Human Mentalizing: Its Scope and Limits

"The book addresses four main topics raised by human mental state attribution or mentalizing. First, it tackles a developmental puzzle: non-verbal tests show that preverbal infants expect an agent to act in accordance with the content of her belief. But conflicting evidence shows that preschoolers fail verbal false-belief tasks. I propose to resolve the puzzle by supposing that spontaneous mentalizing is present in human infancy and by offering a pragmatic explanation of the failure of preschoolers on verbal tasks. Secondly, if an attributed mental state is a mental representation of some state of affairs, then an attributor's representation of an attributed mental representation is a metarepresentation. Hence, human mentalizing is both metarepresentational and intuitive. Thirdly, attribution of a mental state to an agent may either contribute to the success of the agent's action or not. If it does, then mentalizing is interactive. Recognition of an agent's communicative intention is, but attribution of a belief to the agent of an instrumental action is not, necessary for the success of the agent's action. Fourthly, the book turns to the entangled relationship between interactive mentalizing and reason attribution. Objective reasons can be practical or epistemic: they are facts (not mental states) that can justify or explain one's own or another's decision or belief. The goal of a speaker's assertion is to cause her addressee to accept a new belief. If the addressee is reluctant to fulfill the speaker's informative intention, the speaker can provide reasons for her assertion which the addressee can evaluate"--