Can Deaf Children Be Taught to Think Philosophically?
Maura J. Geisser Brown University ABSTRACT: Researchers have found that development of what is called the “mature theory of mind” normally occurs between the ages of 3 and 5. Astington, de Villiers, Peterson, and Siegel point to age 4 as the critical age for syntactic development involving embedding sentences associated with the use of mental verbs, such as “think”, “know”, and “feel”. These verbs are necessary for the representation of mental states such as knowledge, belief, and pretense. For example, “I thought the dragon was fierce” involves a mental verb (“think”) and an embedded complement sentence (“the dragon was fierce”). Such complement structures make it possible to explicitly distinguish between things as they are in the world and things as they are represented in someone’s mind (e.g., imagination, belief, pretense). Thus, command of compliment structures and mental verbs in particular, the ability to differentiate the meanings of different mental verbs is crucial to a chil
