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A new rationalist account of the development of false-belief understanding

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Abstract

Rationalists accounts of the development of folk-psychology maintain that the acquisition of this capacity is aided by special-purpose mechanisms rich in innate structure. Rationalists have typically maintained that false-belief understanding (FBU) emerges very early on, before the age of two. To explain why young children nonetheless fail the false-belief task, rationalists have suggested that they may have troubles expressing their FBU. Here I do two things. First, I argue that extant proposals about what might prevent children from expressing their FBU cannot explain some of the relevant data. Second, I put forward a new rationalist proposal, the processing-time account, according to which young children fail because they cannot carry out all the required processing in the time available. I argue that the processing-time account overcomes the challenges extant rationalist accounts face while being compatible with the evidence in their support, thereby providing a compelling explanation of the development of FBU.

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Notes

  1. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this suggestion.

  2. It is worth noting that simply telling children to wait is not effective. In the very first false-belief study, Wimmer and Perner (1983) immediately considered the possibility that children’s difficulties may be due to premature responding. To test this hypothesis, Wimmer and Perner ran a “stop-and-think” condition where children were encouraged to “think carefully,” and found that this did not improve children’s performance. The attempt is commendable yet, in hindsight, its failure not surprising: “Asking 4-year-olds to wait before responding is a fruitless exercise” (Diamond et al., 2002, p. 353).

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Acknowledgements

This manuscript contains research partially funded by the AHRC (ref: 1370089) and by the University of Sheffield. The author would like to thank the following for their helpful comments and suggestions: Renée Baillargeon, Luca Barlassina, George Botterill, Stephen Butterfill, Alexandre Duval, Stephen Laurence, and the Sheffield Cognitive Science WIP group 2020/21. The author would also like to thank all anonymous referees who provided feedback on the manuscript.

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This work was supported by an AHRC grant (ref: 1370089).

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    Francesco Antilici

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Antilici, F. A new rationalist account of the development of false-belief understanding. Philos Stud 180, 2847–2870 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01986-8

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