social interaction requires the ability to understand people’s mental states (their intentions, desires and believes). the ability for attributing mental states is called “theory of mind.” theory of mind leads the person to explain and predict behavior. researchers showed a great interest in the relation of language and mind/language and thought. some researchers focused on methodological conce...

Abstract This paper assumes that success on false-belief tasks requires a kind of folk psychological know-how, i.e. gradable knowledge how to perform skilful social cognitive acts. Following Ryle (Proceedings the Aristotelian Society, 1946, The Concept Mind, Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1949), it argues know-how required for task cannot be reduced conceptual as this would lead an infinite...

Recently, a number of cases have been proposed which seem to show that – contrary widely held opinion subject can inferentially come know some proposition p from an inference relies on false belief q is essential. The standard response these insist there really additional true in the vicinity, making inessential. I present new kind case suggesting essential where no truth vicinity seems be pres...

To test the domain-specificity of "theory of mind" abilities we compared the performance of a case-series of 11 brain-lesioned patients on a recently developed test of false belief reasoning () and on a matched false photograph task, which did not require belief reasoning and which addressed problems with existing false photograph methods. A strikingly similar pattern of performance was shown a...

A growing body of literature has investigated whether the ability to contend with false belief (Wimmer and Perner 1983) is dependent upon the acquisition of the language that reports false beliefs (de Villiers, 2000, 2004, de Villiers and de Villiers 2000, de Villiers and Roeper (in prep)). de Villiers and her colleagues maintain that certain linguistic developments are precursors to a child’s ...