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Seeing mind in action

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Abstract

Much recent work on social cognition and empathy in philosophy of mind and cognitive science has been guided by the assumption that minds are composed of intracranial phenomena, perceptually inaccessible and thus unobservable to everyone but their owners. I challenge this claim. I defend the view that at least some mental states and processes—or at least some parts of some mental states and processes—are at times visible, capable of being directly perceived by others. I further argue that, despite its initial implausibility, this view receives robust support from several strands of empirical research.

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Notes

  1. For example, Alan Leslie writes that “One of the most important powers of the human mind is to conceive of and think about itself and other minds. Because the mental states of others (and indeed ourselves) are completely hidden from the senses, they can only ever be inferred” (Leslie 2004, p. 164). In a recent handbook of social psychology, Nicholas Epley and Adam Waytz write that “[p]eople do not have direct information about others’ mental states and must therefore base their inferences on whatever information about others’ mental states they do have access to. This requires a leap from observable behavior to unobservable mental states that is so common and routine that people often seem unaware that they are making a leap” (Epley and Waytz 2009, p. 499). Epley and Waytz fail to even consider the possibility that the reason people are often unaware of making an inferential “leap” of the sort they describe is not due to the habitual nature of the process but rather the fact that, very often, there is no leap being made in the first place.

  2. Within the empathy literature, there are multiple and often conflicting definitions of empathy at play—a problem which complicates any appraisal of competing approaches. Daniel Batson observes that “[t]he term empathy is currently applied to more than a half-dozen phenomena,” and that “each is a conceptually distinct, stand-alone psychological state” (Batson 2009, p. 3). Additionally, the concepts of “sympathy” (feeling with another’s suffering and desiring to alleviate it) and “empathy” (comprehension of another’s experience) are often run together, furthering confusion (Wispé 1986). Finally, even within the ranks of DP defenders there is disagreement over how the term empathy ought to be used. For instance, Dan Zahavi (following phenomenological orthodoxy) seems to equate empathy and DP (Zahavi 2008, 2010) whereas Shaun Gallagher wants to reserve empathy for a higher-level, more developed understanding of an individual and their situation (Gallagher, personal communication). While these distinctions are interesting, I am not here concerned with definitional issues. Rather, I am concerned with the core DP thesis at the heart of phenomenologically motivated accounts of social cognition—and not, then, the question of whether or not “empathy” is the best term to use in accounting for this phenomenon.

  3. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty insists that “We must abandon the fundamental prejudice according to which the psyche is that which is accessible only to myself and cannot be seen from the outside. My psyche is not a series of “states of consciousness” that are rigorously closed in on themselves and inaccessible to anyone but me. My consciousness is turned primarily toward the world, turned toward things; it is above all a relation to the world. The other’s consciousness as well is chiefly a certain way of comporting himself toward the world. Thus it is in his conduct, in the manner in which the other deals with the world, that I will be able to discover his consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, pp. 116–117).

  4. For some critical appraisals of this view, see, for example, Goldman and de Vignemont (2009), Herschbach (2008), and Spaulding (2010).

  5. In a similar vein, Scheler writes that, “Our immediate perceptions of our fellow-men do not relate to their bodies (unless we happen to be engaged in a medical examination), nor yet to their ‘selves’ or ‘souls’. What we perceive are integral wholes, whose intuitive content is not immediately resolved in terms of external or internal perception” (Scheler 1954, p. 261). Likewise, John McDowell (following Wittgenstein) endorses a similar (dis)solution to the problem of other minds, one which involves rejecting the distinction between bodily behavior and inner mental states. McDowell argues that when we perceive others, we perceive integrated human beings—and not mere behavior—including, then, facts about their mental life (McDowell 1998, p. 384). However, since McDowell’s analysis is concerned with the epistemic warrant provided by perceptual experience more generally (i.e., not simply our experience of others), his account remains underdeveloped on this point and thus also harbors a similar ambiguity.

  6. Amodal perception is the experience of objects as completed when they are partially occluded. The completed content is amodally given to perceptual consciousness since the visually occluded content (the backside or parts of objects occluded by other objects) is nevertheless experientially present (Durgin et al. 1995). Husserl puts the point this way: “there belongs to every external perception its reference from the “genuinely perceived” sides of the object of perception to the sides “also meant”—not yet perceived, but only anticipated and, at first, with a non-intuitional emptiness (as the sides that are “coming” now perceptually)… Furthermore, the perception has horizons made up of other possibilities of perception, as perceptions that we could have… if, for example, we turned our eyes that way instead of this, or if we were to step forward or to one side, and so forth” (Husserl 1960, p. 44). A similar idea motivates Noë’s sensorimotor account of perceptual consciousness, where the experience of amodal content consists in our knowledge of the sensory effects of movement in relation to the occluded object (Noë 2004, 2009).

  7. Note that I am not yet arguing that DP is correct in its portrayal of how we see other minds. For now, I am simply showing why in virtue of its stated aims DP ought to reject the co-presence thesis.

  8. But see Stout (2011) for an argument that we can become perceptually sensitive to dispositions by interacting with them—that is, by engaging with others and participating in a joint process of emotional expression.

  9. See Dretske’s (1969) distinction between primary and secondary epistemic seeing. See McNeill 2011.

  10. Smith concedes this point but argues that, given the complexity of our mental life and the various functional roles of different mental states, it is plausible that we can never perceptually “latch onto” the complete functional profile of an instantiated mental property and thus perceive this property as fully determinate. However, this is an intuitive result, Smith insists, since it leaves room for further discovery of another’s exact state of mind (Smith 2010, p. 746). While it is certainly true that there is always room to discover further facts about another’s mental life—the proposal I argue for certainly acknowledges this, as we’ll see below—this response does not change the fact that, according to this line of argument, another’s mental life remains in principle unobservable.

  11. In what follows, I use “mental states,” “mental processes,” “mental phenomena,” etc. interchangeably.

  12. To be clear, it is not immediately clear that some of the phenomenologists mentioned do not already endorse some version of the constitution thesis. For example, one can assemble various passages in Merleau-Ponty (1964) that appear to endorse this thesis or something very close to it. Likewise, Gallagher’s discussion of the cognitive function of gesture, for instance, anticipates some of the externalist points raised below (see, for example, Gallagher 2005, pp. 107–129). Zahavi (affirming a view he attributes to Scheler) argues that affective and emotional states are not simply qualities of subjective experience but are “expressed in bodily gestures and actions, and they thereby become visible to others” (Zahavi 2008, p. 518). My point, once more, is this: speaking of behavior as expressive of mentality requires that one disambiguate how “expression” is being used to avoid conflating various senses of the term. Within the phenomenological tradition, this has not always happened—hence, my attempt in this paper to do just this. Of course, there is an additional prescriptive dimension to my discussion since I suggest there is a sense of expression (the constitutive sense) that ought to be used in this context, independently of the exegetical question of whether or not other phenomenologists have in fact used it this way.

  13. Since I am arguing that we do, at times, directly perceive mental states within patterns of expressive behavior, I will focus on bodily externalism. For arguments that the space surrounding the body as well as some of the things in it can be appropriated as a cognitive resource—i.e., environmental externalism—see, for example, Clark (2008), Hutchins (1995), Kirsh (1995), Krueger (2011), Menary (2007), and Scribner (1986).

  14. Some individuals with congenital absence of limbs report the experience of gesturing. However, the phantoms are only reported to be active in contexts involving communicative, and not instrumental, actions (Brugger et al. 2000; Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998). Additionally, congenitally blind speakers gesture both alone and when speaking to others—including others they also know to be blind (Iverson and Goldin-Meadow 1998, 2001).

  15. See Clark (2008, pp. 123–131) for related discussion.

  16. Within the extended cognition literature, the move from parity arguments (arguing that, in extended cognitive systems, inner and outer states and processes function in similar ways) to complementarity arguments (arguing that external states or processes need not replicate the formats or dynamics of inner processes but might rather exhibit complementary properties enabling their harmonious integration) signals a move from “first-wave” to “second-wave” extended mind arguments (Sutton 2010).

  17. I revisit this idea in “The coupling-constitution objection.”

  18. Pierre Jacob objects that DP, in denying that mental states are unobservable, equates mentality with behavior and thus collapses into a kind of crude behaviorism (Jacob 2011). See Krueger and Overgaard (2011) for a much longer discussion of and response to this and several related objections.

  19. Rowland Stout (2010, 2011) argues that, in order to take seriously the direct realist claim that to see facial expressions is to see emotions, we must think of facial expressions not as static signatures (i.e., causal upshots) of ostensibly “inner” emotions but rather as part of an ongoing emotional process. Though Stout frames emotional expression differently than I do, our views are, I think, nevertheless relatively close to one another. For example, Stout writes that, “[e]motional expression is a process of dynamic unfolding of changes in the face and other aspects of behavior; and it is a process that involves interaction with the world around and responsiveness to feedback from that world” (Stout 2010, p. 40). I am in full agreement. Elsewhere, I consider at length the fundamentally interactive character of social cognition, including emotional expression (Krueger 2011). And though in this paper I speak of gestures and facial expressions as proper parts of cognition and emotion, I also want to emphasize the fundamentally processual character of cognition and emotion. As the previous discussion as well as the discussion below suggests to see gestures and facial expressions is indeed to see parts—but not static parts or signatures but rather parts of ongoing, dynamic, and distributed processes. Stout’s view is also helpful in responding to the Humean objection that we are never aware of processes, only individual stages of processes (see Stout 2010, pp. 37–40).

  20. The term “representation” is a notoriously slippery term in cognitive science. Here, I simply mean that gestures can provide concrete images of various thinking strategies in action: for example, a younger learner can show with gesture how to solve a particular math problem even if they lack the vocabulary to fully articulate their strategy. This visuo-spatial format allows gestures to encode strategic information in rich, stable, highly configurable ways, thus giving others access to some of the details of what is being thought (i.e., content)—and not, then, simply the fact that thought is happening. I touch on these representational qualities of gesture a bit later in “What do we see? Some objections to DP”. My thanks to Rasmus Thybo Jensen for pushing for further clarification.

  21. Perceptual sensitivity to gestures is also crucial within investigative interviews—such as forensic interviews used for legal purposes—since spontaneous gestures can convey important additional information not explicitly found within a speaker’s utterances (Broaders and Goldin-Meadow 2010).

  22. In light of these considerations, I need to qualify an earlier objection I made during the discussion of the amodal thesis in “Empathy and direct social perception” and concede that there is a sense in which another’s mental life can be disclosed in a manner analogous to my moving around or manipulating a tomato to bring its occluded backside to perceptual presence. If gestures are the material vehicles for some cognitive processes, it follows that I can utilize the same sensorimotor skills to access hidden or unattended aspects of these processes the same way I can hidden or unattended aspects of solid opaque objects like tomatoes and chairs. I can crane my neck, move around, and achieve a better view on, for example, a student’s gesture-speech mismatch. However, unlike with the amodal thesis, I am, quite literally, getting a better view of (part of) the cognitive process itself—again, the cognitive process as it plays out in the visuo-spatial dynamics of the student’s gestures—and not simply an amodally present aspect.

  23. I am grateful to Rasmus Thybo Jensen and an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.

  24. To drive this point home, a reviewer offers the following related objection: grant that organizing the spatial configuration of our local environments eases our computational burden and thus in some sense extends the mind out of the head into the world. The extended mind theorist need not say that in perceiving organized environments or the various tools (e.g., Otto’s notebook) used to organize and navigate them I perceive another’s mentality. I have my doubts, however. To be clear, seeing Otto’s notebook sitting on a table is not to see Otto’s mind. But the extended mind theorist would surely say that, in seeing Otto use his notebook (to navigate to MOMA, for example), I am in fact seeing genuine cognitive activity; and insofar as the notebook is a constitutive part of this cognitive activity, I am therefore seeing part of a mind in action. The notebook is not magically cognitive in and of itself. However, when it is used by a cognitive subject to encode, manipulate, and/or transform the informational structure of their environment such that this action discloses further information or makes available operations (i.e., cognitive capacities) not previously available to the subject—this is, recall, the idea at the heart of the extended mind thesis—it’s not clear to me that the extended mind theorist is not committed to saying that seeing Otto’s notebook in this context is thus to see part of Otto’s mind in action.

  25. Merleau-Ponty speaks similarly of a “circular causality” coupling organism and environment (Merleau-Ponty 1963, p. 15).

  26. Of course, an air conditioning system and its constituent parts are designed to function in very specific and relatively fixed ways. So, they lack the adaptability, autonomy, and flexibility characteristic of human cognitive systems.

  27. Lawrence Shapiro christens this the “Process-Constituent Fallacy” (Shapiro 2011, p. 181).

  28. Specifying what these complementary properties are, of course, is crucial. But this is an empirical question. All that is necessary for DP is to establish that, within an emotional system, inner (neurological, psychological, phenomenological) and outer (behavioral) processes a times play complementary roles in the realization of some cognitive and emotional processes.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for comments from audience members in Lyon, Copenhagen, and Dublin on earlier versions of this paper. I am also very grateful for the detailed and careful criticisms of two anonymous reviewers. They raised a number of strong objections and offered numerous suggestions for improving the paper’s main argument. Finally, Rasmus Thybo Jensen’s careful reading of multiple drafts of this paper was exceedingly helpful. This final version owes much to his efforts. I am very grateful for his work, both on this paper as well as his efforts in organizing this special issue.

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Krueger, J. Seeing mind in action. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 149–173 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9226-y

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