Abstract
Recent accounts of mindreading—i.e., the human capacity to attribute mental states to interpret, explain, and predict behavior—have suggested that it has evolved through cultural rather than biological evolution. Although these accounts describe the role of culture in the ontogenetic development of mindreading, they neglect the question of the cultural origins of mindreading in human prehistory. We discuss four possible models of this, distinguished by the role they posit for culture: (1) the standard evolutionary psychology model (Carruthers), (2) the individualist empiricist model (Wellman, Gopnik), (3) the cultural empiricist model (Heyes), and (4) the radical socio-cultural constructivist model, which we favor. We motivate model (4) by arguing that many forms of mental state ascription do not serve the function of simply describing inner states causally responsible for the behavior of a cognitive agent; rather, they relate the agent to her environment by characterizing her practical commitments. Making these practical commitments explicit has an important regulatory function in that it supports action coordination and alignment on joint goals. We propose a model of how the ascription of mental states may have evolved as a linguistic device to perform exactly this function of making agents’ practical commitments explicit.
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Notes
Mindshaping practices include such distinctively human phenomena as “overimitation”, explicit pedagogy, norm institution and enforcement, and narrative (self-) constitution.
Of course, as one reviewer notes, folk conceptions of mental states will likely play some role in scientific psychology, e.g., as ways of describing some forms of psychological functioning to be the target of mechanistic explanations. However, this does not necessarily vindicate the claim that mental states as the folk conceive them exist independently of folk practices of attributing such mental states. Instead, the forms of psychological functioning that are well described in terms of folk psychological concepts may be artefacts of folk practices of attributing mental states that fall under these concepts. Thanks to the regulative or “mindshaping” mechanisms and practices that accompany such attributions, they may turn into self-fulfilling prophecies, structuring psychological functioning in ways that respect the constraints that constitute them.
Incidentally, we note that this is not in tension with our previous claim that there is variability in folk psychologies. In order for a folk psychological framework to help mitigate massive individual variation in the behavior of individuals, it is not necessary for different cultures to employ the same framework, but only that members of each culture apply some common framework to other members.
Brandom argues that belief attributions, for instance, inevitably have what philosophers call a “de re – de dicto” ambiguity, because their function is to make explicit the varying commitments of different interlocutors concerning the same subject matter. When we say that Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is not Superman, we are not attributing a flatly self-contradictory belief, because we mean that Lois Lane believes of Clark Kent (the de re component) that he is not the same person as Superman (the de dicto component). Roughly, the de re component captures the common referent about which we might disagree with Lois, while the de dicto component captures Lois’s idiosyncratic perspective, or set of commitments about that referent.
“Young children … [utter ‘[I] want ϕ,’ in order to] request or demand a ϕ only when they actually want a ϕ” (Gordon 1995, p. 358).
“I do not deny that explanations are often couched in terms of beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes; or that predictions, particularly predictions of the behavior of others, are often made on the basis of attributions of such states. Moreover, as functionalist accounts of folk psychology have emphasized, common discourse about beliefs and other mental states presupposes that they enter into a multitude of causal and nomological relations. I don’t want to deny this either.” (Gordon 1986, p. 165).
These relations are normative ones, i.e., constituted by the norms of practical rationality, and hence mastering them is not necessarily the same as characterizing an agent’s inner psychological reality. However, due to the regulative or “mindshaping” roles ascribing such normative relations play, they typically come to characterize agents’ inner psychological realities, to the extent that such regulative and mindshaping regimes are effective. This is precisely how a radically socio-culturally constructivist ontology of mental states differs from the alternatives: as with text reading, mindreading tracks facts that are artefacts of the regulative cultural practices with which it is interdependent.
We may also call what Andrew is going to realize the goal of his action. Importantly, however, goals so conceived identify the state of affairs that must hold in order for the practical reasoning to be successful; they do not describe psychological states (see, e.g., our discussion in Fenici and Zawidzki (2016), as well as the discussion of Geurts below). As Canfield (2007, p. 50) argues: “We often act with an aim. But to speak of someone’s aim is not to make a psychological claim”.
As we argued in Sect. 2 (and we will repeat below), we use the word ‘commitment’ to indicate the set of practical and discursive entitlements and obligations that follow from one’s playing a role in a social practice. In this sense, ‘commitment’ is a deontic category, which is independent of the psychological dispositions of the performer.
In particular, Skyrms focuses on non-psychological facts like the network structure of populations, which make it more likely that individuals with complementary coordination strategies interact, leading to population-level equilibria where such strategies are stable against invasion by incompatible strategies. In such situations, there can be successful coordination without mindreading. Skyrms (2010) contains many real-world examples of biological signaling conventions that succumb to this form of analysis.
“It is sometimes supposed that goals are psychological entities, but that is not how I understand the term” (Geurts 2019, footnote 4).
Interestingly, Geurts also argues that it is possible to explain the verbal ascription of mental states as particular commitments that one can assume (either with herself as private commitments or with others as social commitments). More precisely, a (self-)ascribed intention can be defined as a commitment Ia,b p that is (i) private (if a = b) or social (if a ≠ b), and (ii) telic, i.e., p refers to a state of affairs that a aims to realize. Similarly, a (self-)ascribed belief can be defined as a commitment Ba,b p that is (i) private (if a = b) or social (if a ≠ b), and (ii) atelic, i.e., the truth of p significantly constraints a’s actions without she aims to realize it.
In addition, it is no part of our claim that human coordination and communication do not require sophisticated, perhaps species-specific cognitive capacities. In particular, we are persuaded that our natural abilities to track actions, their goals, and the information that rationally constrains them, precede and make possible our coordinative and communicative feats, and are in many respects unique among animals. Human beings are also likely unique in various capacities to learn from each other, and these also make human-style coordination and communication possible. However, this is not equivalent to the claim that mindreading, in terms of the concepts of folk psychology, precedes and makes possible human-style coordination and communication. There is little reason to think that such folk concepts can be used to accurately characterize the complex, natural, socio-cognitive states that make human coordination and communication possible (see Fenici 2015a; Fenici and Zawidzki 2016, and the discussion in Fenici 2015b for our account of the nature and the ontogenetic development of these abilities).
Some may notice that our proposal strikingly resonates with that of Pettit (2018). We greatly thank an anonymous reviewer for indicating this work to us, and remark that we reached our conclusion independently of it.
As we noted above, due to the regulative roles of such commitments, such assumptions often end up impacting the psychologies of such agents. Our point, however, is that the use of mental state ascriptions in order to track such constructed psychologies derives from their prior, commitment-expressing uses, and this shows how mental states and their ascription can be interdependent, in the way that reading and constructing texts is, i.e., it constitutes a radically socio-culturally constructivist account of the origins of mindreading and mental states.
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Fenici, M., Zawidzki, T.W. The origins of mindreading: how interpretive socio-cognitive practices get off the ground. Synthese 198, 8365–8387 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02577-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02577-4