Online research in philosophy

Theories of children's developing understanding of mind tend to emphasize either individualistic processes of theory formation, maturation, or introspection, or the process of enculturation. However, such theories must be able to account for the accumulating evidence of the role of social interaction in the development of social understanding. We propose an alternative account, according to which the development of children's social understanding occurs within triadic interaction involving the child's experience of the world as well as communicative interaction with others about their experience and beliefs (Chapman 1991; 1999). It is through such triadic interaction that children gradually construct knowledge of the world as well as knowledge of other people. We contend that the extent and nature of the social interaction children experience will influence the development of children's social understanding. Increased opportunity to engage in cooperative social interaction and exposure to talk about mental states should facilitate the development of social understanding. We review evidence suggesting that children's understanding of mind develops gradually in the context of social interaction. Therefore, we need a theory of development in this area that accords a fundamental role to social interaction, yet does not assume that children simply adopt socially available knowledge but rather that children construct an understanding of mind within social interaction. Key Words: language; Piaget; social interaction; theories of mind; Vygotsky; Wittgenstein.

The topic of self-awareness has an impressive philosophical pedigree, and sustained discussion of the topic goes back at least to Descartes. More recently, selfawareness has become a lively issue in the cognitive sciences, thanks largely to the emerging body of work on “mindreading”, the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last 15 years, the processes underlying mindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states to other people. However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states to oneself. This process of reading one’s own mind or becoming self- aware will be our primary concern in this paper.

A number of developmental psychologists have argued for a theory they call the theory theory - a theory of cognitive development that suggests that infants and small children make sense of their world by constructing cognitive representations that have many of the attributes of scientific theories. In this paper I argue that there are indeed close parallels between the activities of children and scientists, but that these parallels will be better understood if one recognizes that both scientists and children are not so much theorists as model builders.

The everyday capacity to understand the mind, or 'mindreading', plays an enormous role in our ordinary lives. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich provide a detailed and integrated account of the intricate web of mental components underlying this fascinating and multifarious skill. The imagination, they argue, is essential to understanding others, and there are special cognitive mechanisms for understanding oneself. The account that emerges has broad implications for longstanding philosophical debates over the status of folk psychology. Mindreading is another trailblazing volume in the prestigious interdisciplinary Oxford Cognitive Science series.

Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith (T&K-S) raise an issue of considerable theoretical importance: Are developmental disorders like cases of adult brain damage? However, a related question: Are developmental disabilities the same in children and adults? is rarely addressed. Failure to consider the cumulative and differing effects of aberrant development across the life span confounds the current literature on both developmental dyslexia and Specific Language Impairment.

Humans interpret others. We are able to anticipate both the actions and intentional states of other agents. We do not do so perfectly, but since we are complex and flexible creatures even limited success needs explanation. For some years now Steve Stich (frequently in collaboration with Shaun Nichols) has been both participant in, and observer of, debates about the foundation of these capacities (Stich and Nichols 1992; Stich and Nichols 1995). As a commentator on this debate, Stich (with Nichols) gave explicit and fair-minded sketches of the cognitive architectures presupposed by the various theories of mindreading. As a participant, Stich has mostly been a defender of the theory-theory, the view that normal human agents have an internally represented theory of other agents and they use that theory in interpreting other agents. The main recent rival to this position, simulationism, claims that agents use their own decision-making mechanisms as a model of those of other agents, and derive their predictions by modelling others in something like the way aeronautical engineers derive predictions from the use of scale models in wind-tunnels. Stich has been sceptical about this alternative, for on his view simulation theory makes mistaken predictions about both the development of interpretive competence and about the pattern of interpretive success and failure.

Bering's work provides new insight into the child's concept of the self. For his results indicate that children don't regard bodily identity as required for identity of self across time. Bering's methodology for investigating afterlife beliefs might also be exploited to explore the extent to which children think that psychological similarity is required for sameness of self.

According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develops from a prior notion of obligation. Finally, the paper sets out how this work might illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.

Previous research suggests that children can infer causal relations from patterns of events. However, what appear to be cases of causal inference may simply reduce to children recognizing relevant associations among events, and responding based on those associations. To examine this claim, in Experiments 1 and 2, children were introduced to a “blicket detector”, a machine that lit up and played music when certain objects were placed upon it. Children observed patterns of contingency between objects and the machine’s activation that required them to use indirect evidence to make causal inferences. Critically, associative models either made no predictions, or made incorrect predictions about these inferences. In general, children were able to make these inferences, but some developmental differences between 3- and 4- year-olds were found. We suggest that children’s causal inferences are not based on recognizing associations, but rather that children develop a mechanism for Bayesian structure learning. Experiment 3 explicitly tests a prediction of this account. Children were asked to make an inference about ambiguous data based on the base-rate of certain events occurring. Fouryear-olds, but not 3-year-olds were able to make this inference.