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The embodied self-awareness of the infant: A challenge to the theory-theory of mind?
Dan Zahavi

The aim of the paper is to discuss whether recent findings in developmental psychology, findings concerning infantile body-awareness, might challenge a view held by advocates of the theory-theory of mind, namely the view that both self-awareness and intersubjectivity presuppose a theory of mind.
According to the standard view, most children only gain possession of a theory of mind when they are around 4-years old. It is only at that age that they can pass the classical theory of mind tasks, such as the false-belief task or the appearance-reality task. But if a theory of mind is required for self-awareness, any creature that lacks such a theory will also lack self-awareness and self-experience. This entails not only that children lack self-awareness during the first 3-4 years of life, but also that persons suffering from autism - a disorder that has often been thought to involve a damaged or destroyed theory of mind mechanism - should be "as blind to their own mental states as they are to the mental states of others" (Carruthers 1996, 262). This take on infantile self-experience differs rather markedly from another well entrenched paradigm in recent developmental psychology, according to which the infant's experience of self and other is transformed and articulated by theory and language rather than being constituted by them. Rejecting Piaget's famous view that babies live in an "adualistic confusion", it has recently been argued that even newborns can pick up the intermodal invariants that specify self- versus nonself-stimulation, and that they thereby have the ability to develop an early sense of self. Infants are in possession of proprioceptive information from birth, they have an early sense of their own bodies, and hence an early perceptually-based sense of themselves. According to this view, then, the infant has a(n ecological) sense of self long before it is in possession of a theory of mind.
The paper will discuss both paradigms, and I will offer a philosophically (and phenomeno-logically) motivated criticism of both.