ABSTRACT
In research on children’s development, intellectual tasks are used so that an adult can gain evidence which licenses the attribution of epistemic states to children. This attribution has two components, one empirical and the other criterial. The empirical component concerns the responses which children make in performing the task. Although such responses are open to direct observation, the underlying epistemic states which are expressed in them are not. Criteria are therefore needed for the identification of such different epistemic states as necessary knowledge, true empirical belief, false belief, guessing and so on. Thus the attribution is based, in part, on the observation of children’s responses and, in part, on the criteria which allow these
responses to count as different epistemic states. A standard problem for developmentalists is that of selecting reasonable “response criteria”.
