What People Say, what they think, and what is Really the Case: Children's Understanding of Utterances as Sources of Knowledge

Much of our knowledge about the physical world is acquired indirectly from other people: We are often told about things without having first-hand experience of them. But what people tell us is also one of the most direct sources of information about their beliefs. Sometimes talk about mental states is explicitly marked as such—“I thought it was in there”—but often it is not. Whenever somebody makes a statement about an aspect of the outside world, the statement simultaneously reveals the speaker’s belief about that.