneously. Relevant studies to date have produced inconsistent results, yet with different methods and dependent measures. To test between the two accounts more systematically, we thus combined different forms of desire tasks (incompatible desires and competition) with different forms of measurement (verbal ascription and active choice) in a single design. Additionally, children’s performance in the desire tasks was compared to their false-belief understanding. Results revealed that 3-year-olds were better at ascribing desires than at ascribing beliefs for both desire tasks whereas they had difficulties actively choosing the more desired option in the competition task. The present findings thus favor the asymmetry theory.

Friends, Secrets, and Lies

Reading Minds ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Henry M. Wellman
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Well Being ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Academic Life ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Children's Achievement

This chapter examines children’s theory of mind and how it can affect children’s, and adults’, lives. A key window on all of this is children’s understanding, achieved in the preschool years, that people can be ignorant and mistaken. Voluminous “false-belief” studies in countries worldwide illuminate this. Moreover, children’s achievement of these theory-of-mind milestones impacts their friendships or friendlessness. And being friendless can have disastrous consequences for a child’s social and academic life that can continue into adulthood. As well as acquiring friends and avoiding friendlessness, theory-of-mind advances impact a child’s ability to keep secrets, to inform and deceive others, and to persuade and argue—all skills vital to a person’s social well-being. Ultimately, young children who best understand false beliefs are not only better liars, secret keepers, and persuaders but also better accepted by their peers.

scholarly journals Developmental Readiness in the Understanding of Own and Other’s False Beliefs

2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Amadó ◽  
Elisabet Serrat ◽  
Francesc Sidera
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
False Belief ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
False Belief Understanding ◽  
Developmental Readiness ◽  
Representational Change

One of the most important milestones in the development of theory of mind is the understanding of false beliefs. This study compares children’s understanding of representational change and others’ false beliefs and evaluates the effectiveness of an appearance-reality training for improving children’s false belief understanding. A total of 78 children ranging in age from 41 to 47 months were trained in three sessions and evaluated in a pretest and in a posttest. The results show that for children it is easier to understand representational change than false beliefs in others, and that the improvement after training was greater when starting from a higher score in the pretest. The implications of this for training in false belief understanding are discussed.

scholarly journals A two-lab direct replication attempt of Southgate, Senju, & Csibra (2007)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora Kampis ◽  
Petra Karman ◽  
Gergely Csibra ◽  
Victoria Southgate ◽  
Mikołaj Hernik
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Collaborative Study ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Action Prediction ◽  
Belief Attribution ◽  
False Belief Understanding

The study by Southgate, V., Senju, A., and Csibra, G. (Southgate et al., 2007) has been widely cited as evidence for false-belief attribution in young children. Recent replication attempts of this paradigm have yielded mixed results: several studies were unable to replicate the original finding, raising doubts about the suitability of the paradigm to assess non-verbal action prediction and Theory of Mind. In a preregistered collaborative study including two of the original authors, we tested 160 24- to 26-month-olds across two locations using the original stimuli, procedure, and analyses as closely as possible. We found no evidence for action anticipation: only roughly half of the infants looked in anticipation to the location of an agent’s impending action when action prediction did not require taking into account the agent’s beliefs and a similar number when the agent held a false-belief. These results and other non-replications suggest that the paradigm does not reliably elicit action prediction and thus cannot assess false belief understanding in 2- year-old children. While the results of the current study do not support any claim regarding the presence or absence of Theory of Mind in infants, we conclude that an important piece of evidence that has to date supported arguments for the existence of this competence, can no longer serve that function.

scholarly journals A two-lab direct replication attempt of Southgate, Senju and Csibra (2007)

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 210190
Author(s):  
D. Kampis ◽  
P. Kármán ◽  
G. Csibra ◽  
V. Southgate ◽  
M. Hernik
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Collaborative Study ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Action Prediction ◽  
Belief Attribution ◽  
Link Type ◽  
False Belief Understanding

The study by Southgate et al. (2007 Psychol. Sci. 18 , 587–592. ( doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x )) has been widely cited as evidence for false-belief attribution in young children. Recent replication attempts of this paradigm have yielded mixed results: several studies did not replicate the original findings, raising doubts about the suitability of the paradigm to assess non-verbal action prediction and Theory of Mind. In a preregistered collaborative study including two of the original authors, we tested one hundred and sixty 24- to 26-month-olds across two locations using the original stimuli, procedure and analyses as closely as possible. We found no evidence for action anticipation: only roughly half of the infants looked to the location of an agent's impending action when action prediction did not require taking into account the agent's beliefs and a similar number when the agent held a false-belief. These results and other non-replications suggest that this paradigm does not reliably elicit action prediction and thus cannot assess false-belief understanding in 2-year-olds. While the present results do not support any claim regarding the presence or absence of Theory of Mind in infants, we conclude that an important piece of evidence that has to date supported arguments for the existence of this competence can no longer serve that function.

scholarly journals Growing Up Thinking of God’s Beliefs: Theory of Mind and Ontological Knowledge

SAGE Open ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 215824401880987 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia Di Dio ◽  
Sara Isernia ◽  
Chiara Ceolaro ◽  
Antonella Marchetti ◽  
Davide Massaro
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mental States ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Belief Attribution ◽  
Knowledge Bias

The study of social cognition involves the attribution of states of mind to humans, as well as, quite recently, to nonhuman creatures, like God. Some studies support the role of social cognition in religious beliefs, whereas others ascribe religious beliefs to an ontological knowledge bias. The present study compares these distinct approaches in 37 catholic children aged 4 to 10 years, who were administered an adapted version of the unexpected content task assessing false beliefs of different agents: a human, a dog, a robot, and God. The children were also administered an intentionality understanding task, a component of mentalization abilities, and an interview on ontological knowledge assessing emotions, intentions, imagination, and epistemic knowledge. In line with previous research, the results showed that children did not attribute false beliefs to God as they did to the human and to other nonhuman agents. Importantly, while false-belief attribution to the human was associated with the children’s ability to attribute mental states (intentionality understanding), false-belief attribution to God was related to children’s ontological knowledge. We conclude that, contrary to false-belief attribution to the human and to other nonhuman agents, children’s understanding of God’s mind is largely a function of ontological knowledge about God, rather than of children’s social cognitive functions.

ADOLESCENT EGOCENTRISM AND THEORY OF MIND: IN THE CONTEXT OF FAMILY RELATIONS

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (9) ◽  
pp. 1211-1220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Müge Artar
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
False Belief ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Imaginary Audience ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Personal Fable ◽  
Social Inference ◽  
Complex Manner

While dealing with the issues of theory of mind (ToM) and false belief, the author realized that adolescents have similar false beliefs to those of children, but in a more complex manner. These false beliefs seem to be related to a typical developmental issue called “egocentrism.” Participants in this study were 11 adolescents (ages 16–18) and their families from a middle SES high school. ToM stories and new imaginary audience and personal fable categories were examined. Every adolescent was interviewed about his or her family relationships. To observe them all together, the author wanted to analyze adolescents' most sophisticated relations: family relations. The results seemed to indicate that in the context of their family, adolescents have more emotional inference than social inference or intentions – that is, they have more thoughts about their parents' feelings. If they have to describe their parents' relations, they seem to have more ToM (overall inference).

The acquisition of mood selection in Spanish relative clauses

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-604 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANA TERESA PÉREZ-LEROUX
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clauses ◽  
False Belief ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
False Belief Task ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Subjunctive Mood ◽  
Production Study ◽  
Spanish Subjunctive ◽  
Representational Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mood Selection

Although children acquire Spanish subjunctive morphology early in the process of language acquisition, they only master mood selection in a staged process that lasts for several years. This paper examines the possibility that the acquisition of subjunctive mood selection in particular syntactic contexts is constrained by cognitive development in the area of representational theory of mind. Acquisition of the epistemic aspects of the semantics of subjunctive are shown to be associated with the understanding of false beliefs, a landmark development in children's cognition. Twenty-two Spanish speaking children between the ages of 3;5 and 6;11 participated in an elicited production study designed to test whether children's ability to produce subjunctive relative clauses was related to their ability to pass a false belief task. Results indicate a strong correlation between children's ability to use the subjunctive mood in relative clauses and their capacity for understanding false beliefs.

Thinking about Things

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sainsbury
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Semantic Description ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Representational Theory Of Mind

In the blink of an eye, I can redirect my thought from London to Cairo, from cookies to unicorns, from former President Obama to the mythical flying horse, Pegasus. How is this possible? How can we think about things that do not exist, like unicorns and Pegasus? Thinking About Things addresses these and related questions, taking as its framework a representational theory of mind. It explains how mental states are attributed, what their aboutness consists in, whether or not they are relational, and whether any of them involve nonexistent things like unicorns. The explanation centers on display theory, a theory of what is involved in attributing attitudes like thinking, hoping, and wanting. These attributions are intensional: some of them seem to involve nonexistent things, and they typically have semantic and logical peculiarities, like the fact that one cannot always substitute one expression for another that refers to the same thing without affecting truth. Display theory explains away these seeming anomalies. For example, substituting coreferring expressions does not always preserve truth because the correctness of an attribution depends on what concepts it displays, not on what the concepts refer to. And a concept that refers to nothing may be used in an accurate display of what someone is thinking. The book describes how concepts can be learned, originated, and given a systematic semantic description, independently of whether there exist things to which they refer. There being no things we are thinking about does not mean that we are not thinking about things.

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