Disenshrining the Cartesian self

creature is to say to him, "Look, you have forgotten how hardwon was your conception of belief. Don't you remember what it was like being a child, when you spent so much time wrapped in thought? This idea of'belief was one you invented (we all did! ), so you r believing that you are believing X is no more incorrigible than any other proposal in science. To cure yourself of this error, cancel your subscription to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and begin one with Child Development. " This is a caricature, but I do not think it is unfair. In short, I would want to take issue not only with how Gopnik regards mental development but with how she views the relation between empirical and philosophical questions in cognitive science. First, there is an uncontroversial sense in which children could be said to be "acquiring a theory" within the mental domain. Mental terms are theoretical terms because grasping them requires a more general grasp of the theoretical network in which they are embedded. Not all terms are theoretical, and recently Campbell (in press) has made the interesting proposal that terms which refer to "primary qualities" are theoretical and those which refer to "secondary qualities" are not. But whatever is the answer to that question, the apparent fact that the acquisition of the theory is gradual does not at all imply that developing approximations to the adult theory are themselves theories. It does not imply that the reason children think about mental concepts in one way when they are 3 and in a different way when they are 4 is that the older children have constructed a better theory for themselves. But we could reasonably say that it is because they are now capable of mental operations of which they were not capable at the earlier age. (The next two points about development will enlarge on this claim.) Second, it is pretty certain that the brains of scientists in the Renaissance performed the same kind of mental operations as those performed by the brains of scientists today. The idea that one scientific theory replaces another because the practitioners just get smarter must be wrong. And is it not equally wrong to believe that younger children can perform all the mental operations of which older children are capable, but that they have been working at the problem of cognition for less time? In short: It is a reasonable conjecture that as the brain develops, newer and more adequate judgements about mental life become possible. Gopnik tries to deal with this kind of point under "information-processing alternatives. " I agree that failures on theory-of-mind tasks cannot be explained away in terms of such processing factors as memory failure and reality seduction (to recant somewhat on: Russell et al. 1991); but this is not the same as believing that 3-year-old brains process information in just the same way as 4-year-old brains. Of course we can say that 3-year-olds lack, in the uncontroversial sense, the right theory of mind, but we still have to explain why. I cannot see any other way of trying to explain why than by going "deeper" towards computational models of cognitive change expressed in terms of "information-processing" rather than "theory. " Explaining development by theory change is either an uncontroversial description of what happens or it is a false parallel with the case of the scientist.