ABSTRACT
Flooding the market of current claims concerning children’s earliest theories of mind is a cluster of aggressively promoted, and still widely subscribed “one miracle” views—a stern and withholding family of heavily inbred accounts, according to which the years both before and after four are largely dismissed as wastrel years; slack times seen to make no real substantive contributions to the supposedly singular, stand-alone insight that minds, by their very nature, are representational (for a recent review, see Moses & Chandler, 1992). Although specifically tailored to fit the increasingly dated findings of an older, first generation of “theories of mind” research, such economy models of mental life, we will argue, never really suited what is otherwise known about the fabric of cognitive development, and provide an even poorer fit for the more up-to-date results of a second generation of better-measured research efforts. In the place of all such scant and increasingly outmoded one-miracle views, this chapter aims at substituting an alternative and, we hope, less withholding vision that sees children’s progress toward a mature conception of mind as altogether more spread out, as starting sooner, as going on longer, and as marked by more in the way of qualitative transformations than has been widely supposed.
