Human Mentalizing: Its Scope and Limits

The main function of mentalizing is to provide human adults with intuitive higher-order beliefs about others' mental states. Behavioral evidence for false-belief attribution has been widely regarded as the hallmark of an attributor's mentalistic expectations about an agent's instrumental action. As it turns out, the developmental investigation of children's capacity to attribute false beliefs to others has yielded discrepant findings. While preschoolers have been shown to fail verbal false-belief tasks, findings based on non-verbal tests suggests that preverbal infants expect an agent to act in accordance with the content of her belief. Why? This volume addresses this experimental discrepancy by offering a pragmatic explanation of the failure of preschoolers on verbal false-belief tasks. Further findings also show that preverbal infants appropriately respond to the presence of ostensive cues whereby the agent of a non-verbal communicative action (pointing, for example) provides them with evidence of her communicative intention. Overall, the developmental evidence calls for a biological phylogenetic account of the human capacity to mentalize: human children could not be taught to mentalize by knowledgeable adults unless they could already mentalize. Rather, the evolutionary ancestors of current human infants were selected for their capacity to mentalize. Human Mentalizing: Its Scope and Limits also explores the complex relationship between the human capacity to mentalize and the human capacity to attribute reasons to self or others for the purpose of explaining or justifying one's own or another's thoughts or actions. An objective reason is not a mental state: it is a fact that supports an epistemic or a practical conclusion. The book argues that a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for the phylogenetic and ontogenetic emergence of the capacity for reason-attribution is the human capacity for verbal communicative interactions, i.e. the capacity for interactive mentalizing.