In this compelling volume, ten distinguished thinkers – William G. Lycan, Jeffrey Poland, Galen Strawson, Frances Egan, Georges Rey, Peter Ludlow, Paul ...

Introduction -- Evidence from children -- Evidence form infants and non-human animals -- Evidence from neuroimaging and neuropsychology -- Evidence from adults -- The cognitive basis of mindreading -- Elaborating and applying the theory.

This essay adjudicates between theoretical models of psychological concept acquisition. I provide new reasons to be skeptical about both simulationist and modularist models. I then defend the scientific-theory-theory account against familiar objections. I conclude by arguing that the scientific-theory-theory account must be supplemented by an account of hypothesis discovery.

The theory of mind debate has reached a “hybrid consensus” concerning the status of theory-theory and simulation-theory. Extant hybrid models either specify co-dependency and implementation relations, or distribute mentalizing tasks according to folk-psychological categories. By relying on a non-developmental framework these models fail to capture the central connection between simulation and theory. I propose a “dynamic” hybrid that is informed by recent work on the nature of similarity cognition. I claim that Gentner’s model of structure-mapping allows us to understand simulation (...) as a process in which psychological representations are aligned, causing the spontaneous abstraction of theoretical generalizations about the psychological domain. (shrink)

Mindreading is the ability to attribute mental states to other individuals. According to the Theory-Theory (TT), mindreading is based on one's possession of a Theory of Mind. On the other hand, the Simulation Theory (ST) maintains that one arrives at the attribution of a mental state by simulating it in one's own mind. In this paper, I propose a ST-TT hybrid model of the ability to attribute disgust on the basis of visual stimuli such as facial expressions, body postures, etc. (...) More precisely, while I defend Goldman's (2006) thesis that the ability to attribute disgust based on observing disgusted facial expressions stems from a mirror-based simulation process, I argue that ST is unable to account for the ability to attribute disgust based on non-facial visual stimuli; I propose, rather, that this latter ability is theory-based. My model is grounded in evidence from individuals suffering from Huntington's Disease. (shrink)

Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff have argued for a view they call the ‘theory theory’: theory change in science and children are similar. While their version of the theory theory has been criticized for depending on a number of disputed claims, we argue that there is a fundamental problem which is much more basic: the theory theory is multiply ambiguous. We show that it might be claiming that a similarity holds between theory change in children and (i) individual scientists, (ii) (...) a rational reconstruction of a Superscientist, or (iii) the scientific community. We argue that (i) is false, (ii) is non-empirical (which is problematic since the theory theory is supposed to be a bold empirical hypothesis), and (iii) is either false or doesn’t make enough sense to have a truth-value. We conclude that the theory theory is an interesting failure. Its failure points the way to a full, empirical picture of scientific development, one that marries a concern with the social dynamics of science to a psychological theory of scientific cognition.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The problem of cortical integration is described and various proposed solutions, including grandmother cells, cell assemblies, feed-forward structures, RAAM and synchronization, are reviewed. One method, involving complex attractors, that has received little attention in the literature, is explained and developed. I call this binding through annexation. A simulation study is then presented which suggests ways in which complex attractors could underlie our capacity to reason. The paper ends with a discussion of the efficiency and biological plausibility of the proposals as (...) integration mechanisms for different regions and functions of the brain. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars has often be proclaimed the father of the "theory theory" of psychological knowledge. This article exposes what is true and and what is false in this claim.

In this paper I assess Gopnik and Meltzoff's developmental psychology of science as a contribution to the understanding of scientific development. I focus on two specific aspects of Gopnik and Meltzoff's approach: the relation between their views and recapitulationist views of ontogeny and phylogeny in biology, and their overall conception of cognition as a set of veridical processes. First, I discuss several issues that arise from their appeal to evolutionary biology, focusing specifically on the role of distinctions between ontogeny and (...) phylogeny when appealing to biology for theoretical support. Second, I argue that to presuppose that cognition is veridical or "truth-tropic" can compromise attempts to understand scientific cognition both throughout history and in the present. Finally, I briefly sketch an evolutionary approach to understanding scientific development that contrasts with Gopnik and Meltzoff's. (shrink)

The interaction theory of social cognition contends that intersubjective interaction is characterized by both immersion and irreducibility. This motivates a question about autonomy and self-agency: If I am always caught up in processes of interaction, and interaction always goes beyond me and my ultimate control, is there any room for self-agency? I outline an answer to this question that points to the importance of communicative and narrative practices.

Many philosophers hold that for various reasons there must be psychological laws governing beliefs and desires. One of the few serious examples that they offer is the _belief-desire law_, which states, roughly, that _ceteris paribus_ people do what they believe will satisfy their desires. This paper argues that, in fact, there is no such law. In particular, decision theory does not support the contention that there is such a law.

Many philosophers hold that beliefs and desires are theoretical entities postulated for the sake of predicting and explaining people's behaviors. This paper offers a very different perspective on the nature of beliefs and desires. According to this, the first step is to understand the nature of assertion and command. Then, to understand the nature of belief and desire, what one must do is extend one's understanding of assertion and commandto assertions and commands on behalf of others; for to attribute a (...) belief is to make an assertion on someone's behalf, and to attribute a desire is to make a command on someone's behalf. From this perspective we can recognize that explanation and prediction are not the primary rationale for attributions of beliefs and desires. A number of foundational issues will also be addressed, having to do with cognition, semantics and ontology. (shrink)

I argue that recent developments in animal cognition support the conclusion that HOT theory is consistent with animal consciousness. There seems to be growing evidence that many animals are indeed capable of having I-thoughts, including episodic memory, as well as have the ability to understand the mental states of others.

A number of developmental psychologists have argued for a theory they call the theory theory - a theory of cognitive development that suggests that infants and small children make sense of their world by constructing cognitive representations that have many of the attributes of scientific theories. In this paper I argue that there are indeed close parallels between the activities of children and scientists, but that these parallels will be better understood if one recognizes that both scientists and children are (...) not so much theorists as model builders. (shrink)

_Words_, _Thoughts and Theories _argues that infants and children discover the physical and psychological features of the world by a process akin to scientific inquiry, more or less as conceived by philosophers of science in the 1960s (the theory theory). This essay discusses some of the philosophical background to an alternative, more popular, “modular” or “maturational” account of development, dismisses an array of philosoph- ical objections to the theory theory, suggests that the theory theory offers an undeveloped project for artificial (...) intelligence, and, relying on recent psychological work on causation, offers suggestions about how principles of causal inference may provide a developmental solution to the “frame problem”. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are powerful similarities between cognitive development in children and scientific theory change. These similarities are best explained by postulating an underlying abstract set of rules and representations that underwrite both types of cognitive abilities. In fact, science may be successful largely because it exploits powerful and flexible cognitive devices that were designed by evolution to facilitate learning in young children. Both science and cognitive development involve abstract, coherent systems of entities and rules, theories. In both (...) cases, theories provide predictions, explanations, and interpretations. In both, theories change in characteristic ways in response to counterevidence. These ideas are illustrated by an account of children's developing understanding of the mind. (shrink)

‘Naturalized’ philosophers of mind regularly appeal to the empirical psychological literature in support of the ‘theory-theory’ account of the natural epistemology of mental state ascription (to self and others). It is argued that such appeals are not philosophically neutral, but in fact presuppose the theory-theory account of mental state ascription. It is suggested that a possible explanation of the popularity of the theory-theory account is that it is generally assumed that alternative accounts in terms of introspection (and simulation) presuppose a (...) discredited ‘inner ostensive definition’ account of the meaning of mental state terms. However, the inner ostensive definition account is not the only alternative to the theory-theory account of the meaning of mental state terms, and commitment to a theory-theory account of the meaning of mental state terms does not mandate commitment to a theory-theory account of the epistemology of mental state ascription. (shrink)

Theory theory and simulation theory share the assumption that mental states are unobservable, such that mental state attribution requires an extra psychological step beyond perception. Phenomenologists deny this, contending that we can directly perceive people's mental states. Here I evaluate objections to theory theory and simulation theory as accounts of everyday social perception offered by Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher. I agree that their phenomenological claims have bite at the personal level, distinguishing direct social perception from conscious theorizing and simulation. (...) Their appeals to phenomenology and other arguments do not, however, rule out theory theory or simulation theory as accounts of the sub-personal processes underlying social perception. While I here remain uncommitted about the plausibility of sub-personal theorizing and simulation, I argue that phenomenologists must do more in order to reject these accounts. (shrink)

This is a truly groundbreaking work that examines today’s notions of folk psychology. Bringing together disciplines as various as cognitive science and anthropology, the authors analyze and question key assumptions about the nature, scope and function of folk psychology.

I offer an account of the relation between explanations of behaviour in terms of psychological states and explanations in terms of neural states that: makes it transparent how they can be true together; explains why explanations in terms of psychological states are characteristically of behaviour described in general and relational terms, and explains why certain sorts of neurological investigations undermine psychological explanations of behaviour, while others leave them intact. In the course of the argument, I offer an account of implicit (...) theories. (shrink)

Social cognition researchers have become increasingly interested in the ways that behavioral, physiological, and neural coupling facilitate social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We distinguish two ways of conceptualizing the role of such coupling processes in social cognition: strong and moderate interactionism. According to strong interactionism (SI), low-level coupling processes are alternatives to higher-level individual cognitive processes; the former at least sometimes render the latter superfluous. Moderate interactionism(MI) on the other hand, is an integrative approach. Its guiding assumption is that higher-level (...) cognitive processes are likely to have been shaped by the need to coordinate, modulate, and extract information from low-level coupling processes. In this paper, we present a case study on Möbius Syndrome (MS) in order to contrast SI and MI. We show how MS—a form of congenital bilateral facial paralysis—can be a fruitful source of insight for research exploring the relation between high-level cognition and low-level coupling. Lacking a capacity for facial expression, individuals with MS are deprived of a primary channel for gestural coupling. According to SI, they lack an essential enabling feature for social interaction and interpersonal understanding more generally and thus ought to exhibit severe deficits in these areas. We challenge SI’s prediction and show how MS cases offer compelling reasons for instead adopting MI’s pluralistic model of social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We conclude that investigations of coupling processes within social interaction should inform rather than marginalize or eliminate investigation of higher-level individual cognition. (shrink)

Among theory theorists, it is commonly thought that folk psychological theory is tacitly known. However, folk psychological knowledge has none of the central features of tacit knowledge. But if it is ordinary knowledge, why is it that we have difficulties expressing anything but a handful of folk psychological generalisations? The reason is that our knowledge is of theoretical models and hypotheses, not of universal generalisations. Adopting this alternative view of (scientific) theories, we come to see that, given time and reflection, (...) we can say what we know. (shrink)

Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human minds are designed to operate within a social environment. This leads to (...) a neglect of _norms_ and the processes of _social_ _transmission_ which have an important effect on scientific cognition and cognition more generally. (shrink)

Recent proponents of the ‘theory theory’ of mind often trace its roots back to Wilfrid Sellars’ famous ‘myth of Jones’ in his 1956 article, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’. Sellars developed an account of the intersubjective basis of our knowledge of the inner mental states of both self and others, an account which included the claim that such knowledge is in some sense theoretical knowledge. This paper examines the nature of this claim in Sellars’ original account and its relationship (...) to more recent debates concerning ‘theory of mind’, in particular the theory theory. A close look reveals that Sellars’ original view embodied several distinctions that would enable more recent theory theorists to accommodate certain phenomenological objections that have been raised against that outlook. At the heart of the philosophical issue is an overlooked complexity involved in Sellars’ account of the ‘theory/observation’ distinction, involving a conception of the distinction that is both independently plausible and a key to the issue in dispute. (shrink)

In “How We Know Our Own Minds: The Relationship Between Mindreading and Metacognition,” Peter Carruthers argues for a view according to which first-person awareness of one’s own propositional attitudes is always interpretive, though one’s awareness of “sensory-imagistic” states is not. In this commentary, I criticize Carruthers’ way of drawing the distinction between sensory states and propositional attitudes. Furthermore, I argue for the superiority of a view, which I derive from Wilfrid Sellars, according to which all self-ascriptions of mental states are, (...) at bottom, interpretive—i.e., the outputs of an inferential process that consists in applying a folk-psychological theory to oneself. (shrink)

Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one’s own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity and inferential promiscuity only occur in metarepresentation. It is concluded that, although metarepresentations can redescribe metacognitive (...) contents, metacognition and metarepresentation are functionally distinct. (shrink)

I offer an account of theories useful in addressing the question of whether children are young theoreticians whose development can be regarded as the product of theory change. I argue that to regard a set of propositions as a theory is to be committed to evaluating that set in terms of its explanatory power. If theory change is the substance of cognitive development, we should see patterns of affect and arousal consonant with the emergence and resolution of explanation-seeking curiosity. Affect (...) has largely been ignored as a potential source of support or disconfirmation for the "theory theory" of development. (shrink)

According to embodied cognition, the philosophical and empirical literature on theory of mind is misguided. Embodied cognition rejects the idea that social cognition requires theory of mind. It regards the intramural debate between the Theory Theory and the Simulation Theory as irrelevant, and it dismisses the empirical studies on theory of mind as ill conceived and misleading. Embodied cognition provides a novel deflationary account of social cognition that does not depend on theory of mind. In this chapter, l describe embodied (...) cognition’s alternative to theory of mind and discuss three challenges it faces. (shrink)

A dialogue between someone who finds Sellars's Rylean myth in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" quite implausible and another who defends it.

Jill de Villiers has argued that children's mastery of sentential complements plays a crucial role in enabling them to succeed at false-belief tasks. Josef Perner has disputed that and has argued that mastery of false-belief tasks requires an understanding of the multiplicity of perspectives. This paper attempts to resolve the debate by explicating attributions of desires and beliefs as extensions of the linguistic practices of making commands and assertions, respectively. In terms of these linguistic practices one can explain why desire-talk (...) will precede belief-talk and why even older children will have difficulty attributing incompatible desires. (shrink)

n this paper, I examine the charge that Gopnik and Meltzoff’s ‘Child as Scientist’ program, outlined and defended in their 1997 book Words, Thoughts and Theories is vitiated by a form of ‘cognitive individualism’ about science. Although this charge has often been leveled at Gopnik and Meltzoff’s work, it has rarely been developed in any detail. -/- I suggest that we should distinguish between two forms of cognitive individualism which I refer to as ‘ontic’ and ‘epistemic’ cognitive individualism (OCI and (...) ECI respectively). I then argue - contra Ronald Giere – that Gopnik and Meltzoff’s commitment to OCI is relatively unproblematic, since it is an easily detachable part of their view. By contrast, and despite their explicit discussion of the issue, their commitment to ECI is much more problematic. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discussions of our capacity to attribute mental states to other human beings, and to produce accurate predictions and informative explanations of their behavior which make reference to the content of those states have focused on two apparently contrasting ways in which we might hope to account for these abilities. The first is that of regarding our competence as being under-girded by our grasp of a tacit psychological theory. The second builds on the idea that in trying to get (...) a grip on the mental lives of others we might be able to draw on the fact that we are ourselves subjects of mental states in order to simulate their mental processes. Call these the theory view and the simulation view. In this paper I wish to discuss an argument—which I shall call Collapse—to the effect that if our capacities can be explained in the way that the simulationist supposes then they can also be explained along lines that the advocate of the theory view favours. I am not the first person with simulationist sympathies to have addressed this argument. However, my response is somewhat less concessive than others in the literature: while they attempt to soften its force by attempting to reformulate the simulationist view in a way that evades the conclusion of the argument, I attempt to meet it head on and to show that it does not even succeed in refuting the version of simulationism which it takes as its target. (shrink)

This was originally written and presented at the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers on Folk Psychology vs. Mental Simulation: How Minds Understand Minds, run by Robert Gordon at the University of Missouri - St. Louis, June-July 1999. It has been only lightly revised since, and should be considered a rough draft. Needless to say, the ideas herein owe a lot to what I learned at the seminar from Robert Gordon and the other participants, particularly Jim (...) Garson. However, any errors are my responsibility alone. (shrink)

This volume presents essays on self-consciousness by prominent psychologists, cognitive neurologists, and philosophers.