A question that has long interested me is how we understand others – that is, what are the cognitive processes that underlie successful social understanding and interaction – and what happens when we misunderstand others. In philosophy and the cognitive sciences, the orthodox view is that understanding and interacting with others is partly underwritten by theory of mind or mindreading, the capacity to make sense of intentional behavior in terms of mental states. On this view, successful social interaction often involves understanding what others are thinking and what they are trying to achieve. In our ordinary social interactions, we attribute beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions to people to make sense of their behavior, and on the basis of that we predict what they are likely to do next. The orthodox view is that children’s development of mindreading is crucially important for learning to navigate the social world and that, even as adults, mindreading is an essential tool in our folk psychological toolkit.
The orthodox view is not without challenge, of course. Theorists in the 4-E tradition (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition) have challenged the prominence of mindreading in theories of how we understand others (Gallagher 2005, 2012, Hutto 2008). Though there is much variety in 4-E approaches, a common theme is that we can explain (some/much/most) intelligent behavior without reference to mental representations. This is not behaviorism 2.0. 4-E views do not deny the reality of mental states. Rather, they challenge the idea that mental representations are always the best explanation of intelligent behavior. With respect to social cognition, 4-E theorists argue that phenomenological evidence suggests we mindread only in unusual circumstances when our ordinary modes of understanding others break down. When your behavior is puzzling to me, I think about what you are thinking or feeling in order to make sense of what you are doing. But in most social interactions, people’s behaviors aren’t puzzling and we don’t have to deliberate about what internal states caused them to act in the way they did. We just intuitively grasp what they are doing and what they will do next. Furthermore, and this is key to the 4-E argument, the best explanation of our intuitive grasp of social interactions is not tacit or subconscious mindreading. The best explanation of the fluidity of ordinary social interactions is that we are attuned to each other’s subtle bodily cues, thanks to the development of primary and secondary intersubjectivity. In other words, we understand what others are doing in ordinary social interactions because we are sensitive to eye saccades, gestures, bodily movements, and we can jointly attend to objects and events. Moreover, as adults we are familiar with social scripts and norms that guide our behavior, so we grasp the meaning of various patterns of behavior without having to think about mental representations. According to 4-E proponents, these capacities are the basic, fundamental components of social interaction, and only in the rare instances that these break down do we resort to mindreading.
Those who have followed this debate closely will know that it has gone through many frustrating epicycles of 4-E and mindreading proponents talking past each other. I have taken part in many of these epicycles. I will not rehash all those arguments here. (See Gallagher (2012), Spaulding (2010, 2015). I also go into more detail in chapter 2 of my book.) In this short space, I will simply report my perspective on the debate.
At the center of this debate is a disagreement about whether explanation and prediction are necessarily conscious, explicit processes. Though this may seem like a strange basis for a debate about folk psychology, this issue seems to drive both sides’ claim to have the best explanation of how we understand others. Mindreading proponents operate under the assumption that explanation and prediction can be subconsciously executed. Some 4-E proponents argue that explanation and prediction must be conscious, deliberative processes, and so at least the product of mindreading (an explanation or prediction) must be consciously accessible (Gallagher 2005, 215). If this is right, then having no phenomenological experience of mindreading ought to count against the orthodox view that mindreading is a frequently used tool. Again, if this were right, the orthodox view would not provide a particularly good explanation of our ordinary social interactions, and this would give a prima facie advantage for the 4-E account of social cognition. (There is a further debate about the reliability of phenomenology, but I won’t go into that debate here. See (Spaulding 2015))
4-E proponents are right that explanation and prediction do connote conscious, deliberative processes. It does seem odd to say that I subconsciously explained someone’s behavior. However, we can easily substitute “interpretation”and “anticipation”for explanation and prediction and avoid this terminological debate entirely. At least to my ear, it sounds perfectly reasonable to say that we implicitly or subconsciously interpret and anticipate behavior. Thus, we can reasonably claim that mindreading may be occurring implicitly or subconsciously in ordinary social interactions, and we may have no phenomenological awareness of this. If this is right, then it takes the teeth out of one of 4-E’s main challenges to mindreading accounts.
Resolving this terminological confusion does not, of course, settle the whole debate. There is much more work being done to determine whether 4-E accounts or mindreading accounts offer better explanations of how we understand others. In general, I have argued that the mindreading accounts have more resources at their disposal, and alleged shortcomings of the views are avoidable. However, this is not to say that I fully endorse the orthodox view of mindreading. In fact, the book represents an important challenge to some central claims of the orthodox view. Though the 4-E objections fall short, they do open the door to a robust reevaluation of the orthodox view of mindreading. In the next posts, I will articulate several ways in which the orthodox view of mindreading falls short and advance a positive account of mindreading that I hope overcomes these shortcomings.
References
Gallagher, S. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind: Oxford University Press, USA.
Gallagher, S. 2012. “In defense of phenomenological approaches to social cognition: Interacting with the critics.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 3 (2):187-212.
Hutto, D. D. 2008. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Spaulding, S. 2010. “Embodied cognition and mindreading.” Mind & Language 25 (1):119-140.
Spaulding, S. 2015. “Phenomenology of social cognition.” Erkenntnis 80 (5):1069-1089. doi: 10.1007/s10670-014-9698-6.
Thanks for this perspective. Would you agree, then, that some philosophers privilege conscious mental processes over unconscious? I’m thinking here also of so-called “free will”.
For example, I imagine that if someone thought that only conscious deliberation is valid mind reading, then all the unconscious “mind reading” we do would not be salient to their deliberations. It would be peripheral, perhaps to the point of not counting as mind reading at all. This is consistent with observations by Antonio and Hannah Damasio on decision making. By analysing the behaviour of people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex they inferred that the salience of information is encoded separately from its truth value and is related to how we process emotions. Someone with VMPC damage might be fully capable of determining whether something is true or false, but unable to assess the value of that information in making a decision. Asked what restaurant to eat at, they rehearse the facts endlessly but cannot decide because they cannot weight the relative importance of any given fact compared to others. And it further suggests that salience as distinct from factfulness, is encoded as an emotional response.
The reasoning used in decision making is fundamentally unconscious and emotional. And for those who are interested in contra-causal free will, this proves that there is free will. Since decision making is caused by factors other than conscious deliberation. Although Patricia Churchland has argued that this is not an interesting position to take and that *of course* decision making is not contra-causal.
My reading of late has focused on Frans de Waal and chimps. Chimps also need to know about what to expect from other group members, to keep things harmonious and achieve common goals (like driving off a leopard). They also use cues from posture, gesture, and vocalisation to interpret the disposition of other chimps. But in their case we probably would not call it mind-reading or represent it as understanding that the other is thinking.
“Thinking” suggests to me the verbal monologue in my head or my conscious processing of ideas. Most of my moment to moment mental activity is not thinking, except perhaps when I am writing. Most of what I need to know about another person is their disposition towards me and others, i.e. how they are *feeling*. I may attribute their disposition to causes, but the causes are less important than the feeling as a predictor of what they will do in response to actions of mine. A chimp has all the information it needs to be a successful social animal without projecting beliefs onto the others. So do other social animals with even less proportion neocortex, like elephants and dogs (thinking here of Robin Dunbar and neocortex ratio).
The privileging of conscious deliberation seems to me to be major stumbling block in understanding how our minds actually work. I note that Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier seemed to be saying something similar about rationality in their book “The Enigma of Reason”. Most decisions are made unconsciously and we tend to generate reasons only when prompted to by other people. This sounds very similar to the argument about generating conscious inferences about others minds only when their behaviour is puzzling.
That most of our cognitions are unconscious and involve emotions is problematic for those who privilege conscious mental activity. It leaves them denying consciousness, free will, and mind reading. But all of these positions seem like dead ends to me because they are based on Victorian ideas about what the mind is and how it works. No, there isn’t an abstract capacity for reasoning that floats above the body and its nasty fluids, but there is no need to throw the baby out with the bath water. We all *experience* consciousness, willing, and mind reading. Instead of trying to explain them away, relegate to the illusory, why do we not study what is happening.
“There isn’t an abstract capacity for reasoning that floats above the body ”
Well, half valid. The “abstract” part. The rest is absolute nonsense. Our lives absolutely depend on the ability of our conscious self and its imagination to leave our bodies and superfly the world in superspace and time, “supervising” the world, and generating endless overviews/ crude maps of it. We have staggeringly creative imaginations – superimaginations – as distinct from the basic imagination involved in immediately looking at the world..
You have to understand the basic predicament of life – living organisms – which is that they are all creatures looking at some kind of movie of the local world around them. All we can see in that movie – in the final analysis, the only reality we can really depend on (as many philosophers have pointed out) is the here-and-now of single bodies taking single actions at single points in time in single fields. We can’t see people for example engaging in “activities” only the scattered single actions that comprise them. We can’t see someone “having a meal” – only taking a single action at a time like putting food in their mouth, then bringing their hand down and so on.
But we can’t survive by thinking in terms of single actions. All living creatures have to conduct – and therefore think about and direct – extremely complex activitites (courses of action not just single actions) in often multiple fields – like scavenging, hunting, foraging, – or as Darwin recounts, an earthworm journeying far above the earth to bring back various materials with which to line its burrow. If we can’t think about “activities” – “journeys” and not just “single steps” – , we will very quickly go off course and get lost – and “lose the thread/plot”.
There is no way we can directly see those courses of action . We have to imaginatively infer them – and the fields where they they must take place.
So when you say: “We went to the cinema, watched a movie and had a meal afterwards”, you may see that as very simple, even logical conceptualisation. Actually it involves a superimagination to be able to think of going/journeying to the cinema, watching a movie etc – all of which are complex activities involving possibly thousands of actions, and which can only be “envisioned” by flying above the world imaginatively.
Think about your media morning reading Google News – one moment you’re flying off to Syrian battlefields, then towering over the “economy” and its falling GDP, back to the Gazan border, off to the US border and demonstrations there etc etc. Even Superman can’t do that. He flies in a straight line, you superfly the world every day with giant leaps – and that’s why this has to be described in terms of “superspace” and “supertime”. Your endless, restless imaginative world travels are why we all have often great difficulty descending from our superimagination soaring above the over-there-and-then, to the down-here-and-now. (Look at “Free as a Bird” on youtube, if you need a little initial inspiration to believe in imaginative mind travel).
Once you understand that language – a conceptualsystem – is based on superimagination rather than logic – you start to see why Chomsky is really the Prince of Darkness, benighting the human mind and its creative imagination, and Hutto is a pathological thinker, who will never ever give a simple example that anyone can understand of how “non-representational thinking” works. (It doesn’t)
Look at “visual reasoning” in wiki – about 7 lines. But the visual system takes up 30-40% of the brain’s functioning. We are as a culture imaginatively illiterate (or better still “im-mediate”) and we understand almost literally nothing of the human and animal imagination, or what it does. That’s why – nothing personal here – you spoke the nonsense you did.
Michael, you make an absurd strawman argument. If I propose that there is no “abstract capacity” I do not thereby argue that there is no capacity whatever.
P.S. I should have said : ” we imaginatively leave our bodies”. We do not literally leave them.
Thanks for your comments, Jayarava. I do think that philosophy historically has tended to privilege the conscious cognitive processes over unconscious cognitive processes. Partly that’s because philosophy stretches back a long time, long before we knew much about unconscious cognition. Much of the foundational philosophical work – the work that sets up the problems to be solved – was done before the cognitive revolution that brought about a serious study of how unconscious and conscious cognitive processes interact to produce intelligent behavior. Nowadays, though, there are lots of philosophers working on interesting problems involving unconscious cognitive processing. (Implicit bias, action production, and decision making, just to take a few examples.)
With respect to social cognition, I think the issue is not so much whether unconsciously interpreting someone’s mental states should count as mindreading. Once we set aside the terminological issues, it seems like most people would agree that mindreading can be unconscious. But what many might wonder how often we unconsciously or tacitly mindread. We clearly tacitly/unconsciously employ stereotypes, adopt situational or behavioral scripts for people, rely on implicit associations, and these all guide our behavior. But what I want to argue, and this is what future posts will address, is that that these other processes are intricately connected to mindreading. Unconsciously assuming that someone is aggressive or nurturing is thick with mindreading. So even if ordinary social interactions don’t seem to involve conscious attributions of belief – the paradigm example of mindreading in the philosophical and empirical literature – that doesn’t settle the issue. In fact, mindreading is just much more interesting, messy, and complex than the paradigmatic case suggests.
Hi Shannon,
Thank you for this interesting blog post! I’m unfamiliar with much of this literature, and I’m looking forward to getting a better insight into the literature on social cognition from your next couple of posts.
I have a quick clarification question on the following:
“At the center of this debate is a disagreement about whether explanation and prediction are necessarily conscious, explicit processes”
It seems to me that explanation and prediction are best understood here in inferential terms (where inferences don’t entail and are different from explanations). Is this the same as your analysis of explanation in this context terms of “interpretation” or something different? (And if so, why/how so?) Again, the notion of unconscious inference seems v much more plausible than that of explanation (but I confess, I’m not entirely clear on what the alternative analysis of explanation is here unless it refers to a process of conscious reasoning) and as far as I’m aware, is well accepted in the Phil mind literature on inference. (Relatedly, I was wondering what type of consciousness is at issue here, given that this is likely to make a difference to the answer we might give to this question).
Hi Cecily. Thanks for your questions. I have the same conception of explanation/prediction and inference. Inference seems to be a thinner notion than either explanation or interpretation. (Inferences in logic, for example, can occur in relative isolation from other information. In contrast, explanations and interpretations are always situated in an informational context.) So, I suppose I’d say that explanations/interpretations are a kind of inference. As for what type of consciousness is at issue, I confess I don’t know! I’m not an expert in theories of consciousness, and typically I try not to step into thorny consciousness debates. So, if it’s ok, I’ll punt on that question.
Many thanks!