Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Empirical research within cognitive sciences may support philosophical inquiry about the ontological and epistemological status of mental concepts, and in particular of the concept of belief. Since thirty years, psychologists have employed the false belief test to assess children's capacity to attribute mental states to themselves and others. Nevertheless, we are still trying to understand which cognitive capacities constitutes necessary prerequisites to pass the test and how they develop. In this article, I analyze the impact of the executive function and linguistic abilities on the capacity to pass the false belief test. I suggest that this capacity depends on the acquisition of a new representational format to encode the falsity of others' mental states. Available data, however, does not clarify the nature of this format.
Author: Marco Fenici
Language: Italian
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2108022265