Grasping the Concept of Representation: Its Impact on 4-Year-Olds’ Theory of Mind and Beyond

Abstract

Intellectual progress is viewed as conceptual change within theory development. After a brief discussion of which connotations of `theory' are intended in the context of children's knowledge, I illustrate how the acquisition of an important concept (representation) makes a restructuring of the existing theory possible (from a situation theory to a representational theory of mind). This restructuring occurs around 4 years of age and allows understanding of false belief, deception, and the importance of informational access for knowledge formation. It also affects abilities which on the surface seem unrelated to understanding the mind, such as the ability to distinguish appearance from reality and to `remember' (in the narrow sense). Finally, I point out that building a theory of mind is not to be equated with introspection of one's own mental representations. The theory view of mind, therefore, makes quite different predictions from the knowing-levels theory {[}Campbell and Bickhard, 1986] about the relative rates at which children come to understand their own and other people's minds.