Belief Attribution Research Articles

Learning words from speakers with false beliefs.

During communication, hearers try to infer the speaker's intentions to be able to understand what the speaker means. Nevertheless, whether (and how early) preschoolers track their interlocutors' mental states is still a matter of debate. Furthermore, there is disagreement about how children's ability to consult a speaker's belief in communicative contexts relates to their ability to track someone's belief in non-communicative contexts. Here, we study young children's ability to successfully acquire a word from a speaker with a false belief; we also assess the same children's success on a traditional false belief attribution task. We show that the ability to consult the epistemic state of a speaker during word learning develops between the ages of three and five. We also show that false belief understanding in word-learning contexts proceeds similarly to standard belief-attribution contexts when the tasks are equated. Our data offer evidence for the development of mind-reading abilities during language acquisition.

Implicit attitudes and implicit prejudices

In social psychology, the concept of implicit attitudes has given rise to ongoing discussions that are rather philosophical. The aim of this paper is to discuss the status of implicit prejudices from a philosophical point of view. Since implicit prejudices are a special case of implicit attitudes, the discussion will be framed by a short discussion of the most central aspects concerning implicit attitudes and indirect measures. In particular, the ontological conclusions that are implied by different conceptions of implicit attitudes will be scrutinized. The main question to be discussed involves whether implicit prejudices are mental states at all, or whether they are (despite the label ‘implicit mental states’) rather dispositions to behave in a certain way. This question will be discussed against the background of principles for belief (and mental state) ascription, which requires ascribed mental states to fulfill some specific explanatory role. We defend a conception of implicit prejudices that does not assume them to be mental states.

Cognitive Architecture of Belief Reasoning in Children and Adults: A Primer on the Two‐Systems Account

AbstractCharacterizing the cognitive architecture of human mindreading forces us to address two puzzles in people's attributions of belief: Why children show inconsistent expectations about others' belief‐based actions, and why adults' reasoning about belief is sometimes automatic and sometimes not. The seemingly puzzling data suggest that humans have many mindreading systems that use different models of mental representations. The efficient system is shared by infants, children, and adults, and uses a minimal model of the mind, which enables belief‐like states to be tracked. The flexible system develops late and uses a canonical model, which incorporates propositional attitudes. A given model's operation has signature limits that produce performance contrasts, in children as well as adults, between certain types of mindreading tasks.

A Russellian account of suspended judgment

Suspended judgment poses a serious problem for Russellianism. In this paper I examine several possible solutions to this problem and argue that none of them is satisfactory. Then I sketch a new solution. According to this solution, suspended judgment should be understood as a sui generis propositional attitude. By this I mean that it cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, other propositional attitudes, such as belief. Since suspended judgment is sui generis in this sense, sentences that ascribe this attitude to someone should not be analyzed in terms of other attitude ascriptions, such as belief ascriptions. Instead they should be understood as involving a semantically primitive predicate, corresponding to the state of suspended judgment.

Disbelief in belief: On the cognitive status of supernatural beliefs

Religious people seem to believe things that range from the somewhat peculiar to the utterly bizarre. Or do they? According to a new paper by Neil Van Leeuwen, religious “credence” is nothing like mundane factual belief. It has, he claims, more in common with fictional imaginings. Religious folk do not really “believe”—in the ordinary sense of the word—what they profess to believe. Like fictional imaginings, but unlike factual beliefs, religious credences are activated only within specific settings. We argue that Van Leeuwen’s thesis contradicts a wealth of data on religiously motivated behavior. By and large, the faithful genuinely believe what they profess to believe. Although many religions openly embrace a sense of mystery, in general this does not prevent the attribution of beliefs to religious people. Many of the features of religious belief that Van Leeuwen alludes to, like invulnerability to refutation and incoherence, are characteristic of irrational beliefs in general and actually betray their being held as factual. We conclude with some remarks about the common failure of secular people to face the fact that some religious people really do believe wildly implausible things. Such incredulity, as evinced by Van Leeuwen and others, could be termed “disbelief in belief.”

New Approaches to Teacher Effectiveness

Teacher effectiveness has been a focal point in plentiful interdisciplinary research conducted by educational psychologists, policy makers and social scientists. The literature abounds in proposed models for measuring and assessing teacher effectiveness in the light of the ever-changing and technology-dominated educational reality. This paper suggests three possible approaches that surpass the academic and pedagogical aims of the established practice. The authors of the current paper see emotional intelligence, the attribution theory of motivation and emotion along with the broaden-and-build theory, as the stepping-stone to increasing teacher effectiveness in language classrooms in the modern world. It is our claim that our attributional beliefs, underpinned by a certain degree of positivity and emotional skills, may lead to the sought after university teacher development and effectiveness more profoundly. It is believed that the proposed approaches will meet the pedagogical outcomes of the syllabi in practice by fostering the theoretical and practical knowledge and expertise needed by educators teaching the 21st century skills to language students.

Decreasing Obesity and Obesity Stigma: Socio-Demographic Differences in Beliefs about Causes of and Responsibility for Obesity

Obesity is a stigmatized condition, and research has shown that obesity stigma varies based on the perceived cause of obesity. It is important that public health professionals develop policy and campaigns that resonate with specific populations while avoiding an increase in harmful stigma. This study identifies socio-demographic differences in causal attributions of obesity and beliefs about responsibility for obesity. Using data from a survey of 923 people in the United States conducted by ABC New/Time Magazine, attributions of cause and responsibility are analyzed using Ordinary Least Squares regression. Beliefs about cause and responsibility fall on a continuum from primarily individual cause and personal responsibility to primarily societal cause and social responsibility. In general, women and minority racial groups are found to be more likely to identify causes over which individuals have little control and place responsibility on societal factors than men and Whites. People in higher income categories are found to be more likely to identify individual responsibility for obesity. Findings from this study can be used to shape information and public health policy to address obesity in ways that will not exacerbate obesity stigma as well as to create programs that will be customized for specific communities based on their existing beliefs.

Topographical Organization of Attentional, Social, and Memory Processes in the Human Temporoparietal Cortex.

The temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is activated in association with a large range of functions, including social cognition, episodic memory retrieval, and attentional reorienting. An ongoing debate is whether the TPJ performs an overarching, domain-general computation, or whether functions reside in domain-specific subdivisions. We scanned subjects with fMRI during five tasks known to activate the TPJ, probing social, attentional, and memory functions, and used data-driven parcellation (independent component analysis) to isolate task-related functional processes in the bilateral TPJ. We found that one dorsal component in the right TPJ, which was connected with the frontoparietal control network, was activated in all of the tasks. Other TPJ subregions were specific for attentional reorienting, oddball target detection, or social attribution of belief. The TPJ components that participated in attentional reorienting and oddball target detection appeared spatially separated, but both were connected with the ventral attention network. The TPJ component that participated in the theory-of-mind task was part of the default-mode network. Further, we found that the BOLD response in the domain-general dorsal component had a longer latency than responses in the domain-specific components, suggesting an involvement in distinct, perhaps postperceptual, computations. These findings suggest that the TPJ performs both domain-general and domain-specific computations that reside within spatially distinct functional components.

When Belief Ascriptions Are About More Than What Is on Someone Else's Mind

The third-person belief ascription, “Marie believes that the contract is in the cabinet,” may engender two interpretations: (1) It neutrally describes what is on Marie's mind and (2) it offers indirect evidence about reality, committing the speaker to the cabinet as the most likely location. The circumstances that lead to the evidential interpretation are at present not well documented in the case of belief verbs. In the case of belief-dependent verbs with and without embedding clause syntax, for example, “Marie says that the contract is in the archive,” and “Marie is lookingfor the contract in the archive,” it has been claimed that they eschew the evidential interpretation altogether. We explore the influence of the pragmatic context on the third-person, present tense and first-person, past tense use of the verbs, believe, say, and look for. In three experiments that manipulated the discourse context, 258 adults rated written vignettes. Regardless of the verb and the tense, when presented in discourse contexts without prior shared knowledge of the location of the object in question, the belief ascription was interpreted as indirect evidence. The results illuminate the border area between semantics and pragmatics, particularly regarding evidential uses of belief and belief-dependent verbs.

The unfairness of it all: Exploring the role of injustice appraisals in rehabilitation outcomes.

A fundamental principle of rehabilitation psychology is that individual appraisals of the social and physical environment-including injury itself-have profound consequences for coping and adjustment. When core assumptions of a just and predictable world are violated and accompanied by ostensibly undeserved suffering and loss, perceptions of injustice can arise. Given the role of appraisal processes in adjustment to disability, mounting empirical support, and absence of targeted interventions, the current article considers perceptions of injustice regarding personal injury/disability as a fundamental appraisal affecting rehabilitation outcomes. The authors review theory underpinning the relevance of injustice appraisals and critically examine existing literature regarding the impact of perceived injustice and related constructs (i.e., attribution of blame, anger, and belief in a just world) on adjustment following injury. The authors bring attention to perceptions of injustice regarding personal injury/disability as a fundamental appraisal affecting rehabilitation outcomes. Dimensions of the social environment that have not received substantial attention in current research on condition-related injustice appraisals are highlighted. Perceived injustice is a potentially central appraisal process to physical and psychological outcomes in the context of rehabilitation. Research regarding the role of perceived injustice, related constructs, and potential social/environmental modulators of injustice perception is still in its infancy. Guided buy its foundational principles, the field of rehabilitation psychology can broaden and shape inquiry regarding perceived injustice. This article aims to guide future research, offer concepts for key areas of discourse, and consider potential interventions in the rehabilitation psychology domain.

Understanding and disagreement in belief ascription

It seems uncontroversial that Dalton wrongly believed that atoms are indivisible. However, the correct analysis of Dalton’s belief and the way it relates to contemporary beliefs about atoms is, on closer inspection, far from straightforward. In this paper, I introduce four features that any candidate analysis is plausibly bound to respect. I argue that theories that individuate concepts at the level of understanding are doomed to fail in this endeavor. I formally sketch an alternative and suggest that cases such as the one presented provide support for the claim that the genuine source for concept individuation is public sharable thought.

Precis of Jonathan Berg, Direct Belief: An Essay on the Semantics, Pragmatics, and Metaphysics of Belief

In Direct Belief I argue for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, I use Grice’s theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution failure in belief ascriptions and go on to defend this view against objections, including those based on an unwarranted “Inner Speech” Picture of Thought. The work serves as a case study in pragmatic explanation, dealing also with methodological issues about context-sensitivity in language and the relation between semantics and pragmatics.

Motivated explanation.

Although motivation is a well-established field of study in its own right, and has been fruitfully studied in connection with attribution theory and belief formation under the heading of “motivated thinking,” its powerful and pervasive influence on specifically explanatory processes is less well explored. Where one has a strong motivation to understand some event correctly, one is thereby motivated to adhere as best one can to normative or “epistemic” criteria for correct or accurate explanation, even if one does not consciously formulate or apply such criteria. By contrast, many of our motivations to explain introduce bias into the processes involved in generating, evaluating, or giving explanations. Non-epistemic explanatory motivations, or following Kunda's usage, “directional” motivations, include self-justification, resolution of cognitive dissonance, deliberate deception, teaching, and many more. Some of these motivations lead to the relaxation or violation of epistemic norms; others enhance epistemic motivation, so that one engages in more careful and thorough generational and evaluative processes. We propose that “real life” explanatory processes are often constrained by multiple goals, epistemic and directional, where these goals may mutually reinforce one another or may conflict, and where our explanations emerge as a matter of weighing and satisfying those goals. We review emerging evidence from psychology and neuroscience to support this framework and to elucidate the central role of motivation in human thought and explanation.

“Who is talking to me?” — Self–other attribution of auditory hallucinations and sulcation of the right temporoparietal junction

Brain imaging research in schizophrenia has provided a better understanding of the neural basis of auditory hallucinations (AH). Recently, renewed interest in the phenomenology of AH raised questions related to their neural substrates. Hence, the neural basis of AH self/other attribution have yet to be investigated as beliefs regarding the origin of the voices is a cardinal feature of AH phenomenology. As the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) play a key role in disentangling the origin of sensory events and in self/other distinction, we tested the hypothesis that the morphology of the IPL/TPJ area may be involved in AH self/other attribution. Magnetic resonance images of 39 right-handed patients with persistent auditory hallucinations and 19 healthy subjects were analyzed with sulcus-based morphometry. AH self–other attribution were found to be associated with the sulcal pattern of the posterior part of the Sylvian fissure, encompassing the IPL/TPJ area. The preference for the attribution of AH to self or to others could be associated with early neurodevelopmental events as the sulcal pattern is determined during fetal life and is stable after birth. Our study also raises basic cognitive questions regarding self-consciousness and suggest that impairments at a pre-reflexive level, leading to hearing his/her thoughts as voices (‘I’ level or feeling of agency), and a reflexive level leading to attribution belief (‘Me’ level or judgment of agency) are likely involved in AH.

Increasing the role of belief information in moral judgments by stimulating the right temporoparietal junction

Morality plays a vital role in our social life. A vast body of research has suggested that moral judgments rely on cognitive processes mediated by the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), an area thought to be involved in belief attribution. Here we assessed the role of the rTPJ in moral judgments directly by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) – a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that, by applying a weak current to the scalp, allows modulating cortical excitability of the area being stimulated. Participants were randomly and equally assigned to receive anodal stimulation (to increase cortical excitability), cathodal stimulation (to decrease cortical excitability), or sham (placebo) stimulation over the rTPJ before completing a moral judgment task. Participants read stories in which protagonists produced either a negative or a neutral outcome based on either a negative or a neutral belief that they were causing harm or no harm, respectively. Results revealed a selective group difference when judging the moral permissibility of accidental harms (belief neutral, outcome negative), but not intentional harms (belief negative, outcome negative), attempted harms (belief negative, outcome neutral), or neutral acts (belief neutral, outcome neutral). Specifically, participants who received anodal stimulation assigned less blame to accidental harms compared to participants who received cathodal or sham stimulation. These results are consistent with previous findings showing that the degree of rTPJ activation reflects reliance on the agent's innocent intention. Crucially, our findings provide direct evidence supporting the critical role of the rTPJ in mediating belief attribution for moral judgment.

Semantics and Pragmatics of Referentially Transparent and Referentially Opaque Belief Ascription Sentences

This essay takes a critical look at Jonathan Berg’s theory of direct belief. Berg’s analysis of the concept of direct belief is considered insightful, but doubts are raised concerning his generalization of the purely extensional truth conditional semantics of direct belief ascription sentences to the truth conditional semantics of all belief ascription sentences. Difficulties are posed that Berg does not discuss, but that are implied by the proposal that the truth conditional semantics of belief ascription sentences generally are those of direct belief ascription sentences, and that once mentioned must enter into an evaluation of the proposition that by implication all beliefs are direct. Another line of objection concerns Berg’s second main thesis that the pragmatics as distinct from the semantics of belief ascription sentences can explain away apparent substitution failure validity breakdowns in belief ascription sentences as inappropriate utterances according to rules of roughly Gricean conversational implicature, rather than correspondence or non-correspondence with the facts about such things as what it is that people actually believe. These two parts of Berg’s argument, that the truth conditional semantics of all belief ascription sentences are those exclusively of direct belief ascription sentences, and that apparent substitution failure is effectively salva propria rather than salva veritate, are explored within the general framework of Berg’s thought experiment, eventually arriving at diametrically opposed conclusions, reflecting on what we believe comic book character Lois Lane believes and does not believe about Superman, and what she believes and does not believe about Clark Kent.

Theory of mind: a new perspective on the puzzle of belief ascription.

The concept of theory of mind (ToM) has considerably changed since its first proposal. The aim of first human studies was to understand how young children acquire the representation of others’ mental states, in particular beliefs, and how they distinguish them from their own and from reality. The False Belief Task was designed to prove the acquisition of this capacity. According to children’s performance in this test the acquisition of ToM has been attested at around 4 years of age. In last years it has been shown that using spontaneous response tasks also 15-month-old-children could attribute to an agent a false belief about the location of an object. These results have generated the puzzle of belief-ascription: Why do 3-year-old children fail the classical false belief tasks whereas much younger children show the correct expectation in the spontaneous response tasks? In this paper I shall argue that (i) infants and young children, when confronted with the two forms of false belief tasks do not face the same problem and (ii) behind the two testing situations there are different ways to understand theory of mind. I shall propose that what appears in infants is the natural human disposition to intersubjectivity.

Parasitic attitudes

Karttunen observes that a presupposition triggered inside an attitude ascription, can be filtered out by a seemingly inaccessible antecedent under the scope of a preceding belief ascription. This poses a major challenge for presupposition theory and the semantics of attitude ascriptions. I solve the problem by enriching the semantics of attitude ascriptions with some independently argued assumptions on the structure and interpretation of mental states. In particular, I propose a DRT-based representation of mental states with a global belief-layer and a variety of labeled attitude compartments embedded within it. Hence, desires and other non-doxastic attitudes are asymmetrically dependent on beliefs. I integrate these mental state representations into a general semantic account of attitude ascriptions which relies on the parasitic nature of non-doxastic attitudes to solve Karttunen’s puzzle.

De Re Belief and Cumming's Puzzle

Cumming (2008) uses a puzzle about belief ascription to argue against a Millian semantics for names, and in favor of a view on which names are assigned denotations relative to a shiftable variable assignment. I want to take the puzzle Cumming raises as an opportunity to showcase the virtues of a rival, broadly Stalnakerian, framework for attitude reports that safeguards Millianism. I begin by describing the puzzle, and arguing that Cumming’s proposed resolution fails. A lesson of this discussion is that the puzzle shouldn’t be addressed by appeal to shiftable parameters of an index. As such, the puzzle seems to militate in favor of a Millian view, not against it. After arguing for this claim, I defend three theses needed to apply a Stalnakerian apparatus to the case, arguing that it not only accounts for the data, but harmoniously integrates the puzzling reports into a general framework for dealing with all de re intensional constructions.

Belief Files in Theory of Mind Reasoning

Humans seem to readily track their conspecifics’ mental states, such as their goals and beliefs from early infancy. However, the underlying cognitive architecture that enables such powerful abilities remains unclear. Here I will propose that a basic representational structure, the belief file, could provide the foundation for efficiently encoding, and updating information about, others’ beliefs in online social interactions. I will discuss the representational possibilities offered by the belief file and the ways in which the repertoire of mental state reasoning is shaped by the characteristics of its constituents. A series of questions will be outlined concerning the representational skeleton of the belief file, sketching a possible structure that supports the rapid encoding and re-identification of belief related information (e.g., variables for the agent, as the belief holder and for the belief-content). After analyzing the possible limitations of the belief attribution system, I will examine some of its characteristics that might enable a flexibility that is often neglected. I will suggest that operations involving belief files are not impeded by the absence of precise first-person information regarding their contents. In fact, the system permits manipulations with “empty” belief files, allowing humans to ascribe beliefs to conspecifics based on little or no direct information regarding the content of the mental state. Such an analysis aims to advance our understanding of how spontaneous belief attribution may be performed, and to provide an insight into the possible mechanisms that allow humans to successfully navigate the social world.