How Young Children Learn from Others

Existing accounts of teaching and the teacher-learner relationship stand in the tradition of epistemic individualism: The teacher produces signals or utterances that the learner uses as evidence to form beliefs. In this article, I argue for an alternative, second-personal, account of teaching in which teacher and learner mutually recognise their participation in a joint enterprise to get the learner to acquire knowledge and capacities that she does not yet possess. A particular version of this account is defended which regards children as ‘self-conscious learners’ who place their epistemic trust in teachers and recognise them as providing the standards of evaluation against which their behaviour is measured. Empirical work is cited to support these ideas.