In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Unprincipled Embodied Engagements Dealing with the Developmental “Paradox” The detour taken in the past three chapters was necessary in order to clarify the important distinction between intentional attitudes and propositional attitudes. With it in hand, it will be possible to say how children eventually acquire their first understanding of propositional attitude terms and what form it takes. My claim is that this must wait for the mastery of certain complex linguistic forms and that it builds on a natural sensitivity to the intentional attitudes of others as well as on a growing capacity to respond to these attitudes in complex ways in face-to-face encounters. It is therefore important to say more about the nature of such primary engagements in order to make explicit in what way they act as the platform for such developments. That is the job of this chapter. Human infants identify, attend, and respond to the intentional attitudes expressed in the goal-directed behavior of others in reliably expectant ways. They are naturally attuned and appropriately sensitive to the expressed attitudes of certain others, at least in certain types of circumstance . Uniquely human forms of intersubjective responding are more sophisticated than the responses found elsewhere in the animal kingdom, and they become ever more refined in the early, formative years, unfolding along a stable and fixed trajectory. During the first two years of life, prior to being able to produce and use even basic sentences, infants exhibit impressive responsiveness to a class of phenomena that fall under the umbrella “intentions-in-action.” They begin life by selectively attending to their caregivers and only at a later stage, at around the age of five months, do they begin to attend to physical objects. Moreover, the feedback they receive from others has particular importance for them; thus even two-month-olds react negatively if their face-to-face encounters with significant others are disrupted (see Hobson 2007). Over time, they show still more focused capacities to distinguish between goal-directed agency and animacy (circa three months). Slightly older children distinguish between human actors as opposed to mechanical “agents,” as well as between object-directed actions (and the paths taken to them) and mere movements. This occurs around the ages of six to nine months. Also at about this time, children begin to alternate their attention between objects of interest and the gaze of others. This eventuates in the activities of declarative pointing and “checking back” to ensure that the other’s gaze is properly directed at the relevant object (this is a more advanced kind of social referencing than that which occurs early on). These latter abilities are associated with the basic forms of joint attention; they begin to emerge around ten to twelve months and are securely in place by eighteen months or thereabouts. During an overlapping time frame, children also gain the ability to segment complex behavior streams meaningfully (at about ten to fifteen months) and to distinguish and imitate intentional actions as opposed to incomplete/unintentional behaviors (at about eighteen months). That young children have such capacities at roughly these times is empirically well established and beyond dispute (Meltzoff 1995; Baldwin et al. 2001; Baird and Baldwin 2001; Eilan 2005; Woodward 2005). What is not settled is how best to characterize what underlies such responsiveness . This chapter is devoted to making the case for an unprincipled embodied account of what this involves. Before turning to that project, it is important to stress that all sides agree that these infantile abilities do not rest on the kind of folk psychological understanding of reasons that I discussed in chapters 1 and 2. We know this because, to reiterate an earlier lesson, understanding what it is to act for a reason minimally requires not only an understanding of the core propositional attitudes but also how they interrelate. There is no prospect of younger children acquiring this if they only get a handle on what it is to have a belief at around age four.1 This verdict is in line with the standard interpretation of the evidence provided by “false-belief” tests. Interestingly, there have been disputes about whether such tests are good indicators of the true timing of the onset of this conceptual competence. A range of individual and situational factors have been shown to make a difference in enabling some children to display “false-belief” understanding prior to four years of age—in some cases such understanding manifests itself up to six...

Share