| Summary: | Six studies were conducted to investigate young children's earliest insights into the interpretive
nature of knowing, or the formation of what has been called an "Interpretive Theory of Mind."
This insight was operationalized as the ability to recognize that two persons exposed to precisely
the same information can, nonetheless, end up holding sharply different opinions about what is the
self-same reality. All of the studies made use of a set of pictures fitted with covers such that most
of the underlying picture was hidden, leaving only an ambiguous set of lines visible through a
small viewing window. The key question asked concerned subjects' understanding that other
persons who have not seen the full picture but only the restricted view, and who know nothing
about the full contents of the picture, are all nevertheless free and able to hold different beliefs
about what is depicted in this restricted view. An important feature of this procedure is that it can
assess both subjects' understanding of simple false belief as well as their understanding of the
interpretive possibilities that such stimuli afford. This feature was exploited to demonstrate that
young persons who appreciate that beliefs can be false—an achievement that is commonly taken to
mark the point of entry into a theory-like understanding of mental life—cannot always be counted
on to also appreciate that different interpretations of the same stimulus are possible. By exploring
children's reactions to inherently ambiguous stimuli that, by design, easily lend themselves to
misinterpretation, it is possible to distinguish between a theory of mind that rests entirely on
notions of false belief (i.e., one that views the mind as a recording device capable only of mistakes
of ignorance), and a more complex appreciation of the mind's more active capacity for
constructively interpreting—and so misinterpreting—reality. What these studies reveal is that an
interpretive theory of mind is different from, and later arriving than, an appreciation of the
possibility of false belief, and, contrary to competing claims, this interpretive theory actually makes
its first appearance during, but not before, the early school years.
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