Date:
Monday, March 29, 2010 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Based on a wealth of experimental data, it has been argued that, already
between their first and second birthdays, children routinely appeal to
mental states---goals, perceptions, beliefs, and desires---to explain the
behaviour of others. In this talk, I will analyse a range of experiments
involving, e.g., non-verbal false-belief tasks, cooperative pointing, and
reasoning about goals and desires, and attempt to show that all of them can
be accounted for on the assumption that infants have a quite minimal theory
of behaviour, which is defined purely in terms of relations between
particulars (individuals, places, and times) and is not mentalistic in any
deep way.