• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1115 0

midair, or when a ball rolled across a table leaps over an obstacle instead of bumping into it. But seven-month-olds do seem to possess some basic theories about the laws that govern such situations, which means that they are either born with the ability to generate those theories or acquire that ability in the first few months of life. See for instance Susan Hespos and Renée Baillargeon, “Décalage in Infants’ Knowledge About Occlusion and Containment Events: Converging Evidence from Action Tasks.” Cognition, Vol. 99 (2006): B31–B41; and Yuyan Luo, Lisa Kaufman, and Renée Baillargeon, “Young Infants’ Reasoning about Events Involving Inert and Self-propelled Objects,” Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 58 (2009): 441–486.

Alison Gopnik. Alison Gopnik, “Explanation as Orgasm and the Drive for Causal Understanding: The Evolution, Function and Phenomenology of the Theory-Formation System,” in Frank C. Keil and Robert A. Wilson, eds., Cognition and Explanation (The MIT Press, 2000), 299–323.

the false belief test. The false belief experiment was first proposed by the philosopher Daniel Dennett and later conducted by the Austrian psychologists Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner, which they then wrote up as “Beliefs about Beliefs: Representation and Constraining Function of Wrong Beliefs in Young Children’s Understanding of Deception.” Cognition, Vol. 13 (1983): 103–128. The candy/pencils variation comes from J. Perner, U. Frith, A. M. Leslie, and S. R. Leekam, “Exploration of the Autistic Child’s Theory of Mind: Knowledge, Belief, and Communication,” Child Development, Vol. 60 (1989): 688–700. For more on the Polaroid version of the task, see Zaitchik, D., “When Representations Conflict with Reality: The Preschooler’s Problem with False Beliefs and ‘False’ Photographs,” Cognition, Vol. 35 (1990): 41–68.

Recent evidence from infancy experiments (FN). For the recent challenges to prior beliefs about young children and false beliefs, see Hyun-joo Song and Renée Baillargeon, “Infants’ Reasoning about Others’ False Perceptions,” Developmental Psychology, Vol. 44, No. 6 (Nov. 2008): 1789–1795; Gergely Csibra and Victoria Southgate, “Evidence for Infants’ Understanding of False Beliefs Should Not Be Dismissed,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 10 (2006): 4–5; Kristine H. Onishi and Renée Baillargeon, “Do 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs?” Science, Vol. 308 (2005): 255–258.

the example of Romeo and Juliet. Rebecca Saxe, “Reading Your Mind: How Our Brains Help Us Understand Other People,” Boston Review, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Feb./March 2004): 39–41.

the First Person Constraint on Doxastic Explanation. I am grateful to Rebecca Saxe for pointing me to this concept, and to the philosopher Ward Jones, whose published work and private correspondence with me were invaluable in shaping what I call here the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint. The quotes from Jones in this section are from “Explaining Our Own Beliefs: Non-Epistemic Believing and Doxastic Instability,” Philosophical Studies, Vol. 111, No. 3 (Dec. 2002): 217–249.

“the bias blind spot.” I relied especially on the following four papers about the bias blind spot: Emily Pronin, Thomas Gilovich, and Lee Ross, “Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder: Divergent Perceptions of Bias in Self versus Other,” Psychological Review, Vol. 111, No. 3 (2004): 791–799; Joyce Ehrlinger, Thomas Gilovich, and Lee Ross, “Peering into the Bias Blind Spot: People’s Assessments of Bias in Themselves and Others,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 5 (May 2005): 1–13; Emily Pronin, Daniel Y. Lin, and Lee Ross, “The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self versus Other,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 3 (March 2002): 369–381; and Emily Pronin, Justin Kruger, Kenneth Savitsky, and Lee Ross, “You Don’t Know Me, but I Know You: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 81, No. 4 (2001): 639–656. Pronin’s quotation is from “Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder,” 784.

CHAPTER 6 OUR MINDS, PART THREE: EVIDENCE

I am indebted