Abstract: It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of humans from that of other animals is the belief-desire psychology of four-year-old children and adults (so-called theory of mind). We argue here that this is actually the second ontogenetic step in uniquely human social cognition. The first step is one year old children’s understanding of persons as intentional agents, which enables skills of cultural learning and shared intentionality. This initial step is ‘the real thing ’ in the sense that it enables young children to participate in cultural activities using shared, perspectival symbols with a conventional/normative/reflective dimension—for example, linguistic communication and pretend play—thus inaugurating children’s understanding of things mental. Understanding beliefs and participating in collective intentionality at four years of age—enabling the comprehension of such things as money and marriage—results from several years of engagement with other persons in perspective-shifting and reflective discourse containing propositional attitude constructions. By all appearances, the cognitive skills of human beings are very different from those of other animal species, including our nearest primate relatives. Human

This thesis is about the reconciliation of realistic views of rationality with inferential-intentional theories of communication. Grice (1957; 1975) argued that working out what a speaker meant by an utterance is a matter of inferring the speaker’s intentions on the presumption that she is acting rationally. This is abductive inference: inference to the best explanation for the utterance. Thus an utterance both rationalises and causes the interpretation the hearer constructs. Human rationality is bounded because of our ‘finitary predicament’: we have limited time and resources for computation (Simon, 1957b; Cherniak, 1981). This raises questions about the explanatory status of inferential-intentional pragmatic theories. Gricean derivations of speakers’ intentions seem costly, and generally hearers are not aware of performing explicit reasoning. Utterance interpretation is typically fast and automatic. Is utterance interpretation a species of reasoning, or does the hearer merely act as if reasoning? Within the framework of cognitive science, mental processing is understood as transitions between mental representations. I develop a traditional view of rationality as reasoning ability, where this is essentially the ability to make transitions that preserve rational acceptability. Following Grice (2001), I claim that there is a ‘hard way’ and a ‘quick way’ of reasoning. Work on bounded rationality suggests that much cognitive work is done by heuristics, processes that exploit environmental structure to solve problems at much lower cost than fully explicit calculations. I look at the properties of heuristics that find solutions to open-ended problems such as abductive inference, particularly sequential search heuristics with aspiration-level stopping rules. I draw on relevance theory’s view that the comprehension procedure is a heuristic which exploits environmental regularities due to utterances being offers of information (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). This kind of heuristic, I argue, is the ‘quick way’ that reasoning proceeds in utterance interpretation.

Grice (1957, 1975, 1989) argued that communication involves inference and that speaker meaning is grounded in reasons. For Grice (2001), reasoning can be explicit and conscious or intuitive and unconscious. This paper suggests that pragmatic interpretation, even when unconscious, counts as reasoning, where reasoning is a goal-directed activity involving reason-preserving transitions, and that this was Grice’s view. An alternative view is that if pragmatic processes are not conscious (or cannot be brought to conscious awareness) they are not inferential or do not count as reasoning. Some arguments are given in favour of the view I attribute to Grice. 0

We thank Ingar Brinck and Ron Chrisley for guidance through the mysteries of nonconceptual content, Ron Chrisley for other useful discussions, and Bruce Bridgeman for making his data available to us. In this response, we start from first principles building up our theory to show more precisely what assumptions we do and do not make about the representational nature of implicit and explicit knowledge (in contrast to the target article, where we started our exposition with a description of a fully fledged RTK). Along the way, we indicate how our analysis does not rely on linguistic representations but it does imply that implicit knowledge is causally efficacious; we discuss the relationship between property structure implicitness and conceptual and nonconceptual content; then we consider the factual, fictional and functional uses of representations, and how we go from there to consciousness. Having shown how the basic theory deals with foundational criticisms, we indicate how the theory can elucidate issues commentators raised in the particular application areas of explicitation, voluntary control, visual perception, memory, development (with discussion on infancy, TOM and

ABSTRACT—In two experiments, we investigated whether 13-month-old infants expect agents to behave in a way that is consistent with information to which they have been exposed. Infants watched animations in which an animal was either provided information or prevented from gathering information about the actual location of an object. The animal then searched successfully or failed to retrieve the object. Infants ’ looking times suggest that they expected searches to be effective when—and only when—the agent had had access to the relevant information. This result supports the view that infants possess an incipient metarepresentational ability that permits them to attribute beliefs to agents. We discuss the viability of more conservative explanations and the relation between this early ability and later forms of theory of mind that appear only after children have become experienced verbal communicators. Current accounts of the conceptual competence underlying infants’ understanding of agents have emphasized infants ’ ability to represent the goal of an action (Gergely & Csibra, 2003), as well as agents ’ internal source of energy (Leslie, 1994; Luo & Baillargeon, 2005). By their first birthday, infants distinguish agents from inanimate objects (Mandler, 2004), interpret behaviors as goal directed (Baldwin & Baird, 2001; Gergely, Nádasdy,

useful comments on earlier drafts of this article and the staff at the DPSS, University of Padua, the parents and infants for their kind help. Attribution of beliefs by 13-month-olds 2 In two experiments, we investigated whether 13-month-old infants expect agents to behave in a way consistent with information to which they have been exposed. Infants watched animations in which an animal was either provided information or prevented from gathering information about the actual location of an object. The animal then searched successfully or failed to retrieve it. Infants’ looking times suggest that they expected searches to be effective when—and only when—the agent had had access to the relevant information. This result supports the view that infants ’ possess an incipient metarepresentational ability that permits them to attribute beliefs to agents. We discuss the viability of more conservative explanations and the relationship between this early ability and later forms of ‘theory of mind ’ that appear only after children have become experienced verbal communicators. Attribution of beliefs by 13-month-olds 3

neuronal basis and ontogeny of empathy and mind reading:

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On the 30th anniversary of Premack and Woodruff’s seminal paper asking whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind, we review recent evidence that suggests in many respects they do, whereas in other respects they might not. Specifically, there is solid evidence from several different experimental paradigms that chimpanzees understand the goals and intentions of others, as well as the perception and knowledge of others. Nevertheless, despite several seemingly valid attempts, there is currently no evidence that chimpanzees understand false beliefs. Our conclusion for the moment is, thus, that chimpanzees understand others in terms of a perception–goal psychology, as opposed to a full-fledged, human-like belief–desire psychology.

Can we really replace semantic parsimony with psychological parsimony? Burge and Millikan