This paper was originally written while the author was at the University of California at Berkeley

It is widely assumed in the developmental literature that certain classes of modal expression appear later in language acquisition than others; specifically, epistemic interpretations lag behind non-epistemic (or root) interpretations. An explanation for these findings is proposed in terms of the child's developing theory of mind, i.e. the ability to attribute to oneself and others mental representations, and to reason inferentially about them. It is hypothesized that epistemic modality crucially implicates theory-of-mind abilities and is therefore expected to depend on prior developments in the child's ability to handle representations of mental representations. In support of this hypothesis, it is shown that autistic individuals (who arguably possess a deficient theory-of-mind mechanism) have difficulty with epistemics.

Two experiments explored the communicative bases of preschoolers ’ object appearance–reality (AR) errors. In Experiment 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N 5 36) completed the AR test (with high- and low-deceptive objects), a control test with the same discourse structure but nondeceptive stimuli, and stimulus naming and memory tests. AR performance correlated positively with control (discourse) and naming test performance. Object deceptiveness had little effect. In Experiment 2, 3- and 4-year-olds (N 5 64) completed AR tests that experimentally varied question phrasing and use of exemplar objects. Children also completed memory, vocabulary, and control tests (of verbal perseveration). AR performance variance was predicted by a composite perseveration score from three non-AR tasks, vocabulary, and exemplars. The results indicate that the discourse structure of the AR test elicits a perseverative tendency that is mediated by children’s verbal knowledge. Adults in modern societies are accustomed to illusion. Our surroundings feature disembodied voices floating from stereo speakers, colored light on TV screens showing fantastic creatures and events, refrigerator magnets resembling juicy victuals or cute animals, and magic tricks that transform ordinary objects. Adults are entertained but not fooled by such phenomena; it is less clear how young children understand them. What are the sources of children’s erroneous answers to questions about apparent and real aspects of deceptive objectsFitems that look like one thing but function like another? Such errors often are assumed to stem from an inability to represent two concepts at once, or an inability to represent one’s own changing beliefs about an object’s identity. We explore an alternative account: Children’s errors might be due to specific communicative and linguistic processes. By this account, mature responses to questions about

Causal learning requires integrating constraints provided by domain-specific theories with domaingeneral statistical learning. In order to investigate the interaction between these factors, the authors presented preschoolers with stories pitting their existing theories against statistical evidence. Each child heard 2 stories in which 2 candidate causes co-occurred with an effect. Evidence was presented in the

Four experiments compared the permanence of imagined and perceived objects. A new method for assessing object permanence in older children and adults was used that tested participants ’ preparedness to acknowledge that an object could change as a result of magical intervention. In Experiment 1, 6- and 9-year-old children and adults treated perceived and imagined objects (pieces of paper) as being equally permanent. In Experiment 2, adults treated a fantastic object (a flying dog) as significantly less permanent than either perceived or imagined objects, but children failed to distinguish between fantastic and imagined objects. Experiment 3 employed a different type of mental-physical causality (an attempt to change objects with the help of a participant’s own wish). Results were similar to those of Experiment 2. In Experiment 4, adults were tested on permanence of personally significant imagined objects (participants ’ images of their future lives). Although almost all participants claimed that they did not believe in magic, in test trials they were not prepared to rule out the possibility that their future lives could be affected by a magical curse. The results are used to explain psychological roots of magical thinking and practices. Implications of these findings for cognitive development and more specifically children’s theory of mind reasoning are discussed. Key words: object permanence, magical thinking, mental-physical causality, imaginary reality. 2

ABSTRACT: Research on general thinking abilities--productive, higher order, critical and creative thinking--has progressed slowly compared with the rapid progress that has been made in the study of cognitive structures and procedures. As alternatives to currently prevailing as-sumptions, three framing assumptions for the study of thinking are proposed, involving situated cognition, per-sonal and social epistemologies, and conceptual compe-tence. Evidence consistent with these assumptions is out-lined, and topics in the psychology of thinking are dis-cussed in relation to the assumptions. The psychological study of thinking has two parts. One part is concerned with performance on specific tasks. The other part is concerned with broader capabilities of pro-ductive thinking, higher order thinking skills, critical thinking, and creativity. In the past 20 years, there has been major scientific progress in the psychology of thinking concerned with performance on specific tasks, and much less in the psy-chology of critical, productive, higher order, and creative thinking. The study of complex information processing, pioneered by Newell and Simon (1972), has provided a progressive framework for analyzing the cognitive struc-tures and processes in many tasks, including tasks used in Piagetian research (Siegler, 1976), puzzles such as cryptarithmetic and the Towers of Hanoi (Anzai & Simon, 1979), items used in intelligence tests (Pellcgrino & Glaser,

ABSTRACT: Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they do not and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to valence. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness. Our first goal in this article is to examine whether ordinary people (viz. people without training in philosophy or in consciousness studies) and philosophers conceive of subjective experience in a similar way. Philosophers see subjective experiences as including such diverse mental states as seeing red and feeling pain, treating them as having something in common, namely that they are phenomenal—viz. that they share the second-order property that there is “something it is like ” (Nagel 1974) to be in these mental states. We provide suggestive evidence that the folk, by contrast, do not conceive of subjective experience in this way. Our second goal is to explore this folk conception for its own sake. We successively consider two accounts. We first examine whether the folk treat perceptual states differently from bodily sensations or felt emotions, taking the latter, but not the former, to be subjectively experienced. This might be phrased in terms of the folk distinguishing between those states that tell us about the world

The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the 20 th century, however, this idea came under serious

ABSTRACT: Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they don’t and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to affectivity. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness. 1 The first author did most of the work on this paper. We would like to thank XX for their comments on previous versions of this article. 1 Our first goal in this article is to examine whether ordinary people (viz. people without training in philosophy or in consciousness studies) and philosophers conceive of subjective experience in a similar way. Philosophers see subjective experiences as including such diverse mental states as seeing red and feeling pain, treating them as having something in common,

ABSTRACT: Do philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in the same way? In this article, we argue that they don’t and that the philosophical concept of phenomenal consciousness does not coincide with the folk conception. We first offer experimental support for the hypothesis that philosophers and ordinary people conceive of subjective experience in markedly different ways. We then explore experimentally the folk conception, proposing that for the folk, subjective experience is closely linked to affectivity. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for a central issue in the philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness. 1 The first author did most of the work on this paper. 1 Our first goal in this article is to show that ordinary people (viz. people without training in philosophy or in consciousness studies) and philosophers conceive of subjective experience in a markedly different way. Philosophers see subjective experiences as including such diverse mental states as seeing red and feeling pain, treating them as having something in common, namely that they are phenomenal. We show that the folk, by contrast, do not conceive of