Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Putting unicepts to work: a teleosemantic perspective on the infant mindreading puzzle

  • S.I. : Cognition
  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this paper, I show how theoretical discussion of recent research on the abilities of infants and young children to represent other agents’ beliefs has been shaped by a descriptivist conception of mental content, i.e., to the notion that the distal content of a mental representation is fixed by the core body of knowledge that is associated with that mental representation. I also show how alternative conceptions of mental content—and in particular Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantic approach—make it possible to endorse the view that infants have the ability to track beliefs by as early as 6 months while failing to understand some of the ways in which beliefs combine with each other and with other mental states in contributing to inferences and actions. In articulating this view, I will draw upon Millikan’s recently developed notion of ‘unicepts’. Unicepts, according to Millikan, are the basic representational vehicles that underpin our abilities to (re-) identify objects, properties, relations and kinds. When applied to research on mindreading in infancy and early childhood, Millikan’s approach generates fruitful new questions about the development of belief reasoning, and about the functions of belief reasoning in infancy and at different stages of childhood.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. For this reason, teleosemantic approaches like that offered by Millikan are sometimes considered to be distinct from, rather than a subgroup of, causal-historical approaches. On the other hand, it is worth emphasizing that teleosemantic approaches and causal-historical approaches are united by their commitment to the basic idea that causal history, rather than descriptive knowledge, is decisive for determining the content of those mental representations. For this reason, teleosemantic accounts are often treated as a subgroup within the larger family of causal-historical theories, as in Rupert (2008) and in Adams and Aizawa (2010).

  2. Nor is this study by any means an anomaly: for extensive review of a large body of convergent findings, as well as a discussion of how such findings bear upon leaner interpretations of the infant mindreading data, cf. Michael and Christensen (forthcoming).

  3. Butterfill and Apperly’s skepticism about the rich interpretation of these findings can also draw support from Low and Watts (2013). In a different paradigm, they found evidence that the anticipatory gaze of 3- and 4-year-old children, and of adults, did not exhibit sensitivity to false beliefs arising through inferences about identity. Interestingly, though, the verbal reports of the 4-year-olds and of the adults did exhibit such sensitivity. This, they note, may be counted as evidence in favor of just the kind of dissociation hypothesized by two systems theory. However, as Carruthers (2015) has noted, this paradigm placed high demands on working memory, so it is not clear that it was specifically the need to draw inferences about identity which outstripped the resources of the implicit mindreading processes driving anticipatory gaze.

  4. To be fair, prediction (iv) should not be read as denying that infants have any understanding at all of how mental states interact with each other. Rather, Butterfill and Apperly’s project is show how a minimal mindreading system could trade flexibility for efficiency by specifying a limited set of principles that enable minimal mindreaders to integrate representations of agents’ registrations with other representations (such as representations of encounterings and of goals). Nevertheless, the findings summarized here and in Sect. 1 put pressure on this proposal for two reasons. First, it is not clear that the principles identified by Butterfill and Apperly can explain all the results. See Michael and Christensen (forthcoming) and Christensen and Michael (2015) for a thorough discussion of this question. Second, the very attempt to give an answer to this question calls attention to the need for a more specific formulation of prediction (iv)—i.e., how much flexibility is too much for system 1?

  5. In the history of philosophy, descriptivism is most obviously associated with Frege (1892) and Russell (1905). In the context of philosophy of science, it informed Kuhn’s (1970) well-known claim that the meaning of a term is dependent on the entire theoretical structure in which it is embedded, and that theory change therefore leads to meaning change as well as to the failure of the terms of the old theory to refer. More recently, Harman (1987) and Block (1987) have developed descriptivist approaches to mental content that particularly highlight the role played by representations in inferential reasoning, and which have therefore been labeled ‘inferential role semantics’.

  6. Drawing upon Dretske’s version of teleosemantics, Buckner (2014) in fact offers an interpretation of research on mindreading in non-human animals that complements the interpretation developed here.

  7. That is, ‘default knowledge’, in the sense of Machery (2009), or ‘core knowledge’ in the sense of Carey (2009); cf. also Margolis and Laurence (2014).

  8. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.

  9. These reasons are articulated in greater detail in Christensen and Michael (2015) and in Michael and Christensen (forthcoming).

  10. These reasons are articulated in greater detail in Christensen and Michael (2015) and in Michael and Christensen (forthcoming).

References

  • Adams, F., & Aizawa, K. (2010). Causal theories of mental content. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/content-causal/.

  • Apperly, I. (2011). Mindreaders: The cognitive basis of “Theory of Mind”. New York: Psychology Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Apperly, I. A., & Butterfill, S. A. (2009). Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states? Psychological Review, 116(4), 953–970. doi:10.1037/a0016923.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baillargeon, R. (1998). Infants’ understanding of the physical world. In M. Sabourin, F. Craik, & M. Robert (Eds.), Advances in psychological science, Vol. 2: Biological and cognitive aspects (pp. 503–529). Hove: Psychology Press/Erlbaum (UK) Taylor and Francis.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baillargeon, R., Scott, R. M., & He, Z. (2010). False-belief understanding in infants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 110–118.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition, 21, 37–46.

  • Birch, S. A. J., & Bloom, P. (2007). The curse of knowledge in reasoning about false beliefs. Psychological Science, 18(5), 382–386.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Block, N. (1987). Functional role and truth conditions. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LXI, 1987, 157–181.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buckner, C. (2014). The Semantic problem(s) with research on animal mindreading. Mind and Language, 29(5), 566–589.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Buttelmann, D., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm. Cognition, 112(2), 337–342. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2009.05.006.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Butterfill, S. A., & Apperly, I. A. (2013). How to construct a minimal theory of mind. Mind and Language, 28(5), 606–637. doi:10.1111/mila.12036.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (1999). A non-verbal false belief task: The performance of children and great apes. Child Development, 70, 381–395.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 Years later. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(5), 187–192. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.02.010.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carey, S. (2009). The origin of concepts. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Carlson, S. M., & Moses, L. J. (2001). Individuals differences in inhibitory control and children’s theory of mind. Child Development, 72, 1032–1053.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carpenter, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2002). A new false belief test for 36-month-olds. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 20(3), 393–420. doi:10.1348/026151002320620316.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, P. (2015). Two systems for mindreading? Review of Philosophy and Psychology. doi:10.1007/s13164-015-0259-y.

  • Christensen, W., & Michael, J. (2015). From two systems to a multi-systems architecture for mindreading. New Ideas in Psychology. doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.01.003.

  • Clements, W. A., & Perner, J. (1994). Implicit understanding of belief. Cognitive Development, 9(4), 377–395. doi:10.1016/0885-2014(94)90012-4.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2011). Natural pedagogy as evolutionary adaptation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 366(1567), 1149–1157.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the flow of information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining behavior: Reasons in a world of causes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Frege, G. (1892). Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, C, 25–50.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harman, G. (1987). (Non-solipsistic) conceptual role semantics. In E. Lepore (Ed.), New directions in semantics. London: Academic.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kovács, Á. M., Téglás, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830–1834. doi:10.1126/science.1190792.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kripke, S. (1972). Naming and necessity. In D. Davidson & G. Harman (Eds.), Semantics of natural language (pp. 253–355). Dordrecht: Reidel.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Kuhn, T. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leslie, A. (2005). Developmental parallels in understanding minds and bodies. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(10), 459–462.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leslie, A., Friedman, O., & German, T. (2004). Core mechanisms in “theory of mind”. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(10), 528–533.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Low, J., & Watts, J. (2013). Attributing false beliefs about object identity reveals a signature blind spot in humans’ efficient mind-reading system. Psychological Science, 24, 305–311.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luo, Y. (2011). Do 10-month-old infants understand others’ false beliefs’? Cognition, 121, 289–298.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luo, Y., & Baillargeon, R. (2007). Do 12.5-month-old infants consider what objects others can see when interpreting their actions? Cognition, 105, 489–512.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luo, Y., & Baillargeon, R. (2010). Toward a mentalistic account of early psychological understanding. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 301–307.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Luo, Y., & Johnson, S. C. (2009). Recognizing the role of perception in action at 6 months. Developmental Science, 12, 142–149.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Machery, E. (2009). Doing without concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Margolis, E., & Laurence, S. (2014). Concepts. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition).

  • Michael, J., & Christensen, W. (forthcoming). Flexible goal attribution in early mindreading. Psychological Review.

  • Millikan, R. (1984). Language, thought, and other biological categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Millikan, R. (2000). On clear and confused ideas: An essay about substance concepts. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Millikan, R. (2013). An epistemology for phenomenology? In R. Brown (Ed.), Consciousness inside and out: Phenomenology, neuroscience, and the nature of experience. Springer’s series Studies in brain and mind. (Vol. 6, pp. 13–26). Netherlands: Springer.

  • Onishi, K. H., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science, 308(5719), 255–258. doi:10.1126/science.1107621.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Onishi, K. H., Baillargeon, R., & Leslie, A. M. (2007). 15-Month-old infants detect violations in pretend scenarios. Acta Psychologica, 124(1), 106–128. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2006.09.009.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Papineau, D. (1984). Representation and explanation. Philosophy of Science, 51, 550–572.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Perner, J., & Ruffman, T. (2005). Infants’ insight into the mind: How deep? Science, 308, 212–214.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Povinelli, D., & Vonk, J. (2004). We don’t need a microscope to explore the chimpanzee’s mind. Mind and Language, 19, 1–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Prinz, J. (2002). Furnishing the mind: Concepts and their perceptual basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rubio-Fernández, P., & Geurts, B. (2012). How to pass the false-belief task before your fourth birthday. Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/0956797612447819.

  • Rupert, R. (2008). Causal theories of mental content. Philosophy Compass, 3/2, 353–380. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00130.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Russell, B. (1905). On denoting. Mind, 14, 479–493.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sabbagh, M. A., Moses, L. J., & Shiverick, S. (2006). Executive functioning and preschoolers’ understanding of false beliefs, false photographs and false signs. Child Development, 77, 1034–1049.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, R. M., & Baillargeon, R. (2009). Which penguin is this? Attributing false beliefs about object identity at 18 months. Child Development, 80(4), 1172–1196. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01324.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott, R. M., Baillargeon, R., Song, H., & Leslie, A. M. (2010). Attributing false beliefs about non-obvious properties at 18 months. Cognitive Psychology, 61(4), 366–395. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.09.001.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shea, N. (2013). Naturalising representational content. Philosophy Compass, 8(5), 496–509. doi:10.1111/phc3.12033.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Song, H., & Baillargeon, R. (2008). Infants’ reasoning about others’ false perceptions. Developmental Psychology, 44(6), 1789–1795. doi:10.1037/a0013774.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Song, H., Onishi, K. H., Baillargeon, R., & Fisher, C. (2008). Can an agent’s false belief be corrected by an appropriate communication? Psychological reasoning in 18-month-old infants. Cognition, 109, 295–315.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Southgate, V., Chavalier, C., & Csibra, G. (2010). Seventeen-month-olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others’ referential communication. Developmental Science, 13, 907–912.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Southgate, V., Johnson, M., El Karoui, I., & Csibra, G. (2010). Motor system activation reveals infants’ online prediction of others’ goals. Psychological Science, 21, 355–359.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Southgate, V., Johnson, M. H., Osborne, T., & Csibra, G. (2009). Predictive motor activation during action observation in human infants. Biology Letters, 5(6), 769–772.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Southgate, V., Senju, A., & Csibra, G. (2007). Action anticipation through attribution of false belief by 2-year-olds. Psychological Science, 18(7), 587–592. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Southgate, V., & Vernetti, A. (2014). Belief-based action prediction in preverbal infants. Cognition, 130, 1–10.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Surian, L., Caldi, S., & Sperber, D. (2007). Attribution of beliefs by 13-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 18(7), 580–586. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01943.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thoermer, C., Sodian, B., Vuori, M., Perst, H., & Kristen, S. (2012). Continuity from an implicit to an explicit understanding of false belief from infancy to preschool age. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30(1), 172–187. doi:10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02067.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Träuble, B., Marinović, V., & Pauen, S. (2010). Early theory of mind competencies: Do infants understand others’ beliefs? Infancy, 15(4), 434–444. doi:10.1111/j.1532-7078.2009.00025.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72(3), 655–684.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13(1), 103–128. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(83)90004-5.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yott, J., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2012). Breaking the rules: Do infants have a true understanding of false belief? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30(1), 156–171. doi:10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02060.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zawidzki, T. (2013). Mindshaping. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Oktober 6 Utca 7, Budapest, 1051, Hungary

    John Michael

Authors
  1. John Michael
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to John Michael.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Michael, J. Putting unicepts to work: a teleosemantic perspective on the infant mindreading puzzle. Synthese 194, 4365–4388 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0850-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0850-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation