Chat directly with University admissions staff to get your undergraduate questions answered.

Register here

Seminars will consist of a 20 minute presentation, followed by 20 minutes of questions. This is a collaborative effort with the editors of Economic History of Developing Regions and with the Economic History Society of Southern Africa.

If you would like to be on our email list or if there are potential speakers you wish to recommend to us, please email James Fenske (j.fenske@warwick.ac.uk).

An up to date schedule of speakers is here: http://www.ehssa.org.za/index.php/workshops-and-conferences/

Speaker: Richard Moore

The Communicative Foundations of Propositional Attitude Psychology

Abstract:

According to a widely held dogma, a developed propositional attitude psychology is a prerequisite of attributing communicative intent, and so a developmental prerequisite of natural language acquisition. This view is difficult to reconcile with developmental evidence, which shows not only that children do not develop propositional attitudes until they are four years old (e.g. Rakoczy 2017), but also that this development is parasitic upon natural language acquisition (de Villiers & de Villers 2000; Lohmann & Tomasello 2003; Low 2010), and that it recruits brain regions that do not exist in infancy (Grosse-Wiesmann et al. 2017). Against the received view, and building on my work on minimally Gricean communication (Moore 2017a), I sketch a developmental trajectory to show how propositional attitude psychology could be both invented and learned through communicative interaction. I finish by considering the conditions in which cultural tools for mental state representation might first have been developed in human history; and the extent to which our early human ancestors might have lacked propositional attitudes. The goal of the paper will not be to show that strong nativism about human mindreading must be false, but that there is no reason to take it for granted in considering the origins of the modern human mind.