Thinking About Thinking: Learning How to Take Statements and Hold Beliefs

Speech act theory (Searle, 1969) is used to analyze the concepts for thinking about talk and thought—metalinguistic and metacognitive concepts—and the relations between them. We examine the relations between speech acts and their corresponding mental states and between speech acts linked in a discourse. We argue that interpreting the illocutionary force of another's speech act is parallel to determining the propositional attitude to one's own mental state. Thus, understanding how to take statements provides a model for how to hold beliefs. We then review what children learn about mental states and speech acts during their preschool years, and we consider what must be achieved in the school years. First, children have to learn how to interpret utterances and hold beliefs, and then they have to learn how to take objective statements as expressions of someone's belief. We conclude by considering how teachers might help children achieve these two ends.

[1]  A. Gopnik,et al.  Children's understanding of representational change and its relation to the understanding of false belief and the appearance-reality distinction. , 1988, Child development.

[2]  D. Olson.  From Utterance to Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing , 1977 .

[3]  E. Spelke,et al.  Object permanence in five-month-old infants , 1985, Cognition.

[4]  M. Beeghly,et al.  Talking About Internal States: The Acquisition of an Explicit Theory of Mind , 1982 .

[5]  A. R. Luria.  Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations. (Trans M. Lopez-Morillas & L. Solotaroff). , 1976 .

[6]  R. Pea,et al.  Origins of verbal logic: spontaneous denials by two- and three-year olds , 1982, Journal of Child Language.

[7]  S. Rosenberg,et al.  Children's knowledge of the presuppositions of know and other cognitive verbs , 1985, Journal of Child Language.

[8]  C. Moore,et al.  Children's understanding of the modal expression of speaker certainty and uncertainty and its relation to the development of a representational theory of mind. , 1990, Child development.

[9]  J. Flavell,et al.  Young children's understanding of the role that sensory experiences play in knowledge acquisition. , 1992, Child development.

[10]  D. Kuhn.  Children and adults as intuitive scientists. , 1989, Psychological review.

[11]  J. Searle.  Intentionality: Name index , 1983 .

[12]  J. Searle.  Expression and Meaning: A taxonomy of illocutionary acts , 1975 .

[13]  A. Gopnik,et al.  Young Children's Ability to Identify the Sources of Their Beliefs. , 1991 .

[14]  J. Fodor,et al.  Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind , 1988 .

[15]  H. Wimmer,et al.  Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception , 1983, Cognition.

[16]  P. Bryant,et al.  Young children understanding that looking leads to knowing (so long as they are looking into a single barrel). , 1990, Child development.

[17]  Beate Sodian,et al.  Young Children's Differentiation of Hypothetical Beliefs from Evidence. , 1991 .

[18]  H. Wellman,et al.  The acquisition of mental verbs: A systematic investigation of the first reference to mental state , 1983, Cognition.

[19]  Christina Haas,et al.  Rhetorical reading strategies and the construction of meaning , 1988 .

[20]  David R. Olson,et al.  Metacognitive and Metalinguistic Language: Learning to Talk about Thought , 1990 .

[21]  A. Koller,et al.  Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language , 1969 .

[22]  J. Flavell,et al.  The development in very young children of tacit knowledge concerning visual perception. , 1977, Genetic psychology monographs.

[23]  S. Wineburg.  On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy , 1991 .

[24]  Ellen Winner,et al.  Distinguishing irony from deception: Understanding the speaker's second-order intention , 1991 .

[25]  R. Pea.  The development of negation in early child language , 1978 .

[26]  Vivian Gussin Paley,et al.  Boys & girls : superheroes in the doll corner , 1984 .

[27]  David R. Olson,et al.  Talking about text , 1990 .

[28]  Alison Gopnik,et al.  Theoretical explanations of children's understanding of the mind , 1991 .

[29]  Chris Moore,et al.  Mental Terms and the Development of Certainty. , 1989 .