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The future of social cognition: paradigms, concepts and experiments

  • S.I.: Future of Social Cognition
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Abstract

Since the publication of Premack and Woodruff’s classic paper introducing the notion of a ‘theory of mind’ (Premack and Woodruff in Behav Brain Sci 1(4):515–526, 1978), interdisciplinary research in social cognition has witnessed the development of theory–theory, simulation theory, hybrid approaches, and most recently interactionist and perceptual accounts of other minds. The challenges that these various approaches present for each other and for research in social cognition range from adequately defining central concepts to designing experimental paradigms for testing empirical hypotheses. But is there any approach that promises to dominate future interdisciplinary research in social cognition? Is social cognition witnessing a gradual paradigm shift where hitherto grounding notions such as theory of mind are no longer viewed as explanatorily necessary? Or have we simply lost our way in attempting to devise adequate experimental setups that could sway the debate in favour of one of the contending accounts? This special issue addresses these questions in an attempt to discover what the future holds for interdisciplinary research in social cognition.

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Notes

  1. “Think of commonsense psychology as a term-introducing scientific theory, though one invented long before there was any institution as professional science. Collect all the platitudes you can think of regarding the causal relations of mental states, sensory stimuli, and motor responses. ... Include only platitudes which are common knowledge among us—everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on. For the meanings of our words are common knowledge, and I am going to claim that the names of mental states derive their meaning from these platitudes” (Lewis 1972/1980, p. 212).

  2. For detailed discussions see Bohl and Gangopadhyay (2014) and Gangopadhyay and Miyahara (2014).

  3. ST’s characterisation of mindreading as an interactive process is disputed by emerging non-ToM views such as Interaction theory, see Sect. 4.

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Acknowledgments

This special issue was partly supported by Marie Curie Actions—Intra-European Fellowship (FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IEF, project no. 298633). I would like to thank the speakers and participants at the conference on “The Future of Social Cognition: Paradigms, Concepts and Experiments”, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (12th–14th June 2014) organised within the Marie Curie Fellowship. Also, thanks to Alois Pichler, Wittgenstein Archives Bergen, Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen for providing me with a workspace for part of the time I worked on this special issue.

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  1. Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Nivedita Gangopadhyay

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Gangopadhyay, N. The future of social cognition: paradigms, concepts and experiments. Synthese 194, 655–672 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1162-5

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