Research Theme: Key concepts in developmental psychology

Eric Schwitzgebel

Every academic discipline employs certain key concepts the scrutiny of which deserves the joint attention of both philosophers and the most theoretically-minded practitioners of that discipline.  Philosophers so far have paid insufficient attention to the basic concepts of developmental psychology, despite the fact that developmental psychologists (especially those interested in cognitive or moral development) often draw upon the work of philosophers in formulating those concepts.

In my dissertation, I examined the use of the concepts of theory, representation, and belief in developmental psychology, and I provided explications of those concepts tailored to the interests of developmental psychology.  In so doing, I hope to have revealed ways in which the standard approaches to those concepts in philosophy have led to confusion when taken up by developmental psychologists.

In "Theories in Children and the Rest of Us" and its later elaboration, "Children's Theories and the Drive to Explain", I argue that the standard ways of thinking about theories in philosophy of science do not help developmental psychologists interested in the "theory theory" of cognitive development, according to which cognitive development involves the improvement of children's theories about the world.  I offer an alternative approach to theories that I hope is more useful for thinking about everyday theories of the sort to which children must subscribe, if they subscribe to theories at all.

In "Representation and Desire: A Philosophical Error with Consequences for Theory-of-Mind Research", I argue that developmental psychologists have conflated two significantly different approaches to representation available in the philosophical literature and that this has led them to misinterpret the results of developmental research on the child's understanding of the mind.  I also suggest some research that I think would look interesting once this conceptual tangle is straightened out.

In "Gradual Belief Change in Children", I argue that developmental psychologists often implicitly accept an anti-gradualism about belief that explicitly most would reject, and that a dispositional approach to belief (detailed in "A Phenomenal, Dispositional Account of Belief") will serve them well in thinking about gradual belief change in development.

"A Difficulty for Simulation Theory Due to the Close Connection of Pretense and Action in Early Childhood" unveils what I think to be a conceptual confusion around pretense and imagination underlying the claim sometimes made by "simulation theorists" that our understanding of other minds has its developmental origins in childhood pretense.

Finally, "Whose Concepts Are They, Anyway?  The Role of Philosophical Intuition in Empirical Psychology" (written with Alison Gopnik) advocates flexibility in our treatment of concepts central to developmental psychology.  We describe several roles that intuition can play in empirical psychology, but we argue against the idea that philosophical intuition serves as an infallible, or even particularly reliable, guide to the nature of the mind.