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9 No Child’s Science Scientific Theory Theory At its core, scientific theory theory (or STT) holds that folk psychology is the result of explicit scientific theorizing on the part of preschoolers—that is, that our mature ToM is in fact the hard-won product of sustained observation, statistical analysis, experimental trial and error, and learning from others (Gopnik 2004, 2003; Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997; Gopnik and Wellman 1992). In particular, the concept of belief is thought to be constructed by each child, individually, during ontogeny—reliably it “appears to be constructed between 3 and 4” (Gopink 1993, 332). In promoting this idea, STT therefore avoids the sorts of problems discussed in the previous chapter that attend nativist proposals. In a crucial respect the proponents of STT are more modest in their views about what our ancient ancestors bequeathed to us. But their modesty about our cognitive endowments has its limits. They also claim that “infants are born with initial innate theories, and . . . begin revising those theories even in infancy itself” (Gopnik 2003, 241; Gopnik and Meltzoff 1998, 451). The important difference is that these starter theories are not imagined to have the core folk psychological concepts built into them, nor are they preset to acquire them automatically when appropriately stimulated. ToM concepts, and particularly that of belief, are forged as children develop their first, inherited mentalistic theory. Children do not start life with full-fledged ToMMs equipped with all the standard concepts nor are they preprogrammed to acquire them; instead, normally developing children create them for themselves. They are only able to achieve this by making good use of rational theory-construction mechanisms that they have inherited as well. Thus, the basic idea is that children develop their everyday knowledge of the world by using the same cognitive devices that adults use in science. In particular, children develop abstract coherent systems of entities and rules, particularly causal entities and rules. That is, they develop theories. (Gopnik 2003, 240; emphasis added) In short, supporters of STT hold that our ancient cognitive endowment, relevant to the development of our theory of mind abilities, is twopronged . It consists of (1) a basic (nonmetarepresentional) theory of mind and (2) mechanisms for scientific theory formation. Like theory theorists generally, advocates of STT acknowledge that children ’s theories have the characteristic static features of mature scientific theories—for example, internal coherence, causal implication, and ontological import. Yet, they place much greater emphasis on the claim that children, like adult scientists, engage in the dynamic activity of theorizing where this is understood as the process of collecting, evaluating, and responding to evidence in a rational, truth-seeking manner. Indeed, the core claim of STT is “that the processes of cognitive development in children are similar to, indeed perhaps even identical with, the processes of cognitive development in scientists” (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997, 3; emphasis added). Accordingly, we are told that “the most important and distinctive thing about theories is the fact that the very patterns of representation that occur can alter the nature of the representational system itself” (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997, 44; emphasis added). The emphasis matters, for it is the activity of theory development that is meant to explain how children succeed in fashioning their own genuinely metarepresentational ToMs by the age of four (ceteris paribus) and beyond, since they continue to add to it even beyond this point—undergoing further, less radical, shifts as children become young adults (Gopnik 2004, 23). Since this process putatively is one of crafting new concepts within an existing framework of laws in a way that involves painstaking assessment of evidence, it is seemingly possible to explain the stages of development in human folk psychological abilities that occur during early childhood. Unlike nativists, supporters of STT take the appearance of conceptual development in ontogeny at face value; they claim that genuine conceptual change occurs as children fashion their theories of mind—that is, that this conceptual change is driven by their activities of theory construction. Our distinctive human understanding of minds is thus theoretical in the strongest possible sense, according to STT—both in its very nature and its mode of acquisition.1 Significantly, as we will see, the credibility of this constructivist proposal rests on assuming that each child (1) works from a species-universal base theory, (2) encounters the same kind of evidence at the same points in the 164 Chapter 9 [18.118.126.241] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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