Developmental psychology

The sixth entry is a tarefa da falsa crença, and the word English puts in the middle of it is the odd one out in this whole vocabulary. Almost every other term on the page is Latin arriving by way of the study — « maturation », « egocentrism », « longitudinal ». « Belief » is not. It is home-grown: Old English had gelēafa, built on the Germanic root that also gave « lief », the old word for dear that survives in « I would as lief stay », and that stands behind « love » itself. A belief, on that reckoning, is what somebody holds dear. Portuguese took the other road entirely. A crença comes from credere, to entrust, so the Portuguese word describes a transaction rather than an affection, and crer and o crédito are its near relatives. English owns that family too — « creed », « credence », « credible », « incredulous » — and could have used it here, yet the experiment is never called anything but « the false-belief task ». In the one place where a technical name was wanted, the language kept the oldest word in the room.