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Action, mindreading and embodied social cognition

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Abstract

One of the central insights of the embodied cognition (EC) movement is that cognition is closely tied to action. In this paper, I formulate an EC-inspired hypothesis concerning social cognition. In this domain, most think that our capacity to understand and interact with one another is best explained by appeal to some form of mindreading. I argue that prominent accounts of mindreading likely contain a significant lacuna. Evidence indicates that what I call an agent’s actional processes and states—her goals, needs, intentions, desires, and so on—likely play important roles in and for mindreading processes. If so, a full understanding of mindreading processes and their role in cognition more broadly will require an understanding of how actional mental processes interact with, influence, or take part in mindreading processes.

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Notes

  1. While mindreading theorists have not reached consensus on the nature of the processes that undergird mindreading—some think the processes are simulatory, others think the processes involve the application of a certain kind of theory, and others go for a hybrid of simulation and theory—for the bulk of this paper, I will treat them singly.

  2. There are more radical versions of this spectatorial complaint. According to one recent strand of embodied social cognition research, paying close attention to interaction motivates a move away from considering individual minds as loci of sociocognitive explanation. De Jaegher et al. (2010), for example, draw a distinction between individualist and interactionist explanations, as follows. Individualist explanations rely entirely on individual factors such as neural mechanisms and allow social interaction “at most a contextual role” (2010, p. 441). Interactionist explanations, however, rely on interaction “playing an enabling or constitutive role” (2010, p. 441). De Jaegher, Di Paolo and Gallagher argue that we should pursue interactionist explanations. The claim here is that social cognition is not reducible to the machinations of individual minds, and thus that social cognition research should explore the ways that the dynamics of interactive processes between agents couple individuals in crucial ways. On this account, social interactions take on a life of their own, exhibiting properties not reducible to the properties of individual cognitive mechanisms. As such, cases of social interaction represent the constitution of “an autonomous self-sustaining organization in the domain of relational dynamics” (2010, p. 442), and deserve explanations appropriate to their level of organization. It is worth noting that though I focus on individualist explanations, nothing I say is inconsistent with the potential importance of interactionist explanations. Indeed, it seems to me that both individualist and interactionist explanations will have roles to play in a mature understanding of social cognition.

  3. Regarding demotion arguments, see Spaulding (2010). Suffice it to say that I regard mindreading as important enough to worry about the proper characterization of mindreading processes.

  4. My hypothesis bears some similarity to a claim made by proponents of an enactive account of social cognition. According to McGann and De Jaegher, for example, “There is no such thing as neutral or objective perception, only valued and perspectival interaction, structured by the goals of the agent and the contingencies contextualized within those valued actions” (2009, p. 425). I am unsure, however, whether my approach is compatible, more generally, with the enactive one. McGann and De Jaegher, for example, go on to develop their account in the direction of the antiindividualist line canvassed in footnote 2. Further, the enactive approach brings with it a suite of interrelated concepts (e.g., autonomy, sense-making, social skill, etc.) and views (e.g., on perception, the constitution of consciousness, naturalistic value, the nature of cognition, etc.) that complicate matters considerably. Given my specific (and relatively modest) aims in this paper, I can afford to leave consideration of such issues for another time.

  5. Of course, Carruthers does not argue explicitly against the idea I’m pressing. Rather, a spectatorial account of the mindreading system’s functioning is taken for granted. It remains to be seen whether the influence of agential considerations could be made to fit within extant accounts of mindreading like Carruthers’.

  6. Some Gibsonians argue that our perception of affordances is nonrepresentational—a claim taken by many to undermine the explanatory value of the notion of affordances. However, we need not be antirepresentationalist to find the notion of affordances useful. On this issue, see Scarantino (2003).

  7. Some proponents of an embodied social cognition criticize studies like these for studying agents in environments that are too static. The idea is that the importance of interaction for social cognition might be best seen when agents are interacting with real agents (see, e.g., De Jaegher et al. 2010). I agree that studying interaction with real agents might reveal interesting features that interaction with static representations—i.e., photographs—cannot (see, e.g., Shockley et al. 2009; Richardson et al. 2007). The extent to which such research problematizes the fruitfulness of mindreading approaches is an issue for future empirical and conceptual work to address. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Mike Kaschak and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as members of the Mindreading Reading Group for helpful discussion on relevant issues.

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  1. Florida State University, 151 Dodd Hall, FSU, Tallahassee, FL, 32306-1500, USA

    Joshua Shepherd

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Shepherd, J. Action, mindreading and embodied social cognition. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 507–518 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9241-z

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