Pierre Jacob (Instituto Jean Nicod)

Miércoles 11 de diciembre de 2019, 16.00 hs.

Abstract:

Developmental research into false-belief understanding in human childhood has yielded discrepant findings. Most preschoolers have been shown to fail verbal false-belief tasks where they are directly asked to predict the action of a mistaken agent. However, findings based on non-verbal false-belief tests show that preverbal infants expect an agent to act in accordance with the content of her belief (whether true or false). How to reconcile these discrepant findings? This is the developmental puzzle about false-belief understanding. There are two broad approaches to this puzzle, according to whether or not one accepts a mentalistic interpretation of the infant data. I propose to take the infant data at face value as reliable evidence of false-belief understanding in human infancy and to provide a pragmatic account of why verbal false-belief tasks are so challenging for preschoolers.