In defense of a developmental dogma: children acquire propositional attitude folk psychology around age 4

Abstract

When do children acquire a propositional attitude folk psychology or theory of mind? The orthodox answer to this central question of developmental ToM research had long been that around age 4 children begin to apply "belief" and other propositional attitude concepts. This orthodoxy has recently come under serious attack, though, from two sides: Scoffers complain that it over-estimates children's early competence and claim that a proper understanding of propositional attitudes emerges only much later. Boosters criticize the orthodoxy for underestimating early competence and claim that even infants ascribe beliefs. In this paper, the orthodoxy is defended on empirical grounds against these two kinds of attacks. On the basis of new evidence, not only can the two attacks safely be countered, but the orthodox claim can actually be strengthened, corroborated and refined: what emerges around age 4 is an explicit, unified, flexibly conceptual capacity to ascribe propositional attitudes. This unified conceptual capacity contrasts with the less sophisticated, less unified implicit forms of tracking simpler mental states present in ontogeny long before. This refined version of the orthodoxy can thus most plausibly be spelled out in some form of 2-systemsaccount of theory of mind.Keywords Theory of mind · Social cognition · Intensionality · Cognitive development When in ontogeny do children acquire a folk psychology or "theory of mind" (ToM)-the conceptual framework of propositional attitudes with which we describe and explain each other? This central question of developmental ToM research has been dis-B Hannes Rakoczy

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“…Concerning unity of performance in various explicit FB tasks in older children, earlier studies directly investigating young children's understanding of aspectuality found evidence for disunity and dissociation: children mastered tasks of aspectuality understanding only some years after passing standard FB tasks (Apperly & Robinson, 1998;Kamawar & Olson, 1999Russell, 1987;Sprung, Perner, & Mitchell, 2007). But more recent research suggests that these findings masked children's competence due to extraneous task (Rakoczy, 2017;Rakoczy, Fizke, Bergfeld, & Schwarz, 2015). These new studies have developed simplified aspectual tasks.…”

Spontaneous mindreading: a problem for the two-systems account

“…(Flavell et al 1981;Low et al 2014;Surtees et al 2012). For this reason, Level-2 perspective-taking is said to signal children's acquisition of a representational theory of mind (Rakoczy 2015).…”

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