Declaration, Childhood Understanding, and the Contents of Natural Language
Date
2013
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Tri-College (Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges). Department of Linguistics
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
We may reasonably expect that children as young as three years old understand the difference between socially constructed facts and bare facts of nature. This assumption is reasonable because children at this age do understand rules for correct performance of speech acts and the scope of normative rules. Declarations, as defined by John Searle, constitute a class of speech acts which bears aptly on socially constructed and not bare facts, thus, experiments that demonstrate childhood understanding of the rules governing apt use of declarations could be taken to demonstrate an understanding of the distinction between the two types of facts.