Nativists about theory of mind have typically explained why children below the age of four fail the false belief task by appealing to the demands that these tasks place on children’s developing executive abilities. However, this appeal to executive functioning cannot explain a wide range of evidence showing that social and linguistic factors also affect when children pass this task. In this paper, I present a revised nativist proposal about theory of mind development that is able to accommodate these findings, (...) which I call the pragmatic development account. According to this proposal, we can gain a better understanding of the shift in children’s performance on standard false-belief tasks around four years of age by considering how children’s experiences with the pragmatics of belief discourse affect the way they interpret the task. (shrink)

Human and non-human animals are social beings, both have social interactions. The ability to anticipate behavior of others is a fundamental requirement of social interactions. However, there are several ways of how agents can succeed in this. Two modes of anticipation, namely mindreading and behavior-reading, shape the animal mindreading debate. As a matter of fact, no position has yet convincingly ruled out the other. This paper suggests a strategy of how to argue for a mentalistic interpretation as opposed to a (...) behavioral interpretation. The first step suggests considering a pluralistic approach in order to allow for shortcomings such as not having a natural language. Second, a critical examination of the principle called Morgan’s Canon will show that this principle cannot be used as a final argument to rule out mentalistic approaches. Finally, the author argues that the setting of current experiments is responsible for the indistinguishability of mindreading versus behavior-reading and she suggests alternative experimental designs. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have advocated for an ‘interactive turn’ in the methodology of social-cognition research: to become more ecologically valid, we must design experiments that are interactive, rather than merely observational. While the practical aim of improving ecological validity in the study of social cognition is laudable, we think that the notion of ‘interaction’ is not suitable for this task: as it is currently deployed in the social cognition literature, this notion leads to (...) serious conceptual and methodological confusion. In this paper, we tackle this confusion on three fronts: 1) we revise the ‘interactionist’ definition of interaction; 2) we demonstrate a number of potential methodological confounds that arise in interactive experimental designs; and 3) we show that ersatz interactivity works just as well as the real thing. We conclude that the notion of ‘interaction’, as it is currently being deployed in this literature, obscures an accurate understanding of human social cognition. (shrink)

Understanding social cognition referring to narratives without relying on mindreading skills has been the main aim of the Narrative Practice Hypothesis proposed by Daniel Hutto and Shaun Gallagher. In this paper, I offer a semiotic reformulation of the NPH, expanding the notion of narrative beyond its conventional common-sense understanding and claiming that the kind of social cognition that operates in implicit false belief task competency is developed out of the narrative logic of interaction. I will try to show how experience (...) is shaped through meaning by the structure of narrativity and the way this can account for how narrative competencies do not just depend on language acquisition, but permeate the interactive competencies of pre-linguistic children and some social non-human animals. Developing during primary and secondary intersubjectivity and rooted in the semiotic ability to deceive and manipulate others, semiotic narrativity is the key bridge that leads us to mind and beliefs starting from basic perceptions, emotions and embodied enactive interactions. I will test my Narrative Practice Semiotic Hypothesis on Autism spectrum disorders, where social cognition skills don’t work properly, connecting NPSH to the Social Motivation Theory of Autism. I will finally answer some criticisms towards the original NPH, connecting its semiotic reformulation to early mindreading in infants and to some very recent experiments by Krupeneye et al. and Buttelmann et al. about false beliefs understanding in primates. (shrink)

We recommend the attitude of optimistic agnosticism toward animal mindreading: suspending acceptance until tests succeed in overcoming Povinelli's problem, and being optimistic about the feasibility of such tests. Fletcher and Carruthers argue for sufficient reasons to accept animal mindreading; we find their arguments unconvincing. Points they raise against the behavior-reading theory apply equally to mindreading theory, and their claims of greater parsimony are unfounded. Premature acceptance of mindreading could inhibit the search for innovative ways to overcome longstanding methodological problems. Optimistic (...) agnosticism, in contrast, encourages the pursuit of approaches that can lead to important insights about animal social cognition. (shrink)

This paper addresses a challenge proposed against non-mindreading explanations of infant spontaneous-response task data. The challenge is a foundational assumption of mindreading explanations best summed up by Carruthers : 141-172, 2013, Consciousness and Cognition, 36: 498-507, 2015) claim that only by appealing to a theory of mind is it possible to explain infant responses in spontaneous-response false-belief tasks when there are no one-to-one correspondences between observable behavior and mental states. Heyes, 131–143, 2014a, Developmental Science, 17, 647–659. b) responds to this (...) challenge arguing discrete stimuli is informationally wealthy, and interprets the spontaneous-response results in terms of low-level perceptual novelty. However, Scott and Baillargeon : 660-664, 2014) challenge Heyes’ explanation on the grounds that her account of spontaneous-response false-belief tasks cannot also explain spontaneous-response ignorance tasks. In response to this, an enactive, ecological goal-tracking explanation of spontaneous-response tasks is presented, and argued to be superior to both mindreading explanations and Heyes’ account. This is done by recasting perception and anticipation and appealing to the central role social normativity plays in constraining social cognition. Finally, it is argued the cognitivist framework that both Heyes and mindreading proponents appeal to, begs the question in favor of the indispensability of mental representations for explaining perception and anticipation. (shrink)

There is currently a consensus among comparative psychologists that nonhuman animals are capable of some forms of mindreading. Several philosophers and psychologists have criticized this consensus, however, arguing that there is a “logical problem” with the experimental approach used to test for mindreading in nonhuman animals. I argue that the logical problem is no more than a version of the general skeptical problem known as the theoretician’s dilemma. As such, it is not a problem that comparative psychologists must solve before (...) providing evidence for mindreading. (shrink)

In opposition to mainstream theory of mind approaches, some contemporary perceptual accounts of social cognition do not consider the central question of social cognition to be the problem of access to other minds. These perceptual accounts draw heavily on phenomenological philosophy and propose that others' mental states are “directly” given in the perception of the others' expressive behavior. Furthermore, these accounts contend that phenomenological insights into the nature of social perception lead to the dissolution of the access problem. We argue, (...) on the contrary, that the access problem is a genuine problem that must be addressed by any account of social cognition, perceptual or non-perceptual, because we cannot cast the access problem as a false problem without violating certain fundamental intuitions about other minds. We elaborate the fundamental intuitions as three constraints on any theory of social perception: the Immediacy constraint; the Transcendence constraint; and the Accessibility constraint. We conclude with an outline of an account of perceiving other minds that meets the three constraints. (shrink)

In this essay, I respond to the critical remarks of Louise Barrett, Amanda Corris and Anthony Chemero, and Daniel Hutto on my book Enactivist Interventions. In doing so, I consider whether behaviorism can make a contribution to enactivist theory, whether synergies are the same as dynamical gestalts, and whether the brain can add anything to mathematical reasoning.

We argue that progress in our scientific understanding of the `social mind' is hampered by a number of unfounded assumptions. We single out the widely shared assumption that social behavior depends solely on the capacities of an individual agent. In contrast, both developmental and phenomenological studies suggest that the personal-level capacity for detached `social cognition' (conceived as a process of theorizing about and/or simulating another mind) is a secondary achievement that is dependent on more immediate processes of embodied social interaction. (...) We draw on the enactive approach to cognitive science to further clarify this strong notion of `social interaction' in theoretical terms. In addition, we indicate how this interaction theory (IT) could eventually be formalized with the help of a dynamical systems perspective on the interaction process, especially by making use of evolutionary robotics modeling. We conclude that bringing together the methods and insights of developmental, phenomenological, enactive and dynamical approaches to social interaction can provide a promising framework for future research. Keywords: theory of mind; cognitive science; phenomenology; embodied cognition; dynamical systems theory; enactive approach; social cognition; interaction theory; evolutionary robotics. (shrink)

How should knowledge be analyzed? Compositionally, as having constituents like belief and justification, or as an atomic concept? In making arguments for or against these perspectives, epistemologists have begun to use experimental evidence from developmental psychology and developmental linguistics. If we were to conclude that knowledge were developmentally prior to belief, then we might have a good basis to claim that belief is not a constituent of knowledge. In this review, I present a broad range of developmental evidence from the (...) past decade and discuss some of the implications it has for the proper analysis of knowledge. The orthodox perspective from the developmental literature was one where children fail to understand belief and knowledge concepts until later in childhood, with typical asymmetries in belief attribution and knowledge attribution. But what emerges from both a discussion of newer findings and a contextualization of older findings is a picture of development whereby core competence with belief and knowledge concepts emerges much earlier than previously thought that apparent failures in later childhood may be explained by other aspects of development than conceptual development and that there is no clear evidence that knowledge attributions emerge earlier than belief attributions. (shrink)

A number of two-systems accounts have been proposed to explain the apparent discrepancy between infants’ early success in nonverbal mindreading tasks, on the one hand, and the failures of children younger than four to pass verbally-mediated false-belief tasks, on the other. Many of these accounts have not been empirically fruitful. This paper focuses, in contrast, on the two-systems proposal put forward by Ian Apperly and colleagues. This has issued in a number of new findings. The present paper shows that the (...) theoretical arguments offered in support of Apperly’s account are nevertheless unconvincing, and that the data can be explained in other terms. A better view is that there is just a single mindreading system that exists throughout, but which undergoes gradual conceptual enrichment through infancy and childhood. This system can be used in ways that do, or do not, draw on executive resources and/or working memory. (shrink)

A number of convergent recent findings with adults have been interpreted as evidence of the existence of two distinct systems for mindreading that draw on separate conceptual resources: one that is fast, automatic, and inflexible; and one that is slower, controlled, and flexible. The present article argues that these findings admit of a more parsimonious explanation. This is that there is a single set of concepts made available by a mindreading system that operates automatically where it can, but which frequently (...) needs to function together with domain-specific executive procedures as well as domain-general resources. This view, too, can be described as a two-systems account. But in this case one of the systems encompasses the other, and the conceptual resources available to each are the same. (shrink)

Philosophers and cognitive scientists have worried that research on animal mind-reading faces a ‘logical problem’: the difficulty of experimentally determining whether animals represent mental states (e.g. seeing) or merely the observable evidence (e.g. line-of-gaze) for those mental states. The most impressive attempt to confront this problem has been mounted recently by Robert Lurz. However, Lurz' approach faces its own logical problem, revealing this challenge to be a special case of the more general problem of distal content. Moreover, participants in this (...) debate do not agree on criteria for representation. As such, future debate should either abandon the representational idiom or confront underlying semantic disagreements. (shrink)

How should we determine the distribution of psychological traits—such as Theory of Mind, episodic memory, and metacognition—throughout the Animal kingdom? Researchers have long worried about the distorting effects of anthropomorphic bias on this comparative project. A purported corrective against this bias was offered as a cornerstone of comparative psychology by C. Lloyd Morgan in his famous “Canon”. Also dangerous, however, is a distinct bias that loads the deck against animal mentality: our tendency to tie the competence criteria for cognitive capacities (...) to an exaggerated sense of typical human performance. I dub this error “anthropofabulation”, since it combines anthropocentrism with confabulation about our own prowess. Anthropofabulation has long distorted the debate about animal minds, but it is a bias that has been little discussed and against which the Canon provides no protection. Luckily, there is a venerable corrective against anthropofabulation: a principle offered long ago by David Hume, which I call “Hume’s Dictum”. In this paper, I argue that Hume’s Dictum deserves a privileged place next to Morgan’s Canon in the methodology of comparative psychology, illustrating my point through a discussion of the debate over Theory of Mind in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

The theory of mind (ToM) framework has been criticised by emerging alternative accounts. Each alternative begins with the accusation that ToM's validity as a research paradigm rests on the assumption of the ‘unobservability’ of other minds. We argue that the critics' discussion of the unobservability assumption (UA) targets a straw man. We discuss metaphysical, phenomenological, epistemological, and psychological readings of UA and demonstrate that it is not the case that ToM assumes the metaphysical, phenomenological, or epistemological claims. However, ToM supports (...) the psychological UA as a claim about cognitive processes responsible for mindreading. The latter can be interpreted as a claim that (a) neither the other's ‘mindedness’ in general nor the other's particular mental states are observable (i.e. apprehended perceptually); (b) particular mental states are unobservable, whereas some aspects indicative of ‘mindedness’ are observable; (c) some mental states are unobservable but some are also observable. Whereas the critics tend to attribute (a) to ToM, most ToM accounts actually take positions (b) or (c). We conclude that the allegations against ToM for positing UA are seriously misdirected. We further bring out an important stipulation of any account of observability of mental states: mental states are not observable in the same way as the sensory properties of physical objects. (shrink)

Many philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that our everyday or "folk" understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. That theory is widely called "folk psychology" (sometimes "commonsense" psychology). The terms in which folk psychology is couched are the familiar ones of "belief" and "desire", "hunger", "pain" and so forth. According to many theorists, folk psychology plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behavior of ourselves and others. However, the nature and status of folk (...) psychology remains controversial. (shrink)

This paper examines the meaningfulness of pointing in great apes. We appeal to Hannah Ginsborg’s conception of primitive normativity, which provides an adequate criterion for establishing whether a response is meaningful, and we attempt to make room for a conception according to which there is no fundamental difference between the responses of human infants and those of other great apes to pointing gestures. This conception is an alternative to Tomasello’s view that pointing gestures and reactions to them reveal a fundamental (...) difference between humans and other apes. (shrink)