ONLINE TALK
On behalf of the LMS Center, we would like to invite you to a talk by:
Michael Tomasello
(Duke University)
who will speak on:
How Children Come to Understand Beliefs
and Reasons for Beliefs
ABSTRACT: Understanding beliefs is more than just simulating others’ epistemic states or forming a theory about them. It involves, in addition, a kind of mental coordination in which the individual attempts to bring coherence to three different perspectives on a common situation: her own, a partner’s, and an “objective” perspective. Young children become capable of such coordination at around 4 years of age via species-unique skills and motivations of shared intentionality, as they are manifest in joint attention and linguistic communication. Understanding reasons for beliefs, emerging in ontogeny soon thereafter, involves a distinct kind of mental coordination as the individual attempts to justify her belief, as opposed to a partner’s, by grounding it logically or evidentially in beliefs they already share in common ground.