Belief in Social Cognition

In both philosophy and psychology, it is widely believed that everyday predictions and interpretations of behavior involve the attribution of belief, and that the concept of belief plays a central role in human theory of mind. In this entry, I argue that belief plays a more modest role in everyday social cognition. The entry begins with a brief review of the history of cognitive scientists’ fascination with belief-attribution, with a specific focus on the debate about when children first acquire the concept of belief. It then turns to two recent theoretical proposals about the role of belief-attribution in everyday social cognition that assign it a much more limited – but also more diverse - set of functions. The final section discusses the implications of this revisionary account of belief attribution for philosophical questions about the relationship between folk psychology and cognitive ontology.