Ayca Mazman (University of Cincinnati)
In developmental psychology, a specific experimental design, namely the false belief task, is used to measure children's ability to attribute beliefs and intentionality to others. There are many variations of the false belief task, each of them claiming to test different aspects of certain theory of mind abilities. The most common type of false belief task is the Sally-Anne task (also known as change of location task).
In this paper, I evaluate some philosophical theories of belief to see if any of them are able to provide an explanation for the implicit passing of the false belief task in early infancy. Most of the theories of what beliefs are rest on the assumption that beliefs are propositional attitudes since philosophers tend to formulate their theories on belief based on experiences in adulthood. Given the psychological research and experimentation stated above, the implicit passing of the false belief task then suggests that infants as young as 13-months are able to entertain propositional attitudes. I argue that attributing pre-verbal infants the ability to entertain propositions seems like the wrong approach since the gap between implicit and explicit passing suggests that children are not able to verbally confirm that they understand someone has a belief that theirs before the age of 4.5 or 5 (most likely due to their inability to entertain propositional attitudes before that age). I see two options to avoid this dilemma: 1) If we agree that false belief tasks in early infancy do indeed show that infants are able attribute false beliefs to others, then beliefs may not be propositional attitudes OR 2) Results of false belief tasks in early infancy do not show that infants possess a ToM but rather they tap into a more primitive mechanism whose usage mimics an understanding of false beliefs, at least in the case of false belief tasks in early infancy. I argue that the second option is more appealing for a variety of reasons, one being that it allows beliefs to be propositional attitudes without attributing infants as young as 13 months the ability to entertain propositional attitudes.
