Volume 43, 1998
Teaching Philosophy
Maura J. Geisser
Pages 43-53
Can Deaf Children Be Taught to Think Philosophically?
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 child's ability to understand and differentiate between narrative and expository stories. This ability is also crucial to the child's understanding of such higher-order cognitive concepts as lying, error and mistake, and false belief. Unfortunately, for deaf children there is a delay of approximately 3 years in developing command of complement structures with mental verbs. Thus, what a hearing child develops at the age of 4 will likely occur in the deaf child only at the age of 7. I describe a philosophical thinking program to be implemented at the kindergarten level. I argue that such a program can help deaf children develop a better command of mental verbs and their associated syntactic structures.