Tyler Burge claims in a recent high-profile publication that none of the existing evidence for mental-state attribution by children prior to the age of four or five really supports such a conclusion; and he makes this claim, not just for beliefs, but for mental states of all sorts. In its place, he offers an explanatory framework according to which infants and young children attribute mere information-registering states and teleologically-characterized motivational states, which are said to lack the defining properties of the mental. I argue that Burge’s claims are poorly motivated and irrelevant to the goals of developmental psychology.

中文翻译：

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在婴儿期就这样代表思想

泰勒·布尔格（Tyler Burge）在最近的一次高调出版物中声称，四到五岁之前儿童的智力状态归因的现有证据均未真正支持这一结论。他提出这一主张，不仅是出于信仰，而且是为了各种精神状态。取而代之的是，他提供了一个解释性框架，根据该框架，婴幼儿仅将信息登记状态和目的论表征的动机状态归因于精神状态，而据说这些状态缺乏精神上的定义性。我认为，布尔格的主张缺乏动机，与发展心理学的目标无关。