Knowing levels and the child's understanding of mind

[Gol, Gop] We are pleased to see that the developmental study of children's conceptions of mind is beginning to have an impact on philosophy of mind. After all, if we take the program of genetic epistemology seriously, that is how things are supposed to work. Gopnik presents a solid summary of her own research, and studies by Flavell, Wimmer, Perner, Wellman, and others, showing that there is a major transition in children's understanding of their own and other people's minds around age 4. Before this transition, children have trouble understanding their own and other people's false beliefs, deceiving other people with the express goal of getting them to accept false beliefs, and differentiating the way an object looks from the way it actually is. Gopnik, like a number of other investigators, proposes that children are developing a "metarepresentational" capacity to think about their own and other people's mental representations. Like most of these other investigators, she interprets this as a representational theory of mind. From an interactivist standpoint, we would agree that a metarepresentational capacity develops around age 4, but we do not cast that capacity as a theory. Instead, we draw on a conception of levels of knowing (Bickhard 1973; 1978; 1980; Campbell & Bickhard 1986) whose basic intuition is as follows: Knowing is accomplished by a goal-directed system interacting with an environment. Knowing is irreflexive; the system can know properties of the environment by interacting with it, but it cannot know anything about itself, even though some of its own properties might be useful to know. A subsystem that interacts with the knowing system, much as the knowing system interacts with the environment, however, could know these properties. Specifically, a second-level system could know and learn about the first-level system by interacting with it. Once the hierarchy gets started, a third-level system could know things about the second-level system; a fourth-level system could know about the third, and so on, unboundedly. According to interactivism, reflexive consciousness requires a second knowing level to interact with the first. In that manner, it is possible to acquire knowledge about knowledge and belief. The hierarchy of knowing levels is also implicated in development through stages; instead of being defined in terms of characteristic mathematical structures like the Piagetian stages, knowing-level stages are defined in terms of the level of knowing at which knowledge is being constructed. The process that is responsible for ascension to the next knowing level we call reflective abstraction, to borrow a term from Piaget (1977; 1986). Understanding false beliefs, engaging in deliberate deception, sorting out appearance from reality and very likely other developments not mentioned by Gopnik, like the emergence of autobiographical memory (Nelson 1992) are all instances of the onset of level 2. So, we would claim, are changes in causal and classification reasoning that require reflective abstraction on prior understandings, but not thought about belief as such (Campbell 1992; Campbell & Bickhard 1986). All these changes begin around age 4.