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Adaptive Modelling and Mindreading
Author(s) -
Peterson Donald M.,
Riggs Kevin J.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0017.00104
Subject(s) - counterfactual thinking , psychology , false belief , context (archaeology) , mental representation , representation (politics) , cognitive psychology , computer science , theory of mind , cognitive science , artificial intelligence , cognition , social psychology , paleontology , neuroscience , politics , political science , law , biology
This paper sets out to give sufficient detail to the notion of mental simulation to allow an appraisal of its contribution to ‘mindreading’ in the context of the ‘false‐belief tasks’ used in developmental psychology. We first describe the reasoning strategy of ‘modified derivation’, which supports counterfactual reasoning. We then give an analysis of the logical structure of the standard false‐belief tasks. We then show how modified derivation can be used in a hybrid strategy for mindreading in these tasks. We then formulate the hypothesis that children become able (around the age of 4 years) to pass these tasks when they acquire the counterfactual reasoning ability required in this strategy. We find this to be consistent with various empirical findings. We then discuss the implications for the theory/simulation debate, meta‐representation and pretence.