developing the idea of intentionality: children's theories of mind

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Developing the Idea of Intentionality: Children's Theories of MindAuthor(s): Alison GopnikSource: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Mar., 1990), pp. 89-113Published by: Canadian Journal of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40231685 .

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Developing the Idea of Intentionality: Children's Theories of Mind*

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 89 Volume 20, Number 1, March 1990, pp. 89-114

ALISON GOPNIK Dept. of Psychology Tolman Hall University of California/Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 U.S.A.

At least since Augustine, philosophers have constructed developmental just-so stories about the origins of certain concepts. In these just-so stories, philosophers tell us how children must develop these concepts. However, philosophers have by and large neglected the empirical data about how children actually do develop their ideas about the world. At best they have used information about children in an anecdotal and unsystematic, though often illuminating, way (see, for example, Mat- thews, 1980). Even the recent revival of interest among philosophers in empirical psychological findings, with the growth of cognitive science and naturalistic epistemology, has left many philosophers ignorant about the developmental literature.

One particularly interesting set of findings concerns children's development of concepts of the mind, specifically their development of the concept of belief. All of us as adults share certain beliefs about belief, particularly beliefs about the relationship between beliefs and the world. These beliefs about belief play an important role in what has been called 'folk psychology' though in this case 'folk epistemology' or 'folk metaphysics' might be a better term. In our everyday folk metaphysics we treat beliefs both as psychological entities and as entities that, in some mysterious way, point to a real world that is independent of them. In ordinary life we are representational realists:

* This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada University Research Fellowship. I am grateful to Janet Astington and David Olson, who collaborated on the psychological research and to Lynd Forguson, William Seager and Ronald De Sousa for philosophical guidance.



90 Alison Gopnik

we assume that our beliefs are representations, genuinely mental entities which genuinely tell us something about the physical world. This Janus-faced nature of our concept of belief has been the source of much puzzlement in philosophy and has been discussed in terms of concepts like intentionality, content, reference and truth. While these notions capture different aspects of our understanding of belief they all focus on the problematic relationship between beliefs and reality.

Where does our folk metaphysical notion of belief, and particularly our notion of the relation between belief and reality, come from? To answer this question I will begin by reviewing a wide body of recent literature investigating the child's development of ideas about the mind and its relation to the world. Then I will argue on the basis of this literature that the child's development of the concept of belief can be seen as the construction of a kind of theory, and finally I will discuss the implications of this view for philosophical discussions of belief.

I Methodological Concerns

Before we go on to discuss the details of research into the child's concept of mind, we need to consider some methodological issues that these kinds of studies raise. Developmentalists attribute mental structures of various kinds to the child to explain regularities in the child's language and behavior. Of course, we may begin by making some assumptions about similarities between the child's psychology and our own, but those assumptions are always tentative, and many of our most interesting findings concern cases in which those assumptions turn out to be wrong.

The mental structures or the kinds of knowledge that we attribute to the child on this basis may not always be consciously accessible to the child in exactly the forms we describe. For example, if a child says things like 'At first I thought this was a rock but now I think it's a painted sponge' or This looks like a rock but it's really a painted sponge' we may want to say that the child understands that representations change, or understands the appearance-reality distinction, even if these words are not in the child's vocabulary, or the child would not phrase the matter in these ways.

It seems that attributing knowledge of this sort to children often per- turbs philosophers (see Davidson, 1974). But it's a little hard to see why it should. For one thing, this is standard practice in modern mentalistic cognitive psychology. Almost none of the mental entities at- tributed to adults by cognitive science, entities like 'noun phrases' or 'prototypes' or '2 Vi d sketches' are consciously accessible in the form they are described. Instead, we use these entities to explain patterns of language and behavior.



Developing the Idea of Intentionality: Children's Theories of Mind 91

Moreover, leaving psychology aside, even the basic tenets of folk psychology, as described by philosophers, are clearly not held in exactly that form by adult folk. Folk psychology, for example, may involve intentional concepts but very few folk would say that it did, or even understand the term. In fact, almost all philosophical discussion of folk psychology consists of trying to explicate the underlying structure of our ordinary common sense understanding of the world. It seems odd to suppose that there is some philosophical age of majority which makes such explication legitimate only when the subjects are over eighteen.

The basic methodology of the studies I will describe here has been to find some extremely simple tasks or questions that will tap children's concepts, and yet make minimal demands on their general cognitive capacities. In fact, much of the progress of the last fifteen years has come from the development of techniques that decrease the irrelevant demands of a task to a bare minimum. In order to justify the claim that children lack some concept, on the basis of their inability to solve some problem or answer some question, we need to ensure that there are not other features of the problem or question that are difficult for the child. On the other hand, justifying the claim that the child has some concept or capacity is also difficult; children may be solving the task using some other cognitive competence than the one we had in mind. For example, young children may be using mentalistic language, but be using that language to encode non-mentalistic concepts.

These considerations make the task of figuring out how the child's mind works difficult, but not impossible; and these difficulties are not different in kind from the difficulties involved in any psychological research. Developmental psychologists are acutely, perhaps sometimes too acutely, aware of these methodological difficulties and much of our energy goes into devising controls, additional questions, training ses- sions and so on that are intended to ensure that our tasks actually tap what they're supposed to tap. In my descriptions of this research I will emphasize general conclusions rather than specific procedural details; so some of these interpretations of the data will have to be taken on trust. The field is new and changing rapidly and in many cases alternative explanations of the data have not been eliminated.

II The Development of Folk Psychology

1. 0-18 months

The new techniques for tapping the child's concepts have produced the most spectacular results in the investigation of infancy. Clearly the



92 Alison Gopnik

newborn's world, far from being the Triooming buzzing confusion' that William James once described, is, in fact, highly structured and or- ganized. Moreover, infants learn a great deal about the world in this period and this learning takes place in a highly structured way.

Infants are not apparently restricted to simple sensory or motor sche- mas as, for example, the classical Piagetian model would suggest (Pi- aget, 1954). First, there is evidence that infants are innately equipped to detect extremely abstract equivalences between different stimuli; for example, infants can detect equivalences in information from different modalities: they can detect the similarity between a shape they feel and a shape they only see (Meltzoff & Borton, 1979). Second, and perhaps more significantly, infants also seem to learn about abstract patterns of information even when these patterns are not innately given. For example, infants can apparently construct abstract prototype-based representations for fuzzy categories like a set of stuffed animals or human faces (Cohen & Strauss, 1979). Similarly, infants seem to learn some of the abstract rules that govern the motion of objects in this period (Bower, 1982; Wellman, Cross & Bartsch, 1987).

One set of infant abilities is particularly interesting because it suggests that infants have some of the foundations of folk psychology. Infants seem to be able to differentiate between other people and objects from a very early age. Human faces and voices call out a distinc- tive set of behaviors from infants. These behaviors are strikingly similar to the behaviors of adult conversations. Very young infants will make eye contact with another person and vocalize and gesture in rhythm with the vocalizations and gestures of the other (Stern, 1977; Trevar- then, 1979). They will also imitate the facial expressions of another person (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977). It seems that infants have at least the beginnings of a sense of identification and rapport with other people.

These very early behaviors, however, are unlike adult conversations in that they aren't about anything. By about nine months more clearly communicative behaviors begin to emerge. Infants begin to use stylized gestures and vocalizations to communicate with others. So children may begin to produce a stylized reach when they want someone to get something for them, or a head-shake and a nasal sound when they refuse to do something (Bates, Bretherton, Benigni, Camaioni & Volterra, 1979; Trevarthen, 1978). Again, these findings are interesting because they suggest that infants distinguish between behaviors that are appropriate to people and to objects, but they are also interesting because the infants seem to believe that other people can be influenced through symbolic means. In fact, it has been argued that some of these activities, such as pointing behaviors, should be seen as precur- sors to later referential abilities (Bruner, 1975, 1983). In spite of these abilities, however, there is little evidence that infants are able to reflect




on or consider their own psychological states or the psychological states of others.

Should we say that infants have beliefs about the world? It depends, of course, on what we mean by belief. Infants clearly can't tell you their beliefs, and if we think belief is inextricably tied to language we could not attribute belief to them. Similarly, it is not clear whether infant's beliefs are consciously accessible to them. Again, if we want to argue for an inextricable connection between having beliefs and being conscious of those beliefs, we might argue against the idea that infants have beliefs.

A more neutral way of putting it might be to say that whether or not infants have beliefs, they clearly do have representations. That is, they have mental structures which are systematically related to information from the world, they have rules for manipulating those structures which allow them to generate predictions about their future experiences, and these representations and rules have important effects on their behavior. Moreover, these representations may be fairly far removed from the immediate evidence of the infants' senses.

How can we justify this claim? Justifying the attribution of any mental structure to an organism is a tricky business and a sufficiently pervasive skepticism could undermine any such attribution. The ultimate justification is really a pragmatic one. All the recent empirical developmental work suggests that we must attribute entities like rules and representations to infants if we want to explain their behavior. It does not seem to be true that infant behavior can be explained in purely behavioral or physiological terms.

In addition to representing objects and events, infants also have some representations of other people that are like the beliefs of folk psychology. For example, infants seem to think that people are not like objects, that people are like them in significant ways, and that people may be influenced by symbols. But infants do not seem to have any representations of representations, any beliefs about beliefs, either their own or other people's.

Moreover, while infants' representations are abstract they appear to be rooted in experience in a way that adult beliefs are not. A useful way to think of the infant's cognitive abilities may be to see the infant as a sort of Dretskean representer (Dretske, 1981). The infants' representations seem to be rather directly related to the information they receive from the world, even though that information may be highly abstract information, such as information about the patterns of trans- formation of objects. However, infants show little ability to construct counter-factual representations, representations that are not congruent with the information they receive from the world; nor do they show any signs of being able to 'metarepresent' (Pylyshyn, 1984), that is, to consider or reflect on their own representational system.



94 Alison Gopnik

2. 18 months to 3 years

These abilities do begin to emerge when infants are about 18 months old. At this point there appears to be a profound and far-reaching change in the infant's cognitive abilities, a change that is reflected in almost every area of the child's behavior. A central part of this change is the development of the ability to reflect on one's own cognitive processes.

Perhaps the first sign of this development is the emergence of the ability to construct counterfactual representations of the world, representations that are not directly given by experience. After about 18 months children begin to be able to construct possible worlds: they can imagine ways that the world might be, which are different from the ways the world actually is. This ability enables children to solve certain kinds of problems they could not have solved before. For example, 18-month-olds can deduce the location of a hidden object, even when there are no perceptual clues about the object's likely location. In order to do this they need to imagine possible trajectories the object could have taken. Similarly, 18-month-olds can invent new solu- tions to difficult problems, even when they have never experienced that solution before. An 18-month-old who is presented with a rake and a toy that is out of reach may immediately use the rake to reach the toy, even if he has never seen the rake used in this way before (Bower, 1982; Koslowski & Bruner, 1972; Piaget, 1952, 1954; Uzgiris & Hunt, 1975).

How do children become able to do this? These problems could not be solved by a Dretskean representer. There is no information in the stimulus, even in combination with all the past stimuli, that could tell the child where the object is or how to use the rake.

One hypothesis about the development of this ability is that the infant becomes able to reflect on and consider her own cognitive processes. For example, in order to solve the difficult object-location problems the infant seems to construct a representation of her own perception of objects and how that perception is related to the movement of objects and the movement of her own body (Bower, 1982; Gopnik, 1982; Piaget, 1954). Similarly, in order to solve the rake problem the infant may need to construct a representation of her own actions and their probable effects on objects, and the relation of those objects to her intentions and goals (Koslowski & Bruner, 1972; Gopnik 1984a; Piaget 1952). Infants can then use this representation to make radically new predictions about the world.

Developing the ability to construct counter-factual representations is a great cognitive advance for infants. Deduction and invention are at the core of human cognitive capacities. But notice that this advance




also presents the child with a dilemma. Not every bright idea turns out to be right. The Dretskean infant was limited to representations given by experience. While some of these representations might turn out to be wrong or at least incomplete, such inaccurate representations would be in a decided minority, and from a pragmatic point of view, would be unlikely to have serious consequences. The infant is unlikely to go seriously wrong in accepting experience-driven representations; it's just that his representational scope will be severely limited.

However, many, if not most, counter-factual representations are seriously wrong. Once we release ourselves from the bonds of perception, we can think about many more things that aren't true than that are. So we need to keep track of which representations we should act on, and which are sheer fantasy.

For the infant, the relation between the representations and the world was straightforward. In fact, from the infant's point of view there was no relation: the representations simply were the world. The 18-month- old can construct hypothetical representations but the relation between these representations and the world becomes problematical. The child needs to distinguish between representations that are merely representations of possibilities and representations of real objects and events. The ability to misrepresent leads to the necessity to meta-represent.

Developing counterfactual representations seems to be intimately related to the development of meta-representational abilities. Being able to reflect on representational processes may be necessary to allow the construction of counterfactual representations at all. On the other hand, being able to construct a counterfactual representation immediately raises the question of how that representation is related to reality.

The development of the ability to meta-represent is most directly evi- denced in developments in the child's language and play at about this point. Some of the earliest words seem to mark rather abstract rela- tionships between the child and the world. For example, at about 18 months children use words like 'gone' to mark the fact that they cannot see an object. Using the word in this way implies an ability to mark the discrepancy between the way we perceive the world and the way the world actually is. Similarly, 18-month-olds use words like 'uh-oh' and 'there' to mark the failure or success of their plans. Like 'gone,' these words are used in a wide variety of different contexts, involving different actions and objects. In each case, however, the child com- ments on the relationship between a represented goal and the actual reality, either commenting on the fit or lack of fit of the two. The development of these kinds of words turns out to be empirically very closely related to the development of invention and deduction: the linguistic and cognitive developments often seem to take place simultane- ously (Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1986).



96 Alison Gotmik

Perhaps the most dramatic example of an early meta-representational use of language is the somewhat later but still early use of 'no' to ac- complish something like propositional negation. A child may, for example, look at a picture of a man with a hat on and say 'hat off no' or respond to the (jocular, maternal) claim 'You're a teddy bear' with an indignant 'no bear.' In these cases it is particularly clear that the child uses 'no' to mark the relation between a possible representation and the actual world (Gopnik, 1982; McNeill & McNeill, 1968; Pea, 1980).

Another particularly clear example of meta-representational ability arises in the child's development of symbolic or pretend play. The play of infancy seems to be centered on the exploration and manipulation of objects. At around 18 months, however, we begin to see children spontaneously pretending that one object is another: a banana becomes a telephone, or a block becomes a train (Fenson, 1984; McCune- Nicolich, 1981; Piaget, 1962). Moreover, it is clear from the context and the infants' affect that these substitutions are understood as substitutions. The giggles that greet the use of the banana as a telephone suggest that the child is not seriously confusing the two things. Leslie (1988 & 1987) has argued that pretend play of this sort necessitates what he calls a 'decoupling' of representations from their referents. Like the use of propositional negation, and the abilities of deduction and invention, decoupling suggests that children can construct hypothetical, counterfactual representations, and moreover can comment on, and can even aesthetically appreciate, the contrast between these representations and representations of reality. These developments in play are particularly interesting because they serve no particular function. Rather, these children seem to be constructing counterfactual representations for the sheer pleasure of it.

These developments are continued and elaborated on in the course of the following years. Between two and three, children begin to use explicitly psychological terms, such as Tcnow,' 'want' and 'think' and often use these terms appropriately (Bretherton & Beeghly, 1982; Shatz, Wellman and Silber, 1983). Interestingly, many of the earliest uses of explicitly causal terms also involve psychological or intentional rather than physical kinds of causation: e.g., lie got angry because she hit him' or 'he crossed the street because he wanted to get to the other side' (Bloom & Capatides, 1987).

In this period children also elaborate on the early representations of the perceptual process that begin to be apparent in their object search behavior and in their use of words like 'gone.' By around age 3, for example, children develop a line of sight' strategy for dealing with perceptual differences. That is, children can recognise that an observ- er can only see things that are in his line of sight: someone who is behind a wall, for example, cannot see what is on the other side of




that wall. This suggests that children are beginning to develop some ideas about how perception works (Flavell, 1978; Flavell, Everett & Croft, 1981).

Perhaps the most striking examples of the very young child's ability to meta-represent come from a study by Wellman & Estes (1986) which investigated children's understanding of the difference between mental and physical entities. They asked children to differentiate mental entities, such as dreams, thoughts, and images, from physical ones such as physical objects. Even three-year-old children turned out to have a remarkably sophisticated understanding of these differences. They differentiated mental entities from physical ones not only in nega- tive terms (you can't touch mental things though you can touch physical ones) but also positively (you can alter images or thoughts just by thinking about them but you can't alter physical objects).

It may seem then, that three-year-olds have developed the central tenets of folk psychology: they recognise a distinction between mental entities (whether these are dreams, images, considered possibilities, or the representations of pretense), and 'real' physical ones, and they can comment on the relationship between these entities. In spite of these remarkable accomplishments, however, three-year-olds' understanding of the mind remains seriously incomplete. Their limitations are apparent in the problems that children have with a variety of mental concepts.

3. From 3 to 5 years

Young children have difficulty distinguishing between appearance and reality. In a series of studies Flavell and his associates presented children with objects that appeared to be one thing but actually were another, like a 'rock' made of sponge, or an egg made of chalk, or a red cat covered with a green filter that made it appear black. Children were then asked what the object looked like and what it really was. Child- ren under age four or five consistently said that the object either looked like a rock and really was a rock, or more frequently that the object looked like a sponge and really was a sponge. In spite of positively heroic efforts on the part of the experimenters to make the problem as clear and as simple as possible, three-year-olds stubbornly resisted the idea that there could be a distinction between appearance and reality (Flavell, Flavell & Green, 1983; Flavell, Green & Flavell, 1986).

Young children also appear to have difficulty appreciating that different people may have different representations. I mentioned above that by about age 3 children develop a line of sight' account of perception. This account allows them to say that someone else either can or cannot see an object, depending on their spatial relation to this object.



98 Alison Govnik

Three-year-olds, however, do not seem to be able to understand that different people could have different views of the same object. For example, they are unable to see that someone who saw a turtle from below might have a different view of it than someone who saw the turtle from above (Flavell, Everett & Croft, 1981).

Another more conceptual version of this problem has been investigated by Wimmer and Perner and their colleagues (Hogrefe, Wim- mer & Perner, 1986; Perner, Leekam & Wimmer, 1987; Wimmer & Perner, 1983). In these studies, a child is asked about the false belief of another child. For example, a child may be shown a candy box, which when opened turns out to contain pencils. The child is then asked what another child who sees the closed box will think is inside it. Three-year-old children consistently say that the other child will think there are pencils inside the box, again in spite of extensive attempts to make the nature of the problem clear.

Another task which is related to these two involves the ability to recognise that one's own representations may change over time. In an experiment in our lab (Gopnik & Astington, 1988) children were presented with situations similar to those described in the appearance- reality and false-belief tasks. In this case, however, children were asked what they had thought the object was when they first saw it. For example, did they think it was a rock, or did they think it was a sponge? Again, three-year-olds tended to say that they had thought all along that the object was a sponge. They were apparently unable to recognise that their own representation of the object had changed.

One more task that is difficult for children of this age involves iden- tifying the sources of representations. Wimmer (Wimmer, Hogrefe & Perner, 1988; Wimmer, Hogrefe & Sodian, 1988) has argued that children are unable to understand that other people may have different sources of information than they do. In a recent experiment (Gopnik & Graf, 1988) we gave children information about the contents of a box in different ways, sometimes letting them see the box, sometimes telling them about the contents and sometimes getting them to infer the contents, and then asked them how they knew what was in the box. Three-year-olds typically had great difficulty answering this question.

All of these abilities develop gradually in the period between 3 and 5. Most five-year-olds are adept at solving these tasks. Moreover, there is some evidence for an association among these tasks. Children who are good at solving one task are also likely to be good at solving the others (Flavell et al., 1986; Gopnik & Astington, 1988). This suggests that the development of the ability to solve all these tasks reflects some underlying conceptual development in this period.

How can we characterize this development? Clearly, three-year-old children are able to meta-represent. That is, they can construct




representations of representations and make some generalizations about those representations. However, their understanding of representations seems to involve a contrast between two types of entities, merely mental 'unreal' things, like dreams, thoughts, images, pretenses, or possibilities and physical, real, objects, events and so on. But these young children don't seem to realize that even the 'real' things are themselves represented. They don't treat representations as representations.

As Wellman puts it (1985, 1988), these children have made an ontological distinction between the mental and the physical but they seem to have little understanding of the complex epistemological relationship between the two kinds of entities. They do not seem to understand that our knowledge of the real, external physical world is mediated by mental representations that are themselves mental entities.

Several developmentalists have recently tried to characterize the conceptual change that takes place between 3 and 5 in terms of the development of a concept of representation. Perner (1988) has described the emergence of an ability to model the representational process while Flavell has distinguished between an earlier view that postulates cognitive connections and a later view that postulates mental representations (Flavell, 1988). We have tried to capture this development by arguing that children develop a 'representational model of mind' between three and five (Forguson & Gopnik, 1988).

Five-year-olds, like adults, believe that our knowledge of the world is mediated by representations and that these representations may change or may differ among different people. Five-year-olds appear to have at least the beginnings of a causal account of representation which connects mental entities and the physical world. They know where representations come from and they know that the causal chains connecting the physical world and our representations of it are complex, and that differences in those causal sequences may lead different people to have different beliefs, or may lead us to change our beliefs about the world, even though the world itself stays the same.

Children, like adults, may not make this model explicit. Neverthe- less, implicitly, some such model must underlie the ability to recognise the distinction between different views of the same object, between appearance and reality, between my beliefs and the beliefs of others, between my present and past beliefs, and between my beliefs and the sources of those beliefs in the world.

4. Five years on

The period from 3-5 marks a watershed in the child's development of folk psychology and particularly in the development of the concept



100 Alison Govnik

of belief. However, it is far from being the end of that development. For example, the representational model of belief formation that is developed at around five still seems to suppose reasonably direct causal chains between the mind and the world. More complex indirect chains such as the chains involved in inference appear to remain puzzling for children. Even 6-year-olds may assume that another person will draw the same inferences from an experience that they do even though they may recognise the differences between their beliefs and the beliefs of others (Chandler & Helm, 1984; Olson & Astington, 1987).

The development of the representational model also allows children to begin to solve a variety of problems that could not be solved before. One essential feature of that model is that the same reality may give rise to a variety of different representations. This assumption under- lies two philosophically interesting developments in the period between 5 and about 9. One is the development of an appreciation of natural kinds. Between 5 and 9, usually around age 7, children begin to make some adult assumptions about the nature of biological natural kinds. Keil (1986), for example, asked children whether a cat whose superficial features had all been changed to resemble a rabbit would actually be a cat or a rabbit. Children under seven said it would be a rabbit - they paid attention to the superficial appearance of the object in de- termining its category membership - while older children said it would still be a cat. They paid more attention to underlying unspecified features even when they couldn't tell exactly what those features were. Thus the seven-year-olds seemed to have developed something like the adult concept of natural kinds.

A more well-known example is the development of conservation abilities which begins at around age five and continues until 9 or 10 (Pi- aget, 1929). Young children are likely to say, for example, that a tall glass contains more water than a short glass even when they have just seen the water poured from the short glass into the tall one, while older children recognise that the quantity of the water remained the same. Again a presupposition for the development of these abilities is that the object's real underlying properties may give rise to different representations, so that a long thin glass may look fuller than a short fat one but still contain the same amount of water.

A particularly interesting development in the child's knowledge of the world after age five is a sort of over-generalization of the representational model. The model is actually not appropriate for certain kinds of socially constructed or conventional knowledge. For example, the representational model does not apply to the rules of baseball. There are no 'real' rules which are causally involved in our acquisition of baseball knowledge. Rather, baseball is a social convention in which rules are agreed upon, rather than discovered. However, 6- and 7-year-old




children are unwilling to accept this model of games. Instead, they be- have as if there is a matter of fact about such conventions which may be subject to alternative representations (Piaget, 1965). My own six-year- old son's existential despair at the discovery that the National League did not have a designated hitter reflected more than simply the fact that he is a Blue Jays fan. Children make similar errors in other areas of con- ventionalized knowledge, such as linguistic knowledge (Berthoud- Pappandrapolo, 1978), or knowledge of the conventions of pictorial representation (Winner, 1982). Discovering the limitations of the representational model is also one of the developments of this period.

These developments appear to be largely a matter of building on the discovery of the representational model of mind, just as the developments from 18 months to five years build on the 18-month-old's discovery of counterfactual representation. Chandler (1988) has made the interesting suggestion that another cognitive watershed may take place at adolescence. An essential part of the child's discovery of the representational model is the metaphysical claim that there is a real world which is independent of our representations of it but which causes those representations. But as philosophers know, this assumption is merely an assumption. Chandler suggests that the possibility of a truly pervasive skepticism, the possibility that there is no real world that our representations are about, is a cognitive achievement of adolescence and indeed may be responsible for some adolescent malaise.

Ill When is intentionality discovered?

At what point in this developmental picture should we say that the child has developed something like the adult concept of the intention-

ality of belief? Or to put it another way, when do children become

representational realists? It seems that the core of this notion, the notion that beliefs are related to reality in a particular way, is discovered in the period between three and five. Indeed we might characterize this watershed by saying that this is when the folk psychological notion of the intentionality of belief is acquired.

We might say, in fact, that before age 5 children lack any concept of belief as such at all, though they may have beliefs. They do have concepts of thoughts, dreams, images, goals, possibilities, and pretenses and they can contrast those types of representations with real physical objects. But the peculiar characteristic of belief, at least in everyday psychology, is that it is at once a mental entity, like dreams, images, possibilities, goals and so on, and also makes reference to the real world. Appreciating this characteristic of belief depends on having something like a representational model of mind.



102 Alison Gopnik

Similarly, we might say that while children have mental states with content before five, they don't know that these states have contents. The notion of content applies both to 'real' representations such as beliefs and to 'unreal' ones such as thoughts, dreams, goals, etc. The notion of content assumes that there is some relationship, though often a convoluted one, between all representations and the world those representations are about. Three-year-olds don't seem to recognise this fact about representations.

Five-year-olds, on the other hand, like adults and unlike three-year- olds, seem able to treat all representations, including beliefs, as things that are variable, temporary and defeasible, and also to treat all representations, including thoughts, goals, desires, etc. as things that are related to the real world via a long causal sequence.

IV How is intentionality developed?

So far I have sketched a sequence of stages in the development of the child's understanding of the intentionality of belief, and I've suggested that something like the adult notion is developed somewhere between the ages of three and five. But of course the crucial question is how this concept is developed. It is unfortunately all too typical of developmental psychology that we are much better at saying what develops, when, than we are at giving causal explanations for those developments. Nevertheless, the facts of development can suggest something about the origins of these developments.

1. Introspective and nativist theories

First, it is clear that the concept of the intentionality of belief is not in any sense immediately given in our experience or introspected in a Cartesian way. When a three-year-old introspects, her psychological knowledge is radically different not only from our own knowledge but also from the knowledge of a five-year-old. Our psychological knowledge is no more certain and indefeasible than our knowledge of anything else.

It also seems that the developmental evidence does not support the thesis that this notion is part of our innate cognitive endowment. First, and obviously, these notions develop over time; but perhaps more significantly, there seems to be a logical sequence from one stage in this development to the next. For example, once the child develops counterfactual representations, working out the ontological status of those representations is a reasonable problem to pursue. Once the child rea- lises that other people may have different representations, this reali-




sation may lead her to consider the possibility that her own representations may change. Once the child has developed an understanding of false belief in the simpler perceptual cases, she may apply this knowledge to the more complex inferential cases. Children seem to use the discoveries of one stage of development as a springboard for subsequent discoveries. In fact, the development of concepts of the mind often has a recursive quality. The child builds up knowledge about a particular domain and then reflects on that knowledge, reorganizing and restructuring it (see Karmiloff-Smith [1986] for a general model of cognitive development that stresses these reflective processes). Of course, there may not be any simple reduction of the concepts of one stage of development to the concepts of the previous stage, but this is characteristic of theory change and, in fact, conceptual change in general.

Of course, children do seem to come to similar conclusions about the mind at about the same stage in their development, but this need not necessarily mean that such developments are the result of some matura- tional process. Rather, these developments may reflect the logical relations between one piece of knowledge and another, and the similarity in the experience of different children. We might compare children's consistent pattern of development to the phenomenon of independent discovery in science. Because Wallace and Darwin both developed the idea of natural selection at about the same time, we don't conclude that some 'evolutionary theory' module suddenly matured around 1850. Rather, we assume that similar prerequisite conceptual advances and a similar accumulation of evidence independently led them to similar conclusions.

2. The social convention theory

Another alternative might be that the folk psychological concept of belief might be constructed as something like a social convention, like a 'form of life.' Folk psychological laws might be more like the laws of baseball, to revert to a previous example, than like the laws of physics. This possibility would, for example, be suggested by the philosophical arguments of Wilkes or Davidson which point out that the concepts of folk psychology serve other functions than explanation in adult life.

The developmental evidence does not speak clearly to this point. An interesting developmental consideration that might speak in favor of the social convention view is the role of language in the development of folk psychology. It is interesting that the period in which we see the greatest developments in folk psychology, the period between 18 months and five years, is also the period in which the child acquires language. It seems probable that much of the information that the child acquires about folk psychology is acquired through the medium of language.



104 Alison Gopnik

However, the fact that we acquire folk psychology through the medium of language doesn't necessarily mean that that knowledge does not serve an explantory function. Even in cases where our knowledge clearly is theoretical, we often, even usually, acquire that knowledge through language. For example, when I learn the theory of relativity, I learn it through language, like every one else except Einstein. How- ever, it seems that really learning a theory involves some of the same processes that were involved in the construction of the theory in the first place. If I don't understand the explanatory force of the theory but simply learn it as a set of formulaic answers to questions, I won't have learnt it at all. This is not true of my learning of social conventions, or at least not in the same way. When I learn the designated hitter rule or learn that this year shoulder pads are out and short skirts are in, I don't need to understand the explanatory justification for this rule: the rule has no explanatory justification, though it may have aesthetic or moral ones. In short, the fact that I learn about the world through a process of cultural transmission doesn't necessarily mean that that knowledge is culturally determined.

Two phenomena in particular make me think that, at least in the case of belief, children acquire the concept because of its explanatory force rather than because of its social usefulness. First, the fact that they develop and hold inaccurate accounts of the mind, wrong explanations which they adhere to with some stubbornness, suggests that these notions are more like theories than forms of life. You don't generally develop and adhere to wrong versions of social conventions; instead, you either internalize the convention or you don't. But it's easy to imagine how you might get the wrong explantion for some phenomena and hold on to that explanation tenaciously in the face of adult correction. In fact, this is characteristic of children's cognitive development in general.

Second, in the particular case of belief, the child's conceptual leap at five does have explanatory power. The phenomena of representational diversity and change are genuine phenomena. We do change our ideas about things, and different people do have different ideas about things, and understanding these differences is important if we are to understand behavior.

However, these arguments are not definitive. Some element of social convention may also enter into children's notion of intentionality: certainly, these notions seem to be culturally transmitted. Moreover, it seems probable that something like the social convention account may in fact explain the development of other areas of folk psychology, such as notions of motivation or desire, which are themselves closely tied to ethical and aesthetic considerations. It may indeed be true, as La Rochefoucauld claimed, that no one would ever fall in love if




they hadn't read about it in novels first; I'm suggesting, though, that we might very well discover intentionality, even if we hadn't read about it in philosophy books first.

3. The 'theory theory'

If children's ideas about the mind are not immediately introspected, innately given, or imposed by their culture, how are they developed? The most plausible explanation is that they are constructed in a way that is very similar to the way scientific theories are constructed. This is a developmental version of what philosophers have called the 'theory theory.'

Of course, we could define a theory as something that is developed only by degree-holding scientists working in officially accredited la- boratories, and so exclude three-year-olds. Or we could include other less obviously arbitrary criteria that might exclude children's representations from consideration as theories. For example, we might say that a theory needs to be explicitly and consciously recognised as such by those who propound it and this might also exclude three- year-olds: certainly the term 'theory' is not in most three-year-old vocabularies.

An alternative possibility however, is to point to the formal and struc- tural similarities between children's explanatory structures and scientific theories. In both cases, theoretical entities are proposed and rules are devised that relate those entities to one another and to patterns of evidence. In the theory of folk psychology these include entities like beliefs, intentions and perceptions, and include rules that relate particular types of beliefs to particular types of experiences, or that relate actions to combinations of desires and beliefs. These entities and rules serve several functions. First, they provide a sort of cognitive econo- my: the child can store a few abstract mental structures rather than a larger and heterogeneous set of pieces of information about particular events. Second, they explain particular patterns of evidence. In the case of theories of mind, much of this evidence involves behavior, though some may also be derived from introspection. Finally, they ena- ble the child to make predictions about future evidence. Often, these predictions turn out to be wrong, and enough false predictions or un- explained evidence may eventually lead to a restructuring of the theoretical entities and rules. As children develop the concept of belief, we see such restructuring, such paradigm shifts, as it were, at 18 months, and again at about 4. (For a more elaborated defense of the position that children's cognitive development involves theory formation see Carey, 1986, 1988; Gopnik, 1984 b, 1988; Karmiloff-Smith, 1986, 1988; Wellman, 1988, in press.)



106 Alison Gopnik

I suggest, then, the concept of the intentionality of belief is part of a theory that children construct. But why do they construct this theory? The answer seems to be because the theory explains certain phenomena that would otherwise be inexplicable. Notice that in the many tasks that children fail at, at three, the child just plain makes the wrong predictions. The other child won't in fact say that there are pencils in the box; the child herself didn't think there were pencils in the box when she first saw it; and so on. It's characteristic of children's cognitive development, and of theory development in general, that without a theory to explain these phenomena the child may manage to insulate herself from them for a while. But eventually, in childhood as well as in science, the weight of evidence forces the child to change her model of the world.

The kinds of phenomena that push children to develop a representational model of the mind, and hence a concept of the intentionality of belief, involve changes or differences in our representations of the world, that are the result of our causal interactions with the world, but that are not accompanied by changes or differences in the world itself. The phenomena that puzzle children and lead them to intentionality involve conceptual change and diversity. A single, real world gives rise to many alternative representations, representations that differ in different times and in different people but that nonetheless are caused by and make reference to the world. In short, children develop intentionality, and the representational model more generally, as a way of explaining how we learn about the world.

What I am suggesting, then, is that the 'theory theory' is empirically correct, at least so far as the intentionality of belief goes. Children seem to develop this notion because it allows them to explain facts about the mind that would otherwise be inexplicable. In particular, these facts involve phenomena of representational change and diversity and involve the causal relations between the world and our representations of it.

V Should the notion of belief be eliminated?

So far I have argued that the developmental evidence supports the thesis that the folk psychological notion of belief is indeed a theoretical notion. It is part of a model that we develop at around age five to explain a variety of facts about our psychological life.

An important consequence of this claim is that this notion could turn out to be mistaken. We might in time modify this notion, just as the five-year-old modified some of the notions he held at three, and will in future modify some of his five-year-old notions, such as the appli-




cation of the representational model of mind to social conventions. But should we abandon this notion?

Much of the discussion of the status of 'folk psychology' has relied on ideas about conceptual change that are derived from the history and philosophy of science. But these discussions have tended to limit themselves to changes in official, institutionalized science, the science that scientists engage in. In official science, progress in scientific theory construction is often, perhaps even usually, accompanied by the elimination or abandonment of earlier theories. Eliminative materialists like the Churchlands (1981, 1984) and Stich (1983), who argue for the replacement of folk psychology have claimed, for example, that the notions of folk psychology are simlar to notions like 'ether' or 'phlogiston,' which were eventually abandoned by physics and chemistry.

I have argued that conceptual change in childhood has many struc- tural features in common with theory change in science. In fact, one might argue that institutionalized science itself is simply a specialized form of a more general epistemological project that we are all engaged in from infancy. However, there are also some differences in the two endeavors. One major difference involves the relation between past and present theories. I would suggest that the 'common sense' theories we develop in childhood are far less likely to be eliminated than to be modified or to be explained by later theories.

Churchland and Stich have largely used the analogy of the history of theories in institutional science to support their eliminativist claims. But the psychological evidence suggests that a better analogy might be one between our common sense ideas about the physical world, our 'folk physics' as it were, and scientific physics.

Just as children construct a theory of the mind, they also construct a theory of the physical universe, a theory which passes through many changes and transformations as the child reaches adulthood. For example, children discover at about 18 months that objects move towards the ground spontaneously but do not move up spontaneously. This is a discovery: at an earlier point, children seem to assume that objects must be physically moved, so that they will, for example, throw objects to the ground rather than let them fall. This is a useful and important discovery, and one that would have to be a starting point for any more sophisticated discoveries about dynamics. There are in- numerable other such facts that are discovered by children in the first few years of life: objects that move behind a screen come out on the other side; small objects can fit inside larger objects; and so on.

The process by which infants move from 'infant physics' to 'childhood physics' to something like ordinary adult folk physics appears to be similar to the process by which we move from one scientific theory



108 Alison Gopnik

to another. It involves positing a relatively simple system of abstract rules and entities which explain the relatively complex and chaotic evidence of experience. However, it seems that in this epistemological sequence we are less likely to think of one theory as eliminating an earlier theory, and more likely to think of it as explaining that theory; we seem to be more willing to allow common sense theories to coexist with earlier and later theories than we are to allow scientific theories to coexist with earlier scientific theories.

It is, of course, notoriously true that some of the tenets of common sense folk physics turn out to be wrong as we advance to more sophisticated levels of physics, and these mistaken beliefs, such as, for example, the belief that objects that are thrown in a curve will continue to move along a curved path, are what is usually described as 'folk physics' (McCloskey, 1983). But the very impressiveness of these examples may blind us to the fact that the vast majority of the discoveries of folk physics turn out to be both useful and, at some level of description, correct. These folk physical discoveries are not eliminated by the development of scientific physical theories but rather are explained by them.

It seems plausible that the same thing will turn out to be true in the case of folk psychological notions. It would not be surprising if some of these notions turned out to be wrong and had to be replaced, but it would be surprising if the vast majority of these notions had to be abandoned. The wholesale replacement rather than the explanation of folk psychology by neurophysiology, for example, seems highly im- plausible. Certainly, this is not the history of the relation between folk physics and scientific physics. A practical program for psychology which consisted of abandoning all attempts to begin with folk psychological notions in favor of neurophysiological investigation, such as has occasionally been proposed by the Churchlands, seems premature. It would be like trying to construct physics in, say, 1500 by throwing out wholesale our ordinary folk physical knowledge, such as our beliefs that objects fall towards the ground.

We may still ask, however, whether the specific notion of the intentionality of belief should be replaced, in particular, even if folk psychology, wholesale, is not replaced. Within cognitive science a candidate replacement for this concept has been a syntactic theory of mind, a theory which specifies mental entities and assigns them a role in the causation of behavior without being concerned about their relation to the world. We might think of such an approach as an instance of Fodor's 'methodological solipsism' (Fodor, 1980) research strategy, where we ignore the question of the relation between representations and reality and concentrate on the structure of representations themselves. Clearly, at least from the age of 5, our common sense notion




of belief is not solipsistic. But should it be? Is a syntactic theory better than the intentional theory?

Again, the developmental evidence can't directly answer this question. However, I think we can point to the kinds of real phenomena that lead children to develop the notion of intentionality. As I have argued above, the central phenomenon seems to be the defeasibility of representations, that is, the fact that representations change and differ as a consequence of our interaction with the world. The rock turns out to be a sponge; the smarties box turns out to have pencils in it; the turtle looks different from under the table; the threatening figure in the closet is really an old pair of pyjamas. In all these cases we have a representation, we interact with the world, and the representation changes, often in substantial ways. Explaining these phenomena involves postulating a causal connection between one's representations and a world that is independent of one's representations and that may be misrepresented, and that nevertheless is in some sense faithfully captured by those representations.

The folk psychological notion of intentionality is not a terrific explanation of these phenomena. The incoherencies and complexities of such a notion are notorious. However, syntactic theories of mind at present tend to leave these questions unanswered. Cognitive science has been quite good at explaining how representations are connected to other representations, and even how representations generate behavior. It has been quite bad at explaining where representations come from and how they change, and how they are related to the world out- side our heads.

Until cognitive science can provide better answers to these developmental questions, as opposed to simply ignoring them (see Fodor, 1980) or denying their existence (see Fodor, 1975), it cannot afford to abandon the answers of folk psychology. Recently there have been some attempts in cognitive science, particularly within philosophy (Dretske, 1981; Millikan, 1984) to show how folk psychological notions of intentionality might be translated into scientific terms. At the same time, psychologists and computer scientists have begun to pay more attention to the problem of how our representations are derived from the world: in short, to the problem of how we learn (see, for example, Hol- land, Holyoak, Nisbett & Thagard, 1986). The convergence of these two research programs might finally help to answer the questions that children begin to pose when they are five years old. Rather than being an explanatory dead-end, our common sense notion of intentionality might turn out to be the starting point for a scientific account of how our minds tell us things about the world.

Received: August, 1989



110 Alison Gopnik

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developing the idea of intentionality: children's theories of mind

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