Social cognitive abilities in infancy: Is mindreading the best explanation?
Philosophical Psychology 28 (3):387-411 (2015)
Abstract
I discuss three arguments that have been advanced in support of the epistemic mentalist view, i.e., the view that infants' social cognitive abilities manifest a capacity to attribute beliefs. The argument from implicitness holds that SCAs already reflect the possession of an “implicit” and “rudimentary” capacity to attribute representational states. Against it, I note that SCAs are significantly limited, and have likely evolved to respond to contextual information in situated interaction with others. I challenge the argument from parsimony by claiming that parsimony per se favors neither a mentalist nor a behavior-reading account. Finally, I argue that early SCAs do not develop continuously into four-year-olds' belief attribution abilities. Accordingly, the argument from developmental continuity is empirically inadequate. Careful analysis of both the empirical data and the theoretical assumptions leading to the epistemic mentalist view is needed in order to improve our understanding of SCAs in earl..Author's Profile
DOI
10.1080/09515089.2013.865096
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Citations of this work
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The origins of mindreading: how interpretive socio-cognitive practices get off the ground.Marco Fenici & Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki - 2020 - Synthese (9):1-23.
What is the Role of Experience in Children's Success in the False Belief Test: Maturation, Facilitation, Attunement or Induction?Marco Fenici - 2017 - Mind and Language 32 (3):308-337.
A simple explanation of apparent early mindreading: infants’ sensitivity to goals and gaze direction.Marco Fenici - 2015 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (3):497-515.
References found in this work
Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan M. Leslie & Uta Frith - 1985 - Cognition 21 (1):37-46.
Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception.H. Wimmer - 1983 - Cognition 13 (1):103-128.