Science · Other minds · 1983
Where Maxi Will Look
A child is asked where another child will look for a chocolate that has been moved. The wrong cupboard is the beginning of a science of other minds.
- Salzburg
- Late twentieth-century developmental psychology
- 47.80°N 13.05°E
Plate · Generated interpretation
A marble has been moved. Who, in the plate, still thinks it is where it was?
Listen · Eve
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Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner, “Beliefs about Beliefs,” Cognition 13 (1983). A story of Maxi and chocolate. Children who know the chocolate has been moved still have to represent Maxi’s wrong belief in order to say where he will look. Many three-year-olds fail. Many four-year-olds pass. The ages have been argued ever since.
Wimmer and Perner, Cognition 13 (1983): 103–128. Later work (Onishi and Baillargeon; non-verbal looking-time) contests the age and the method. The 1983 paper is a task, not the last word on other minds.
The experiment does not prove that younger children have no minds of others. It shows that a particular report of a wrong belief is hard. Nyāya treated other minds as inference from a sign. This laboratory treats them as a story a child must keep.
Theory of mind is a research program’s name. It is not a discovery that children acquire a theory the way they acquire a bicycle.
Whether passing the task is the birth of other minds, or only the birth of a sentence about them, remains open.
Distant echoes
Echo
Classical Nyāya · North India, on the page of the sūtras and their commentaries
Smoke, fire, and the unseen mind
Nyāya infers the other. The child is asked to predict the other. Not one method.
One question remains
Other minds · How do we know when another being is experiencing anything at all?
When a child first points to the empty cupboard, has another mind appeared, or only a new way of talking about one?