ABSTRACT
A current view in the ‘theory of mind’ literature is that children acquire knowledge about the mind between the ages of 2 and 5 years by going through a process of conceptual ‘discovery’. Most theorists who make this assumption couch this discovery process in terms of the child actively constructing a kind of ‘scientific theory’ (Gopnik, 1993, 1996a,b; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992, 1994; Perner, 1988, 1991, 1995). To date, none of these theorists have provided an account of (i) how even a single mental state concept might be ‘discovered’ this way, (ii) how any of the proposed sequences of theories might be ‘constructed’, (iii) what the critical evidence is that children are exposed to at different points in the sequence, or (iv) how children are able to identify and assess this ‘evidence’ as critically relevant to the process of theory discovery. In general, although a ‘theory’ is an information structure, theory-theorists seem unaware of the information processing issues raised by their proposals.
