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.
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Notes
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).
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).
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.
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?
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’.
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.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
These reasons are articulated in greater detail in Christensen and Michael (2015) and in Michael and Christensen (forthcoming).
These reasons are articulated in greater detail in Christensen and Michael (2015) and in Michael and Christensen (forthcoming).
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I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions.
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0850-x