ABSTRACT
Not very long after children produce recognizable words, they start to employ words that convey mental attitudes: at first desires, later beliefs. Although many linguistic expressions convey mental attitudes (see, e.g., Olson & Astington, 1986), the acquisition of terms such as know, think, and guess is of particular relevance to the child’s developing theory of mind, because these terms make direct reference to internal cognitive states. In this chapter, we review what previous studies of the language of mental state have taught us about the child’s theory of mind, and we then report our own work investigating children’s understanding of the expression of the mental states of certainty and uncertainty. The review is not detailed, because a number of good reviews already exist (e.g., Johnson, 1982; Olson & Astington, 1986); however, we highlight certain issues and findings from this body of work in order to establish a framework for our investigations. We then discuss the pragmatics of mental terms and describe a series of studies that we have recently conducted on this topic. Finally, we consider how the development of aspects of the child’s understanding of mental terms may relate to the development of a theory of mind. Whereas previous work has examined children’s understanding of the existence of true and false beliefs and of how those beliefs can be acquired, our interest here goes in a somewhat different direction to examine children’s understanding of the fact that beliefs can be held with differing degrees of certainty. Certainty and degrees of uncertainty may be considered as weights that are attached to beliefs and, as such, are integral aspects of beliefs.
