Introduction to Part II: The Mental Register

Abstract

Although terms such as ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding’ are widely used in technical reports in science education, and often as if they were technical terms, they are part of the natural language that is used in everyday discourse. As a part of normal development children acquire a ‘theory of mind’, that allows them to make sense of the behaviour of others. We all rely on this faculty in our everyday interactions with others. In effect we are all automatically modelling the minds of others that we interact with. There is a ‘mental register’ of terms such as thinking, remembering, understanding and so forth that reflect aspects of our informal mental models of mind, and which we use in everyday discourse to communicate with others. Like much natural language, these terms are somewhat ‘fuzzy’ rather than being well-defined in the way technical terms need to be in academic discourse. Yet these notions are so ubiquitous in everyday discourse that they amount to a ‘folk psychology’ that we can all come to take for granted - for example using them in research reports on the assumption that readers will understand and share our own meanings for them.