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

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Rakoczy, Hannes
Copyright Year	2015
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-systems-account of theory of mind.
Starting Page	689
Ending Page	707
Page Count	19
File Format	PDF
ISSN	00397857
Journal	Synthese
Volume Number	194
Issue Number	3
e-ISSN	15730964
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2015-09-05
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Theory of mind Social cognition Intensionality Cognitive development Philosophy of Science Epistemology Logic Philosophy of Language Metaphysics
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Philosophy Social Sciences

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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