Jay Garfield will be doing a talk next Friday (September 23) at Cornell at 4.30pm. (I’m not sure of the location, but I assume it will be in Goldwin Smith Hall.) Here is the title and the abstract.

bq.. “But Until Then, We’ll Just Pretend: How Pretence Scaffolds the Acquisition of Theory of Mind.”

Why is pretence such a prominent part of normally developing children’s activity in the third and fourth years of life when they have so much to learn? Why is this nearly universal in the species? Why do children with autism fail both to pretend and to acquire theory of mind? In Garfield, Peterson and Perry (2002) we proposed a Sellarsian-Vygotskian developmental framework according to which social interaction and language development jointly scaffold the a acquisition of theory of mind, and speculated that pretence should play a crucial role in this process. In Garfield et al. (2003) we presented data that confirmed a special role for verbs of pretence in the acquisition of sentential complementation and showed that competence with verbs of pretence precedes the competence with doxastic verbs necessary for passing theory of mind tasks. We now present further data confirming these results and demonstrating in greater detail how pretence scaffolds the acquisition of theory of mind, and so why it is so important to normal child development.