When representations conflict with reality: the preschooler's problem with false beliefs and "false" photographs

It has been argued that young preschoolers cannot correctly attribute a false belief to a deceived actor (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Some researchers claim that the problem lies in the child's inadequate epistemology (Chandler & Boyes, 1982; Wellman, 1988); as such, it is specific to the child's theory of mind and no such problem should appear in reasoning about nonmental representations. This prediction is tested below in the "false photograph" task: here an actor takes a photograph of an object in location X; the object is then moved to location Y. Preschool subjects are asked: "In the picture, where is the object?" Results indicate that photographs are no easier to reason about than are beliefs. Manipulations to boost performance on the photograph task proved ineffective. Further, an explanation of the failure as a processing limitation having nothing to do with the representational nature of beliefs or photographs was ruled out. It is argued that young children's failure on the false belief task is not due to an inadequate epistemology (though they may have one) and is symptomatic of a larger problem with representations.     

Children's understanding that utterances emanate from minds: using speaker belief to aid interpretation.

Children interpreted an utterance made by a protagonist with a false belief, such as, 'I would like the car in the garage.' Calculating the speaker's belief in conjunction with the literal meaning of the utterance would lead to the correct interpretation that the intended referent is the car on the track, given that the car in the garage swapped places with the one on the track. In Experiments 1 and 2, many children aged around 4 and 5 years wrongly indicated the car in the garage. In contrast, many correctly indicated the car on the track when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief because the utterance was, 'the car I put in the garage'. Six-year-olds found both kinds of utterance equally easy in Experiment 1, while 3-year-olds had equal difficulty with both. In Experiments 2 and 3, the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance and many children aged between 3 and 6 years successfully used information about the speaker's belief to identify which of several candidate referents was intended. We discuss the results in relation to characteristics of utterance comprehension and consider implications for developments in understanding the mind by children beyond 4 years.     

Normative Practical Reasoning: John Broome

Practical reasoning is a process of reasoning that concludes in an intention. One example is reasoning from intending an end to intending what you believe is a necessary means: 'I will leave the next buoy to port; in order to do that I must tack; so I';ll tack', where the first and third sentences express intentions and the second sentence a belief. This sort of practical reasoning is supported by a valid logical derivation, and therefore seems uncontrovertible. A more contentious example is normative practical reasoning of the form 'I ought to φ, so I';ll φ', where 'I ought to φ' expresses a normative belief and 'I';ll φ' an intention. This has at least some characteristics of reasoning, but there are also grounds for doubting that it is genuine reasoning. One objection is that it seems inappropriate to derive an intention to φ from a belief that you ought to φ, rather than a belief that you ought to intend to φ. Another is that you may not be able to go through this putative process of reasoning, and this inability might disqualify it from being reasoning. A third objection is that it violates the Humean doctrine that reason alone cannot motivate any action of the will. This paper investigates these objections.     

Promoting the Transition from Implicit to Explicit Understanding: A Training Study of False Belief

Ninety‐one children aged between 2;10 and 5;0 participated in a training study of false belief. Children were assigned to either an explanation condition, a practice condition or a control condition where children heard two stories unrelated to false belief. Children’s eye movements in anticipation of the protagonist reappearing were monitored at pre‐test. Only the explanation condition led to improvements in judgement and justification of a protagonist’s future action based on false belief. Children who looked in anticipation to where the protagonist thought the object was at pre‐test were more likely to give a correct judgement at post‐test than those who did not. Those children in the explanation group who gave a correct judgement at pre‐test were more likely to give an appropriate justification at post‐test than those who did not. Three main conclusions are drawn: (1) providing explanation about the underlying principles of a task is more likely to lead to improvements in performance than merely informing children of whether their response is correct; (2) the nature of improvements in performance will depend on the level of knowledge of the child at pre‐test; (3) training will only be beneficial for those children who demonstrate evidence of implicit understanding.     

A liberal realist answer to debunking skeptics: the empirical case for realism

Debunking skeptics claim that our moral beliefs are formed by processes unsuited to identifying objective facts, such as emotions inculcated by our genes and culture; therefore, they say, even if there are objective moral facts, we probably don’t know them. I argue that the debunking skeptics cannot explain the pervasive trend toward liberalization of values over human history, and that the best explanation is the realist’s: humanity is becoming increasingly liberal because liberalism is the objectively correct moral stance.     

The developmental paradox of false belief understanding: a dual-system solution

We explore the developmental paradox of false belief understanding. This paradox follows from the claim that young infants already have an understanding of false belief, despite the fact that they consistently fail the elicited-response false belief task. First, we argue that recent proposals to solve this paradox are unsatisfactory because they (i) try to give a full explanation of false belief understanding in terms of a single system, (ii) fail to provide psychological concepts that are sufficiently fine-grained to capture the cognitive requirements for the various manifestations of false belief understanding, and (iii) ignore questions about system interaction. Second, we present a dual-system solution to the developmental paradox of false belief understanding that combines a layered model of perspective taking with an inhibition-selection-representation mechanism that operates on different levels. We discuss recent experimental findings that shed light on the interaction between these two systems, and suggest a number of directions for future research.     

Can Jean Piaget explain the possibility of knowledge?

The purpose of this article is to show that Piaget's use of the equilibrium principle cannot explain the possibility of correct understanding. That is, it cannot explain the possibility of knowledge, as opposed to simple change in belief. To make the argument, I begin by describing Piaget's explanatory model, which is known as the equilibrium principle. I then argue that correct understanding, or knowledge of any x as a case of y, requires a concept of correctness, i.e., the recognition that words and concepts apply under some conditions but not others. I try to show that because he uses the equilibrium principle as a basis for his explanation, Piaget cannot explain how a concept of correctness is acquired. Finally, I argue that to explain the possibility of knowledge, one must show how the conditions for word and concept application are determined by a community of language users. Again, I claim that Piaget's use of the equilibrium model precludes such an account.     

Moral internalism and moral cognitivism in Hume’s metaethics

Most naturalists think that the belief/desire model from Hume is the best framework for making sense of motivation. As Smith has argued, given that the cognitive state (belief) and the conative state (desire) are separate on this model, if a moral judgment is cognitive, it could not also be motivating by itself. So, it looks as though Hume and Humeans cannot hold that moral judgments are states of belief (moral cognitivism) and internally motivating (moral internalism). My chief claim is that the details of Hume’s naturalistic philosophy of mind actually allow for a conjunction of these allegedly incompatible views. This thesis is significant, since readers typically have thought that Hume’s view that motivation is not produced by representations, coupled with his view that moral judgments motivate on their own, imply that moral judgments could never take the form of beliefs about, or representations of, the moral (virtue and vice).     

The discursive form of human understanding as the source of the transcendental illusion

Kant famously claims that pure reason is subject to a transcendental illusion in which the subjective validity and the regulative use of a principle of reason are conflated with its objective validity and constitutive use. His doctrine of transcendental illusion is puzzling for he insists that this illusion is natural as well as necessary. The two dominant interpretation strategies cannot make sense of this puzzle because they turn out to be either too strong or too weak: they either struggle to account for the legitimate, regulative use of the transcendental principle of reason or fall short of explaining the necessity of the transcendental illusion. In contrast, I shall argue that it is possible to account for the fact that the transcendental illusion is natural and necessary because it has its source in the discursive form of our human understanding, and that this illusion can nevertheless be known to be illusory because our discursive nature can be recognised as a merely particular form of understanding by comparing it with a possible, intuitive form of understanding in an act of critical self-reflection.     

Does the autistic child have a metarepresentational deficit?

This study examines the claim that autistic children lack a “theory of mind” because of an inability to metarepresent. We argue that if autistic children have a “metarepresentational” deficit in Leslie's (1987, 1988) sense of the term, then they should have difficulty not only with mental representations such as false beliefs, but also with external representations such as photographs. Autistic children's understanding of photographic representations was tested using Zaitchik's (1990) task. This task is modelled on the false belief task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985: Wimmer & Perner, 1983) but involves “false” photographs where a photographic representation does not conform with the current state of the real world. Like Zaitchik (1990) we found that normal 3 and 4-year-olds found this task as difficult as the false belief task. In sharp contrast, however, the autistic children in our study passed the photograph task but failed the false belief task. As both tasks require the ability to decouple, this evidence challenges the view that autistic children lack “metarepresentational” ability in Leslie's sense. However, the results leave open the question of whether autistic children have a metarepresentational ability in the different sense of the term intended by Pylyshyn (1978), that is, representing the relationship between a representation and what it represents.     

Explaining the Paradox of Hedonism

The paradox of hedonism is the idea that making pleasure the only thing that we desire for its own sake can be self-defeating. Why would this be true? In this paper, I survey two prominent explanations, then develop a third possible explanation, inspired by Joseph Butler's classic discussion of the paradox. The existing accounts claim that the paradox arises because we are systematically incompetent at predicting what will make us happy, or because the greatest pleasures for human beings are found in certain special goods which hedonists cannot enjoy. On the account that I develop, the paradox is a consequence of a theory about the nature of pleasure, together with a view about the requirements of rational belief. Which of these explanations is correct, I argue, bears on central questions about how to understand the nature and extent of the paradox.     

On the alleged normative significance of a platitude

It seems to be a platitude that the belief that p is correct iff it is true that p. And the claim that truth is the correct‐making feature of belief seems to be just another way of expressing this platitude. It is often thought that this indicates that truth constitutes a normative standard or criterion of correctness for belief because it seems to follow from this platitude that having a false belief is believing wrongly, and having a true belief is believing rightly or correctly. In this paper, I aim to show that when we judge the platitude in question to be indisputably true, we do not endorse that truth is normative for belief but merely the triviality that the belief that p is true iff it is true that p.     

Davidson on First-Person Authority

Davidson's explanation of first-person authority in utterance of sentences of the form 'I V that p ' derives first-person authority from the requirements of interpretation of speech. His account is committed to the view that utterance sentences are truth-bearers, that believing that p is a matter of holding true an utterance sentence, and that a speaker's knowledge of what he means gives him knowledge of what belief he expresses by his utterance. These claims are here faulted. His explanation of first-person authority by reference to the requirements of interpretability is committed to the view that all understanding involves interpretation. This is argued to be a misconception of understanding and of speaker's meaning. Davidson's account involves acceptance of the cognitive assumption that normally when a person V s that p , he knows that he does. This assumption is challenged. Throughout, Davidson's conception is compared and contrasted with Wittgenstein's.     

How to avoid inconsistent idealizations

Idealized scientific representations result from employing claims that we take to be false. It is not surprising, then, that idealizations are a prime example of allegedly inconsistent scientific representations. I argue that the claim that an idealization requires inconsistent beliefs is often incorrect and that it turns out that a more mathematical perspective allows us to understand how the idealization can be interpreted consistently. The main example discussed is the claim that models of ocean waves typically involve the false assumption that the ocean is infinitely deep. While it is true that the variable associated with depth is often taken to infinity in the representation of ocean waves, I explain how this mathematical transformation of the original equations does not require the belief that the ocean being modeled is infinitely deep. More generally, as a mathematical representation is manipulated, some of its components are decoupled from their original physical interpretation.     

SCEPTICISM AND THE IMAGINATION MODEL OF DREAMING

As a solution to dream scepticism, Ernest Sosa has argued that when we dream, we do not believe the contents of our dreams, but rather imagine them. Thus dreams do not cause false beliefs; so my beliefs cannot be false as a result of being caused by dreams. I argue that even assuming that Sosa is correct about the nature of dream experience, belief in wakefulness on these grounds is epistemically irresponsible. The proper upshot of the imagination model is to recharacterize the way we think about dream scepticism: the sceptical threat is not that we have false beliefs. So even though dreams do not involve false beliefs, they still pose a sceptical threat, which I elaborate.     

Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility

Non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech. We demonstrate that this “processing difficulty” causes non-native speakers to sound less credible. People judged trivia statements such as “Ants don't sleep” as less true when spoken by a non-native than a native speaker. When people were made aware of the source of their difficulty they were able to correct when the accent was mild but not when it was heavy. This effect was not due to stereotypes of prejudice against foreigners because it occurred even though speakers were merely reciting statements provided by a native speaker. Such reduction of credibility may have an insidious impact on millions of people, who routinely communicate in a language which is not their native tongue.     

Systematic innovation and social philosophy

Corbett's “Europe and the Social Order”; makes two claims: that industrial societies are marked by “systematic innovation”; and that, as a consequence, our inherited social doctrines are obsolete and must be replaced. The first claim is true, but the second is false: it is not the case that social doctrines are “consistent”; only with certain kinds of social order: we cannot therefore say that innovating societies either preclude or compel any particular social doctrines. They do not invalidate a priori doctrine, though they undermine belief in it. It is therefore less important to attack such doctrine than to study innovation empirically.