Abstract
There is a large body of empirical work that has investigated the relationship between parents’ child-directed speech and their children’s Theory of Mind development. That such a relationship should exist is well motivated from both Theory Theory and Socio-Cultural (SC) perspectives. Despite this general convergence, we argue that theoretical differences between the two perspectives suggests nuanced differences in the expected outcomes of the empirical work. Further, the different ontological commitments of the two approaches have (mis)guided the design, coding, and analysis of existing research and imply different future directions. We discuss five areas of extant research that can be extended and diversified most coherently by adopting a SC framework.
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Notes
While the theory revision process has been formalized through the use of new statistical modeling, the conceptual point regarding new content holds (i.e., to generate new hypothesis requires new content and nothing about Bayesian modeling will provide that new content).
What would it mean for the TT position to integrate the social environment into the constructive processes? Perhaps we could think of the child as co-constructing their hypotheses in order to give culture a more constitutive role. For example, co-constructing hypotheses could be similar to the co-construction of memories through the process of reminiscing. Perhaps the co-constructed hypotheses about the mind would be manifest through conversations about the actions of other people. Further, the pre-linguistic version of this would be the child’s second-person interactions with other adults. Accordingly, TT could give culture a more constitutive role by focusing on second-person interactions in infancy; the integration of rudimentary language would be seen as increasing the complexity of those second-person interactions in toddlerhood; and, finally, more complex language would be understood as helping the preschooler to reflect on and take a third-person perspective toward themselves and others. However, this would seem to result in TT giving culture a more constitutive role by aligning itself with a socio-cultural approach. Further, the underlying issues related to emergence would remain.
See embodied, enactivist, ecological, and phenomenological approaches to cognitive science for different degrees of convergence with action-based approaches in general and socio-culture approaches in particular (Chemero 2009; Gallagher 2001; Hutto and Myin 2012; Ziemke 2003). That said, enactivist, ecological, and phenomenological approaches differ from action-based approaches in that they tend to reject the possibility of modeling representation altogether; and, embodied approaches that do not share the anti-representationalism of the other three tend to be overly reliant on information-processing assumptions in which the “body” still has no necessary/constitutive connection to cognition.
One difficulty for the social-cognition literature in general is that the empirical work seems to be accommodated by all of the different approaches (Miller 2016)—this includes simulation theory and modularity theory. However, if there are to be meaningful differences between the approaches then different empirical work should fit better for some approaches than for others. Further, it is clear that the sorts of empirical research programs pursued by researchers differ in terms of their background frameworks. For example, the modularity approach has limited empirical research programs or they have tended to focus on children with developmental disorders. In contrast, the constructivism of TT and SC approaches have resulted in robust empirical research programs that tend to focus on (linguistic) social interaction at different developmental periods. Our goal in the current study will be to illustrate some of the particulars of empirical research that we argue are better motivated and interpreted from within the socio-cultural tradition over the TT perspective.
What Wellman does not share with Piaget is the underlying action-basis to cognition and mind more broadly. Consequently, he does not share with SC approaches in their focus on the pragmatics of (linguistic) social interaction.
For a socio-cultural approach, including that of Katherine Nelson, language is not generally considered the starting point of making (social) meaning. Instead, language builds on children’s existing understanding of the meaningfulness of different types of social situations. In this way, socio-cultural theorists do not tend to see language as its own domain of development; instead, language development is an emergent outcome of the social-cognitive domain.
The underlying reason for this divergence is in terms of what challenge social understanding is supposed to overcome (Carpendale and Lewis 2014). For TT, the challenge is to understand other’s behavior by understanding their minds. For most SC approaches, the challenge is to make meaning of the social situation through coordinated social engagement.
Lillard has provided an excellent survey of some of the cultural variation for beliefs about others’ minds and behavior (i.e., folk psychologies). Wellman acknowledges this variation but argues that it does not undermine the quest for that which is universal. We hope that our explication of SC approaches can further open the door to the essential role of such cultural diversity while maintaining the quest for that which is universal.
With their eventual mastery of ToM children will develop a relatively decontextualized understanding of others (i.e., a decontextualized understanding is a developmental outcome).
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Preparation of this article was supported by a Grant to Hande Ilgaz from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, (Grant No.: 217K169).
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Ilgaz, H., Allen, J.W.P. (Co-)Constructing a theory of mind: From language or through language?. Synthese 198, 8463–8484 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02581-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02581-8