ABSTRACT
The central concern of this chapter is the real life, social interactive or discursive roots of children's cognitive performance and our distinctive lack of attention to them. This arises out of the observation that the old perspective-taking literature and its hi-tech counterpart, the theory-of-mind literature, are not related in any clear way to children's perspective-taking experiences in the world outside our developmental laboratories. In keeping with these theoretic concerns over a perceived lack of social viridicality or real social world groundedness in these developmental literatures, this chapter opens with an account of how the first author became interested in the developmental roots of young children's social competencies or theories of mind, as they are most often currently referenced.
