BCCCD20 Invited Lecture: Michael Tomasello, How Children Come to Understand Beliefs

Invited lecture by Michael Tomasello (Duke University, USA) -- January 10, 2020 How Children Come to Understand Beliefs and Reasons for Beliefs 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. Michael Tomasello's website: https://psychandneuro.duke.edu/people... BCCCD: http://www.bcccd.org CDC Web: https://cdc.ceu.edu CDC Facebook:   / cognitivedevelopmentcenteratceu   CDC Twitter:   / cogdevceu