Our ability to attribute mental states to others (to mentalize) has been the subject of
philosophical and psychological studies for a very long time yet the role of language
acquisition in the development of our mentalizing abilities has been largely understudied. This
book addresses this gap in the philosophical literature. The book presents an account of how
false belief reasoning is impacted by language acquisition and it does so by placing it in the
larger context of the issue how language impacts cognition in general. The work provides the
reader with detailed and critical literature reviews and draws on them to argue that language
acquisition helps false belief reasoning by boosting the ability to create schemata that
facilitate processing of information in some social contexts. According to this framework it
is a combination of syntactic clues and cultural narratives that helps the child to solve the
classic false belief task. The book provides a novel original account of how language helps
false belief reasoning while also giving the reader a broad precise and well-documented
picture of the debate around some of the most fundamental issues in social cognition.
