ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by taking up familiar themes on the nature of interpersonal relatedness and the growth in a child’s understanding of minds. It considers significant psychological concept that a child needs to acquire—the concept of “belief”—and explores how an analysis of the concept might bring out what it is that a child grasps in understanding what “beliefs” are. The chapter suggests that the child needs to recognise what it means to take a correct or incorrect view of “reality”, where the “correct view” is that which any right-minded person would assent to. In the background to such understanding of agreed-upon reality, is the child’s awareness of and engagement with other people’s attitudes towards the world and towards each other. The child who plays symbolically adopts a novel attitude towards the symbolic vehicle, and does so playfully.
