Abstract
For decades, philosophers and psychologists have assumed that children understand other people’s behavior on the basis of Belief Reasoning (BR) at latest by age 5 when they pass the false belief task. Furthermore, children’s use of BR in the true belief task has been regarded as being ontogenetically prior. Recent findings from developmental studies challenge this view and indicate that 4- to 5-year-old children make use of a reasoning strategy, which is cognitively less demanding than BR and called perceptual access reasoning (PAR), in true belief tasks. I appeal to research on fluency to explain these findings. On my account, 4- to 5- year-old children understand other people’s behavior by means of BR if they experience cognitive strain (such as in false belief tasks) but they revert to simpler heuristics PAR when such an experience is missing (such as in true belief tasks).
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Notes
Of course, the fact that Fabricius and Khalil’s (2003) study has not been replicated (yet) is only an indicator but does not mean necessarily that it is not replicable. I dismiss their findings because Perner and Horn (2003) failed to replicate it and because Perner’s and Horn’s assumption that the children in the study by Fabricius and Khalil were confused by a series of yes–no questions strikes me as plausible.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Cameron Buckner, Albert Newen, Danny Oppenheimer and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. Furthermore, I acknowledge the financial support provided by the Barbara-Wengeler-Foundation during the initial stages of this paper as well as ongoing support from the VW-project “The Social Mind”.
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Fiebich, A. Mindreading with ease? Fluency and belief reasoning in 4- to 5-year-olds. Synthese 191, 929–944 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0301-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0301-5