Talking About Thinking

Primates unleashed

“…Such abilities are needed for ostensive-inferential communication only in limited ways, and the relevant abilities are within the ken of all great ape species (Moore, , 2017a. Moreover, the development of uniquely human forms of metarepresentation seems to be languagedependent (Berio, 2021a(Berio, , 2021bGrosse Wiesmann, Friederici, Singer, & Steinbeis, 2017;Low, 2010;Moore, 2021) and acquired later than basic forms of beliefs (Newen & Starzak, 2020). Nor is what's missing in unenculturated great apes exclusively a matter of trust.…”

How language shapes our minds: On the relationship between generics, stereotypes and social norms

“…Importantly for this article, language is considered to be one such cultural tool-and a particularly powerful one at that. For instance, a number of influential accounts have proposed that linguistic input is important for the formation of our folk-psychological skills (de Villiers, 2005;Hale & Tager-Flusberg, 2003;Wellman et al, 2001), in particular when it comes to mental models for mindreading (Moore, 2021) and schemata for false-belief reasoning (Berio, 2021a;2021b). Similarly, language is argued to be a tool that enhances our categorization skills (Lupyan, 2015) as well as a number of other cognitive abilities including memory and metacognition (Clark, 2013).…”