What is folk psychology?

Eliminativism has been a major focus of discussion in the philosophy of mind for the last two decades. According to eliminativists, beliefs and other intentional states are the posits of a folk theory of mind standardly called “folk psychology”. That theory, they claim, is radically false and hence beliefs and other intentional states do not exist. We argue that the expression “folk psychology” is ambiguous in an important way. On the one hand, “folk psychology” is used by many philosophers and cognitive scientists to refer to an internally represented theory of human psychology exploited in the prediction of behavior. On the other hand, “folk psychology” is used to refer to the theory of mind implicit in our everyday talk about mental states. We then argue that sorting out the conceptual and terminological confusion surrounding “folk psychology” has major consequences for the eliminativism debate. In particular, if certain models of cognition turn out to be true, then on some readings of “folk psychology” the arguments for eliminativism collapse.     

Children''s Representational Theory of Language:The Problem of Opaque Contexts

Around four years of age, children recognize that action is less a consequence of the way the world is than the way it is represented by the actor. This understanding is characterized as a “theory of mind.” This study examines the possibility of the development of a parallel theory of language; specifically, the understanding that, in opaque contexts, terms do not simply map on to the referent of the expression, but rather indicate how that object is to be represented. 120 3- to 7-year-olds were tested on their theory of mind (using false belief tasks) and sensitivity to opaque contexts. Children who passed false belief tasks performed more successfully on the opacity measure than those who did not, even when age was partialled out (r (117) = .2453, p < .01). It is concluded that children come to realize that language does not refer to the world directly, but rather via one's representation of it. The results are consistent with the view that both abilities are manifestations of a more general understanding of representation, and that children's theories of mind and language follow similar developmental paths.     

Children's understanding of belief as a normative concept

The variety of accounts of theory of mind development, arising from distinct theoretical perspectives, have focused on children's causal-explanatory views on the mind and have not developed accounts of children's normative judgments of the mental domain. This review maintains that such a focus is unfortunate and leaves our understanding of belief as a concept incomplete. First, by presenting an alternative framework that treats belief as a normative concept, this account discusses the central importance of children's understanding of epistemic justification and their appreciation of the normative significance of others’ reasons for belief. Next, this review of the relevant theory of mind literature proposes a new way of thinking about the findings of various domains in this field and gives particular attention to prior work on false belief, origins or sources of belief, and the distinctions between fantastical and epistemic states. On the basis of this review, it is concluded that in order to accurately assess the development of the concept of belief, further research is required on children's views of how beliefs ought to be formed, their evaluation of justified and unjustified believers, and the notions of duty or responsibility they associate with epistemic agents.     

Narrative access and production in preschoolers' false belief reasoning

False belief tests seem to show the apparent acquisition at around age 4 of an ability to understand the representational status of mind. In this article, preschoolers' performance on a false belief task was manipulated in terms of their grasp of its narrative base. Five experiments are reported in which 3-year-olds were helped to become familiar with the events that comprise the false belief procedure by going through a picture book version of the task, before being asked to judge the protagonist's mental state. In Experiment 1, children who had failed a traditional task succeeded if they narrated the book version back to the experimenter, particularly if they were fluent in their story recall. Experiment 2 showed that this success occurred either if the child recited the story or if she or he was taken through each page twice in succession. Experiment 3 combined the most effective procedures with a younger group of children (mean age 3;3) and revealed 95% success as long as they could recall the prerequisite events. Experiments 4 and 5 probed possible limiting conditions for success by inserting an extra episode in the story and changing the format of the test question. The results suggest that the structure of 3-year-olds' event memories is central to their poor performance in the traditional false belief task—a clear grasp of the false belief “narrative” is necessary for successful performance. When they are given the opportunity to link discrete events into a coherent narrative, they have no problem demonstrating an understanding of others' minds—being able to recount the narrative is sufficient for successful performance.     

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.     

Belief-based action prediction in preverbal infants

Successful mindreading entails both the ability to think about what others know or believe, and to use this knowledge to generate predictions about how mental states will influence behavior. While previous studies have demonstrated that young infants are sensitive to others’ mental states, there continues to be much debate concerning how to characterize early theory of mind abilities. In the current study, we asked whether 6-month-old infants appreciate the causal role that beliefs play in action. Specifically, we tested whether infants generate action predictions that are appropriate given an agent’s current belief. We exploited a novel, neural indication of action prediction: motor cortex activation as measured by sensorimotor alpha suppression, to ask whether infants would generate differential predictions depending on an agent’s belief. After first verifying our paradigm and measure with a group of adult participants, we found that when an agent had a false belief that a ball was in the box, motor activity indicated that infants predicted she would reach for the box, but when the agent had a false belief that a ball was not in the box, infants did not predict that she would act. In both cases, infants based their predictions on what the agent, rather than the infant, believed to be the case, suggesting that by 6 months of age, infants can exploit their sensitivity to other minds for action prediction.     

Phenomenology and psychophysics

Recent philosophy of mind has tended to treat “inner” states, including both qualia and intentional states, as “theoretical posits” of either folk or scientific psychology. This article argues that phenomenology in fact plays a very different role in the most mature part of psychology, psychophysics. Methodologically, phenomenology plays a crucial role in obtaining psychophysical results. And more importantly, many psychophysical data are best interpreted as reporting relations between stimuli and phenomenological states, both qualitative and intentional. Three examples are used to argue for this thesis: the Weber–Fechner laws, the Craik-O’Brien–Cornsweet effect, and subjective contour figures. The phenomenological properties that play a role here do so in the role of data that ultimately constrain theoretical work (in this case theory of vision), and not as theoretical posits.     

The mental time line: An analogue of the mental number line in the mapping of life events

A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this “self-projection” in time depends logarithmically on the temporal-distance between an imagined “location” on the time line that participants were asked to imagine and the location of another imagined event from the time line. This logarithmic pattern suggests that events in human cognition are spatially mapped along an imagery mental time line. We argue that the present time-line data are comparable to the spatial mapping of numbers along the mental number line and that such spatial maps are a fundamental basis for cognition.     

Do 10-month-old infants understand others' false beliefs?

As adults, we know that others’ mental states, such as beliefs, guide their behavior and that these mental states can deviate from reality. Researchers have examined whether young children possess adult-like theory of mind by focusing on their understanding about others’ false beliefs. The present research revealed that 10-month-old infants seemed to interpret a person’s choice of toys based on her true or false beliefs about which toys were present. These results indicate that like adults, even preverbal infants act as if they can consider others’ mental states when making inferences about others’ actions.     

Stereotyped beliefs about desirability: implications for characterizing the child's theory of mind

A central research issue in the child's theory of mind literature is the question of whether children appreciate the subjectivity of mental phenomena. The typical research paradigm involves researchers creating a discrepancy between children's own mental states and the mental state of a protagonist, and then asking children to predict the protagonist's reaction. A prediction that fits the child's own mental state (rather than the beliefs and desires of the protagonist) is seen as an indication that the child fails to acknowledge the subjectivity of mental phenomena.Here we present two experiments involving the use of desire statements in predicting other people's emotions which demonstrate that even when one does acknowledge the subjectivity of mental states, this does not necessarily leads to ‘correct’ predictions (e.g. predictions based on the protagonist's desires). Other factors, such as cultural knowledge, might influence this process. The first experiment demonstrates that even adults, with a fully operational theory of mind, sometimes choose to disregard information about other people's desires. Their own generalized beliefs about desirability appear to be instrumental in this respect. The second experiment, on sex-stereotyped preferences for toys, demonstrates that even young children already can use generalized beliefs about desirability as a basis for their predictions of others’ emotions, even when these beliefs on desirability do not coincide with their own desires. This strategy results in a response pattern that can be easily misconceived as an indication that the child does not yet appreciate the subjectivity of desires.Two remarks are made on the basis of these experiments. First, even a so-called ‘adult’ theory of mind tends to be affected by normative considerations and is therefore more complex than straightforward desire-belief reasoning. Second, whenever normative considerations come into play, researchers should be cautious that ‘correct’ answers in theory of mind testing may not always have been based on theory of mind reasoning, and that ‘incorrect’ answers do not necessarily imply the absence of an active theory of mind.     

Reasoning bias for the recall of one's own beliefs in a Smarties task for adults

While many studies in the theory of mind (ToM) literature have investigated how we understand others' mental states, few have explored the mechanism by which we reflect on our own mental states. This study examined how adults reflect on their own and others' mental states within the same ToM task. To do so, we modified the Smarties task, one of the traditional ToM tasks for children. The results showed that adult participants were biased by outcome knowledge when recalling their false belief and that the participants who overestimated their false belief also overestimated the mental states of a naive other. These results were analogous to young children's failure in the Smarties task. Considering the current findings, we discuss possible cognitive processes that are common across children and adults when reflecting on their own mental states and the mental states of others.     

Disentangling the course of epistemic development: parsing knowledge by epistemic content

Over the past three decades, research into the developmental course by means of which persons come to an increasingly mature conception of the knowing process has yielded an highly defracted picture. Despite some concert of opinion about the general bill of particulars, what remains deeply problematic is the increasingly radical disagreement that has arisen regarding the ages at which major milestones in the course of epistemic development are said to be reached. As a way of making some sense of these competing claims, it is argued that the emerging insight that knowledge is ineluctably shaped by those doing the knowing (i.e., that there is an unavoidable “world-to-mind direction of fit” (J.R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983) between things in the world and the manner of their understanding) does not arrive in a single piece. Instead, as the data presented here help to illustrate, an appreciation of the constructed character of knowledge more commonly arrives piecemeal and at different ontogenetic moments, the times of which are governed by the place that different objects of knowledge occupy along an envisioned continuum of diverse epistemic contents. On this account, not all “facts of the matter” are ordinarily seen to occupy the same epistemic footing. Rather, some so-called facts are commonly understood to be of an “institutional” sort, where “representational” diversity is early expected and widely tolerated. By contrast, other objects of knowledge are imagined to be more like “brute” facts that, on some less mature readings, fully escape the clutches of subjective opinion. Viewed against the backcloth of this proposed continuum, a developmental sequence hypothesized according to which growing persons first come to view “institutional” facts as humanly constructed before subsequently coming to a similar view about presumptively “brute” facts. To test this hypothesis, 242 young persons were administered a paper and pencil measure of epistemic reasoning (the EDQ). Results strongly support the hypothesis that respondents understood the interpretive nature of beliefs about “institutional” facts at an earlier age than so-called “brute” facts.     

Relations between mental verb and false belief understanding in Cantonese-speaking children

Previous research has shown that linguistic forms that codify mental contents bear a specific relation with children’s false belief understanding. These forms include mental verbs and their following complements, yet the two have not been considered separately. The current study examined the roles of mental verb semantics and the complement syntax in children’s false belief understanding. Independent tasks were used to measure verb meaning, complements, and false belief understanding such that the verbs in question were present only in the verb meaning test, and no linguistic devices biased toward false belief were used in the false belief test. We focused on (a) some mental verbs that obligatorily affirm or negate what follows and (b) sentential complements, the content of which is to be evaluated against the mind of another person, not reality. Results showed that only (a) predicted false belief understanding in a group of Cantonese-speaking 4-year-olds, controlling for nonverbal intelligence and general language ability. In particular, children’s understanding of the strong nonfactive semantics of the Cantonese verbs /ji5-wai4/ (“falsely think”) predicted false belief understanding most strongly. The current findings suggest that false belief understanding is specifically related to the comprehension of mental verbs that entail false thought in their semantics.     

Reaction time, race, and racism

The claim (Jensen, 1975) that blacks are slower than whites in choice (but not simple) reaction time is examined. It is false. The claim (Jensen, 1985) that Muhammad Ali was shown to have a “very average” reaction time is examined. It is false. The claim (Vernon & Jensen, 1984) that an unpublished technical report showed blacks to be inferior to whites on a relatively content-free mental processing task is examined. It is false. Suggestions are made concerning relevant questions that might be addressed by students of race differences in intelligence.     

Theory of mind for learning and teaching: the nature and role of explanation

The relationship between “theory of mind” and teaching is deep and complex. We focus on one particularly powerful link that is based on the role of children's psychological explanations in their learning. Psychological explanations involve explaining persons’ actions and lives as the causes and consequences of their mental states. We begin by showing that psychological explanations are central to children's developing theories of mind—they are part of the mechanism for development in this domain. We then review theory and data suggesting that psychological explanations are also critically important for learning and being taught more generally.     

When Dreams Become Reality

In three experiments, we found that after a subtle suggestion, subjects falsely recognized words from their own dreams and thought they had been presented during the waking state. The procedure used in these studies involved three phases. Subjects studied a list of words on Day 1. On Day 2, they received a false suggestion that some words from their previously reported dreams had been presented on the list. On Day 3, they tried to recall only what had occurred on the initial list. Subjects falsely recognized their dream words at a very high rate—sometimes as often as they accurately recognized true words. They reported that they genuinely “remembered” the dream words, as opposed to simply “knowing” that they had been previously presented. These findings, which suggest that dreams can sometimes be mistaken for reality, have significant implications for the practice of psychotherapy.     

自闭症儿童非言语错误信念任务的实验研究

心理理论是指对自己和他人心理状态(如需要、信念、意图、动机、感觉等)的认识,并由此对相应行为做出因果性的预测和解释。国内外心理理论研究较多关注一般儿童的心理理论能力,而对自闭症儿童领域的心理理论的研究不够。本研究在原有的错误信念任务的基础上,对任务进行完全“非言语”改进,以意外内容任务为主要测试内容,将智力落后儿童作为对照组纳入到实验当中,进一步探索自闭症儿童心理理论发展情况。研究结果表明：改编后的非言语意外内容任务适用于自闭症和智力落后儿童;包括低言语能力个体在内的所有自闭症儿童的心理理论能力显著低于智力落后儿童;智力落后儿童的心理理论能力与以往研究结果相一致;相对于智力落后儿童,自闭症儿童在物品转移和调换的注意方面存在更大障碍。     

Personal epistemology and theory of mind: deciphering young children's beliefs about knowledge and knowing

The beliefs that individuals hold about knowledge and knowing have been the focus of a growing body of work on “personal epistemology.” There has been general agreement among researchers about a developmental trajectory of epistemological understanding that takes place in adolescence and adulthood. Rarely has this research included children, however, and we know little about the origins of epistemological awareness or its early development. A separate group of researchers have investigated children's “theory of mind,” or the ability to understand others’ beliefs, actions, and desires, with primary attention to the onset of this cognitive achievement between the ages of 3 and 5. This article reviews the theoretical foundation for a proposed relation between these constructs, and reports on an exploratory investigation with 3–5 year olds, in which epistemological level was significantly related to theory of mind ability. Results are discussed in relation to a general timeline depicting the development of children's beliefs about knowledge and knowing, a process that involves an ongoing tension between objective and subjective perspectives. We propose that the trajectory of epistemological development be expanded to include an initial period of egocentric subjectivity that characterizes epistemological thinking prior to the achievement of theory of mind.     

Rebuilding reality: A phenomenology of aspects of chronic schizophrenia

Schizophrenia, like other pathological conditions of mental life, has not been systematically included in the general study of consciousness. By focusing on aspects of chronic schizophrenia, we attempt to remedy this omission. Basic components of Husserl’s phenomenology (intentionality, synthesis, constitution, epoche, and unbuilding) are explicated and then employed in an account of chronic schizophrenia. In schizophrenic experience, basic constituents of reality are lost and the subject must try to explicitly re-constitute them. “Automatic mental life” is weakened such that much of the world that is normally taken-for-granted cannot continue to be so. The subject must actively re-lay the ontological foundations of reality.