The Status of Language in the Development of a Theory of Mind

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THE STATUS OF LANGUAGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF A THEORY OF MIND

NENE HARRISON

MA Linguistics

May 1st 2002

Tutor: Neil Smith


The study of the development of ‘theory of mind’ skills in children became popular when the false-belief task was invented in the 1980’s, providing cognitive scientists with the focus of a clear experimental paradigm.  This tested the ability of the young child to attribute false beliefs to others in order to explain their actions.  Researchers then began to investigate the developmental stages through which children acquire these theory of mind abilities.

This essay will examine the nature of this acquisition process, studying two opposing views of theory of mind development in the young child; whether it can be explained by the modular nature of the cognitive process, where the ability is innate but must be triggered by input from the child’s environment, or whether it exists as a developing theory, a set of causal principles progressively formulated by the child through observation and hypothesis formation.  We also consider the role played by the language faculty, particularly the question of whether the acquisition of a natural language is causally necessary for the development of a theory of mind in the young child.

A ‘theory of mind’ refers to the cognitive ability to interpret, predict and explain the behaviour of others in terms of their underlying mental states.  This theory is universal among all normal humans, and becomes accessible during childhood.  It is also metarepresentational.  It demands that we not only employ propositional attitudes, but also that we employ them about propositional attitudes; we have beliefs about the beliefs of ourselves and others.  This also applies in cases where the embedded belief is false.

The original false belief test pioneered by Wimmer and Perner ‎[1], involved a character, Maxi, who places some chocolate in some location and then leaves the room.  The chocolate is moved to a different location, and the child is then asked where Maxi will look for the chocolate when he returns.  The child succeeds this task if he understands that Maxi believes that the chocolate is where he left it, thereby attributing a false belief to Maxi; the child is able to represent not just the state of the world, but also Maxi’s representation of the world.

This leads us to ask the obvious developmental question of how this concept of belief and therefore the theory of mind, is acquired.  The suggestion that it is learnt is dubious, because of the particularly abstract nature of mental states; children are eventually able to make predictions about mental states that they cannot hear, feel or see.  The alternative is to propose that the capacity to acquire a theory of mind has an innate basis.

The Development of Theory of Mind

The Modularist Approach

The modularist approach is closely linked to the claim that the theory of mind is innate; most cognitive structures, such as that which controls the acquisition of natural language are innate, and innateness is generally believed to be one of the chief characteristics of modular systems.  This view, held by those such as Baron-Cohen [2] and Leslie ‎[3] proposes that human cognition is built with an innately channelled architecture, or module, which has access to all the information necessary for meta-representation in older children and adults, and that all that is needed for the theory of mind to develop are the appropriate social context and background beliefs.  So while the theory of mind is not a given at the start of cognitive development, this module enables it to emerge at some point along its normal course, in a manner akin to that of Chomsky’s language faculty.  Although some environmental input may be called for as a trigger, the module constrains development to a genetically predetermined sequence.  From this we would expect the acquisition of an adult theory of mind to be a universal human achievement.  One property of the development of modular cognitive capacities is that their end-states (as well as being subject to parametric variation, as discussed later) are often uniform across individuals, although the environment may affect the precise developmental schedule.  As the modularity account predicts, the eventual acquisition of a theory of mind is virtually uniform across individuals and cultures ‎[4].

Cognitive modules of the type described by Fodor [5], have the following properties: -

  1. Domain specificity; modules only access a restricted range of inputs in the course of their operation
  2. Informational encapsulation; modules are unaffected by feedback from conscious, or unconscious beliefs and expectations; they have no access to information held in the central system
  3. Obligatory firing; modules process in a mandatory way, such that their operation is not entirely under voluntary control
  4. Fast speed; modules are typically fast, partly because they are encapsulated (they need consult only a restricted data base) and mandatory (little time is spent on deciding whether or not to process incoming input)
  5. Characteristic ontogeny; modules tend to display a relatively fixed developmental sequence
  6. Characteristic patterns of breakdown; modules and the abilities that they support may be selectively impaired by neurological pathologies
  7. Dedicated neural architecture; modules may be implemented in fixed specialised portions of neural architecture
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The theory of mind module seems to fit Fodor’s criteria reasonably well.  It does appear to be domain-specific and informationally encapsulated; Segal [6] offers the following example as evidence for information encapsulation; ‘Watching a good actor can generate a sort of theory-of-mind illusion: even though one knows that he is not really in pain, or in love, or trying hard to solve a problem, it still seems to one that he is.’  So despite having information about the actor’s true mental state, the workings our theory of mind module are not influenced.  The module also seems to operate quickly ...

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