FB1 Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaften
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The current understanding of cognitive development rests on the premise that infants can individuate objects early on. However, the so-called object-first account faces severe difficulties explaining extant empirical findings in object individuation tasks while alternative, more parsimonious explanations are available. In this paper, we assume that children start as feature-thinkers without being able to individuate objects and show how this ability can be learned by thinkers who do not already implicitly possess the notion of an object. Based on Tugendhat's ideas on the relation between singular terms and object reference, we argue that spatial indexicals comprise the fundamental means of object individuation and describe how feature thinkers might acquire the complex substitutional system of spatial indexicals. In closing, two accounts of object cognition that do not rely on symbolic capacities, namely Pylyshyn's FINST indexes and Burge's perceptual objectivity, are critically discussed.
In the current study, 24- to 27-month-old children (N = 37) used pointing gestures in a cooperative object choice task with either peer or adult partners. When indicating the location of a hidden toy, children pointed equally accurately for adult and peer partners but more often for adult partners. When choosing from one of three hiding places, children used adults’ pointing to find a hidden toy significantly more often than they used peers’. In interaction with peers, children's choice behavior was at chance level. These results suggest that toddlers ascribe informative value to adults’ but not peers’ pointing gestures, and highlight the role of children's social expectations in their communicative development.
I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ (or ‘ToM’) are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk.