Why the Child's Theory of Mind Really Is a Theory

How do children (and indeed adults) understand the mind? In this paper we contrast two accounts. One is the view that the child's early understanding of mind is an implicit theory analogous to scientific theories, and changes in that understanding may be understood as theory changes. The second is the view that the child need not really understand the mind, in the sense of having some set of beliefs about it. She bypasses conceptual understanding by operating a working model of the mind and reading its output. Fortunately, the child has such a model easily available, as all humans do, namely her own mind. The child's task is to learn how to apply this model to predict and explain others' mental states and actions. This is accomplished by running simulations on her working model, that is observing the output of her own mind, given certain inputs, and then applying the results to others. The first position has a certain prominence; research on children's understanding of mind has come to be called 'children's theory of mind'. This position is linked to certain philosophers of mind such as Churchland (1984) and Stich (1983) who characterize ordinary understanding of mind, our mentalistic folk psychology, as a theory. It is also part of a recent tendency to describe cognitive development as analogous to theory change in science (Carey, 1985, 1988; Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder, 1975; Wellman & Gelman, 1988; Keil, 1989; Gopnik, 1984, 1988). The second position, in