Pragmatic Development and the False Belief Task

Abstract

Nativists about theory of mind have typically explained why children below the age of four fail the false belief task by appealing to the demands that these tasks place on children's developing executive abilities. However, this appeal to executive functioning cannot explain a wide range of evidence showing that social and linguistic factors also affect when children pass this task. In this paper, I present a revised nativist proposal about theory of mind development that is able to accommodate these findings, which I call the pragmatic development account. According to this proposal, we can gain a better understanding of the shift in children's performance on standard false-belief tasks around four years of age by considering how children's experiences with the pragmatics of belief discourse affect the way they interpret the task.

The Situational Mental File Account of the False Belief Tasks: A New Solution of the Paradox of False Belief Understanding

“…On the one hand, 'nativists' argue for an early ToM-ability based on an inborn module (or module-like structure) which allows infants to pass the implicit FBT (e.g. Baron-Cohen 1995;Baillargeon et al 2010 3 ;Carruthers 2013Carruthers , 2016Helming et al 2016;Leslie et al 2004;Westra 2016). Broadly, this is the view that infants have an early understanding of other people's beliefs which allows them to pass the implicit FBT.…”

“…Response account Baillargeon et al (2010) Pragmatic development account Westra (2016) Triple mindreading Carruthers (2013Carruthers ( , 2016 Theory of mind mechanism (ToMM) Leslie et al (2004) Neutral Differential task demands view Rubio-Fernández (2013) Situational mental files account Newen and Wolf (this paper) Empiricist Two systems account Butterfill (2009), Butterfill andApperly (2013) Submentalizing/cognitive gadgets Heyes (2014Heyes ( , 2018) Child scientist -theory revision Gopnik (1993), Gopnik andWellman (1992, 2012), Wellman (2014) Behaviour rules and meta-representation Perner et al (1987), Perner (1991) Mental files Perner et al (2015), Perner and Leahy (2016) Dual systems association account De Bruin and Newen (2012) For the purposes of this paper, we want to remain neutral concerning the nativist/ empiricist debate. 5 Although we will be making use of the mental files framework from Perner et al (2015) and Perner and Leahy (2016) who do not advocate a nativist position, it is not clear whether the development of the ability to link mental files has to be a domain specific development in terms of a specifically developing understanding of belief, or whether this is also something which can be cashed out in terms of the development of domain general processes (e.g.…”

“…Some even do so explicitly (e.g. Helming et al 2016;Westra 2016). These accounts, however, still have a focus on one factor and fail to adequately integrate the dominant factor with the other factor.…”

“…There has been increased interest in the role of situational factors on development over the past years, in particular in the form of 'pragmatic accounts' (Helming et al 2016;Westra 2016;Westra and Carruthers 2017). This is partly due to the open challenge to provide an explanation of the paradox of false belief that does justice to the competence displayed by children across a variety of implicit FBTs.…”

The biocultural emergence of mindreading: integrating cognitive archaeology and human development

“…For instance, according to Helming et al (2016), younger children reason that the experimenter cannot be really asking for some information that she already knows, and assume instead that she is testing their ability to tell where the mistaken agent should look for the object. Similarly, Westra (2017;Westra and Carruthers 2017) argue that younger children fail ER-FBTs because they are unlikely to judge the experimenter's communicative intention, i.e., her desire to have ''the child to show that she knows that Sally believes that the marble is in its old location.'' If any of these proposals were correct, the attested discontinuity in the development of socio-cognitive abilities between infancy and early childhood would not rule out the hypothesis that children's success in ER-FBTs-as well as infants' performance in SRFBTs-depends on innate (meta-representational) mindreading capacities.…”