7 - Stalking young persons' changing beliefs about belief

Summary

Introduction

Somewhere very near the top of psychology's list of most vexing and least settled matters are the nagging questions of how and when young persons come to anything like a “mature” account (or folk conception) of the nature and limitations of human knowing. That is, we (where “we” refers to all of us salaried professionals actually paid to know about such things) seem unable to agree about almost anything having to do with people's changing beliefs about belief (Chandler et al., 2002; Chandler and Sokol, 1999). Do young persons ordinarily abandon some entry-level commitment to “naive realism” at the age of four, or is it fourteen, or twenty-four (Chandler and Carpendale, 1998)? Are our earliest insights about the inherently agentic (and therefore ineluctably subjectivized or relativized) nature of human knowing standardly acquired during the preschool or, rather, the post-graduate years (Chandler et al., 2000)? When, give or take a few decades, is it fair to say that young persons will have already acquired a journeyman's “theory-of-mind,” adult-like in all of its basic particulars (Chandler, 2001)? Is it four, or eight, or twelve, and, if not, do such accomplishments await some “age of majority,” or the acquisition of a liberal arts degree (Kitchener and King, 1981)? No fair-minded reader of the contemporary research literature on personal epistemologies could, we maintain, come away from an exhaustive review of the several hundred studies given over to such matters with anything like a confident conclusion (Chandler et al., 2002).