Gavin Robert Foster

Among theory-of-mind researchers, it’s widely agreed that children acquire the capacity to attribute desires well before they acquire the capacity to attribute beliefs. This suggests that there is something about the concept of desire that makes it less cognitively challenging than the concept of belief, but what could that be? One possibility is that the difference has something to do with the development of the capacity for metarepresentation, but this just raises more questions: according to the standard philosophical model of the propositional attitudes, the concepts of belief and desire share the same basic metarepresentational structure. First, we review three potential solutions to this developmental puzzle and discuss their limitations. Then we propose a novel non-metarepresentational account of young children’s concept of desire that grounds the contents of desire attributions in a type of representation that we call modal affordances.

In recent decades, a novel theoretical account of folk psychology has emerged that challenges traditional assumptions: mental fictionalism. Rather than treating mental states as things in creatures’ minds that we are really tracking, mental fictionalists argue that folk psychology is best understood as a collective fiction that we partake in. On this account, it is this fiction rather than an ability to track mental states that enables us to predict/explain one another’s behavior, or to coordinate our affective states to grow and maintain social relationships. I provide an overview of the evidence from comparative and developmental psychology that is inconsistent with mental fictionalism, arguing that both views considered here are unable to account for the mindreading abilities of non-linguistic primates and children. I then offer an ontogenetic challenge, arguing that mental fictionalism faces the difficult task of explaining how mindreading could emerge from what are thought to be more sophisticated cognitive mechanisms, such as those underlying participation in either pretense or collective narratives. I conclude by highlighting the specific body of evidence that a more robust version of mental fictionalism should account for, especially as it continues to be refined and emerges as a serious competitor amongst interpretations of folk psychology.