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What Do False-Belief Tests Show?

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Abstract

In a (2018) paper published in Psychological Review, Tyler Burge has offered a unified non-mentalistic account of a wide range of social cognitive developmental findings. His proposal is that far from attributing mental states (e.g. beliefs), young children attribute to humans the same kind of internal generic states of sensory registration that biologists attribute to e.g. snails and ticks. Burge’s proposal deserves close attention: it is especially challenging because it departs from both the mentalistic and all the non-mentalistic accounts of the data so far. Moreover Burge has been one of the leading philosophers of mind of the past 40 years and some of his writings on the objectivity of perception display a deep understanding of the relevance of science for sharpening our understanding of the mind. After taking a close look at the developmental evidence, in particular at false-belief studies, I argue that Burge’s (Psychological Review, 125(3), 409–434, 2018) account faces severe obstacles. To give one telling example: if young children can only attribute to others sensory registrations, then it is hard to explain the evidence showing that they respond differently to an agent’s ignorance and to her false belief.

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Notes

  1. There is reliable evidence that most 4,5 year-olds succeed on verbal false-belief tasks about an object’s location (cf. Wellman et al. 2001).

  2. As Bloom and German (2000) were the first to argue, the capacity for false-belief attribution cannot be sufficient for success on verbal false-belief tasks, because success also requires understanding the question asked by the experimenter. If they are right, then conversely failure on verbal false-belief tasks does not demonstrate the inability to attribute false beliefs to others.

  3. Some philosophers also endorse this position, cf. Carruthers (2013).

  4. Fabricius et al. (2010) have reported an intriguing pattern whereby most of the children (between 5 and 6 years of age), who succeed on verbal false-belief tasks about an object’s location, oddly fail on verbal true-belief tasks. They take these findings as evidence that these children cannot attribute genuine beliefs to others. In these true-belief tasks about an object’s location, the agent’s belief was true, but the agent did not know the object’s location in the philosophical epistemological sense of ‘know’, because before being placed back where the agent had put it before leaving the scene, the toy was temporarily displaced in the agent’s absence (cf. Oktay-Gür and Rakoczy 2017 for detailed discussion and for a pragmatic account of the failures in true-belief conditions). Burge does not discuss these findings which might lend support to his own point of view.

  5. Following his (2010) book, Burge (2018, p. 410) uses “attribution” in an unusually liberal way (at least among psychologists): “Not only individuals, but states, attribute things. Perceptual states attribute properties and relations to particular entities.”

  6. According to Burge’s anti-individualist standpoint, the contents of an individual’s perceptual representations depend on the individual’s non-social environment. In earlier work, Burge (1979) has also argued for antiindividualism (also called ‘social externalism’) with respect to an individual’s beliefs and other propositional attitudes by highlighting the contribution of the individual’s social environment (what members of her community think and say) to the contents of her beliefs and other mental states.

  7. Granting Burge his thesis that non-mental states lack representational functions, a deep question is: what gives mental states their representational functions? Burge seems to think that mental states do not derive their representational functions from evolution by natural selection. One alternative possibility highlighted by Dretske (1988), but not, so far as I can see, by Burge is that the representational functions of mental states rests on ontogenetic learning.

  8. I’ll ignore conscious states, which are irrelevant to the present discussion.

  9. Burge’s assumption here seems to be that sensory retention in the absence of a target can be construed as a non-mental counterpart to a mental state of believing or remembering.

  10. Knudsen and Liszkowski (2012) also rule out the possibility that infants attributed ignorance, rather than false belief, to the agent.

  11. Further significant evidence that toddlers (and even infants) construe differently an agent’s state of ignorance from an agent’s false belief comes from He et al. (2011) and Knudsen and Liszkowski (2012).

  12. The aspectuality of beliefs explains the intensionality (or referential opacity) of belief-attributions, exhibited by the fact that replacement of ‘Cicero’ by the coreferential name ‘Tully’ does not preserve the truth of the ascription ‘Mara believes that Cicero was a Roman orator’.

  13. Unlike false-belief tests about an object’s location, false-belief tests about object-identity have recently been called “aspectual” studies (cf. Rakoczy et al. 2015).

  14. Cf. Rakoczy, Fizke, Bergfeld, & Schwarz (2015) and Rakoczy (2016) for extended discussion. Burge himself discusses a study involving a toy figure first called Peter and casually dressed, then introduced as “the fire-fighter” and wearing a fire-fighter uniform that makes him look unrecognizably different from when he is casually dressed.

  15. Findings based on the false-belief condition of Scott and Baillargeon’s (2009) penguin study (discussed in section 3) can be taken to show that 18-month-olds attribute to the agent the false belief that the assembled two-piece penguin in the transparent box is the one-piece penguin. Buttelmann et al. (2015) provide evidence that most 18-month-olds give a rock, not a sponge, to an agent who is unsuccessfully trying to reach for a sponge that deceptively looks like a rock and which the agent falsely believes to be a rock.

  16. In other words, I will bracket any doubt as to whether a state of sensory retention is a genuine non-mental counterpart to mental states of believing or remembering.

  17. It is not clear, as I have argued in section 3, whether Burge thinks that the distinction between intention and desire (two mental states) can be mapped onto an equivalent distinction between a pair of generic non-mental internal conative states.

  18. Cf. Sober (1998) for extended discussion of this issue in evolutionary theorizing.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Editor and to four anonymous reviewers, to Andreas Falck, George Galfalvi, Gyuri Gergely and Dan Sperber, for their insightful comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this paper, and also to Ned Block for conversations on the topic of this paper. I gratefully acknowledge support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Seventh Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant 609819.

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    Pierre Jacob

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Jacob, P. What Do False-Belief Tests Show?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 11, 1–20 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-019-00442-z

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