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Embodying the False-Belief Tasks

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Abstract

Embodied approaches to mindreading have tended to define themselves in contrast to cognitive approaches to social mindreading. One side effect of this has been a lack of engagement with key areas in the study of social cognition—in particular the topic of how we gain an understanding of the referential nature of others’ thoughts, and how that understanding develops from infancy. I argue that embodied accounts of mindreading are well equipped to enter into this debate, by making use of the notion of a joint mental state, but that doing so will require taking a less antagonistic attitude towards mainstream cognitive approach.

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Notes

  1. For further sub-divisions, and very informative overviews of the field, see Gergeley 2010 and Caron 2009.

  2. For the standard false-belief test, see Wimmer and Perner (1983); Baron-Cohen et al. (1985); Wellman et al. (2001) and Doherty (2009, Ch 2).

  3. There are, to my knowledge, two standard methods for determining the understanding of pre-linguistic children: Anticipatory Looking and Violation of Expectations. Within cognitive neuroscience there is also an increasing reliance on Event-Related Potentials.

  4. Other evidence of relevance here is that to do with infant’s understanding of goals and intentions (see Caron 2009: 85–90 for a review), and their apparent understanding of other’s understanding of identity (Scott and Baillargeon 2009). Due to space considerations, I have omitted reference to these factors (although the question of identity is addressed in the section “Embodying the False Belief Tasks”). Inclusion of them would paint a fuller picture, but would not significantly affect the ideas discussed in this paper.

  5. For instance, Baldwin 1995; Moll et al. 2008; Liebal et al. 2009; Király 2009

  6. It is worth noting, however, that these are two separate demands, and it’s not clear why they should both be thought of as necessary conditions on psychological understanding (the authors state Davidson as an inspiration here). I shall attempt to exploit this gap in the section “Embodying the False Belief Tasks”, where I argue for a form of psychological understanding that is propositional, rather than extensional, but not necessarily holistic.

  7. For related claims see Campbell 2002; Ratcliffe 2007; Eilan 2007; Seeman 2008.

  8. I am indebted to comments from an anonymous referee for pressing the clarification in this paragraph.

  9. This is essentially the causal condition that John Campbell (2002) places on joint attention.

  10. The experiential correlate of this view is spelled out by John Campbell: “… the individual experiential state that you are in, when you and another are jointly attending to something, is an experiential state that you could not be in, were it not for the other person attending to the object. The other person enters into your experience as a constituent of it, as co-attender, and the other person could not play that role in your experience except as being co-attender” (Campbell 2002: 163). My concern here, however, is with the cognitive elements of the account, rather than the experiential or phenomenological elements. For more on how the phenomenology of joint attention might be understood, see Seeman 2008, 2010.

  11. This is not the only way of cashing out the mode of a psychological attitude (although it is perhaps the standard one in philosophical cognitive science). An alternative—or at least different—way of doing so would be in terms of a direction of fit (Searle 1983).

  12. In various ways, infants have an innate tendency to react differentially to objects with face-like features that behave in a contingent manner towards the infant (Johnson 2005)

  13. The infant is further incapable of the kind of holistic thinking that is involved in the second-tier. Although such thinking is essential for full-blown mature mindreading, it is a further claim (unargued for by Apperly and Butterfill themselves, who rely, not unreasonably, on the authority of Donald Davidson) that there could not be an intermediate (atomistic or molecular) form of psychological reasoning. The position I outline here allows for such a halfway house.

  14. It is, for example, a datum within developmental psychology, that joint attention has a pivotal role to play in word learning (e.g., Baldwin 1995; Sabbagh and Baldwin 2005; Tomasello 2008). For suggestions about how joint attentional interaction might be central to normative learning see Carpendale and Lewis (2006) and Tomasello (2009).

  15. Butterfill and Apperly do have a response to this: they claim that the infants are only tracking the agent’s capacity to make a distinction between types of objects (a detachable penguin and an undetachable penguin), and not the identity of the individual objects (this detachable penguin and that undetachable penguin). Although this might save their theory, it does have the air of a post hoc explanation. Firstly, it is not clear why the infants might understand the agent as regarding the penguins as types rather than individuals (the infants themselves presumably do not, so they have no particular reason to regard the agent as doing so). Secondly, the explanation is a hostage to experimental fortune—it would take seemingly minimal changes to the experimental paradigm to make it reasonably evident to all parties (agent and infant) that only two objects are involved, and that the agent has a particular attachment to hiding the key in that penguin.

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Acknowledgment

Thanks to two anonymous referees for very helpful suggestions and comments.

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    Michael Wilby

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Wilby, M. Embodying the False-Belief Tasks. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 519–540 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9222-2

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