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Is mindreading a gadget?

  • The Cultural Evolution of Human Social Cognition
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Abstract

Non-cognitive gadgets are fancy tools shaped to meet specific, local needs. Cecilia Heyes defines cognitive gadgets as dedicated psychological mechanisms (e.g. cooking and sporting expertise) created through social interactions and culturally, not genetically, inherited by humans. She has boldly proposed that many human cognitive mechanisms (including imitation, numeracy, literacy, language and mindreading) are gadgets. If true, these claims would have far-reaching implications for our scientific understanding of human social cognition. Here we assess Heyes’s cognitive gadget approach as it applies to mindreading. We do not think that the evidence supports Heyes’s thought-provoking thesis that human children are taught to read minds the way they are taught to read words. We highlight a potential circularity lurking behind this analogy, and we explain why we are unpersuaded by Heyes’s anti-mentalistic proposal for handling data inconsistent with the gadget view, which others take to be evidence for mindreading in human infancy. We conclude that while human minds may well be filled with gadgets, mindreading is unlikely to be one of them.

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Notes

  1. We assume for the sake of argument that the distinction between social cognitive instincts and social cognitive gadgets is exhaustive, but we do not accept it in actuality. We believe instead that instincts and gadgets are not a dichotomy but instead two end-points of a continuum. See Sperber (2019) and Del Giudice (2019) for elaboration.

  2. Quite probably not all advocates of either of these schools of thoughts would agree with Heyes’s characterization (see also Morin 2019). We will not enter into these debates here.

  3. Cf. the famous Sally-Anne task first designed by Wimmer and Perner (1983) and adapted by Baron-Cohen et al. (1985).

  4. To be clear, we are only claiming that it is possible (not ruled out by extant data) that cultural variations in the development of mindreading reflect variations in the frequencies of certain mental state terms across cultural-linguistic groups. We are not claiming this has been experimentally demonstrated. Further experimental work would be needed to test this possibility.

  5. As we shall argue shortly, it might also reflect differences in folk psychological theories, which should not be confused with differences in mindreading.

  6. It is an open question what the full effects of deafness are on the social cognition of human infants and children. For example, in a non-verbal false-belief test based on anticipatory looking, Meristo et al. (2012) found a contrast between the performance of typically developing hearing 23-month-old toddlers and deaf 23-month-old toddlers of hearing parents who lacked proficiency with sign language. The hearing toddlers accurately gazed in both the true- and the false-belief conditions, but deaf children gazed at the non-empty location in both the true- and the false-belief conditions. These findings might be taken to vindicate Heyes’s claim that children learn to read others’ minds from conversation with knowledgeable adults; but another possibility is that these findings reflect a more immature capacity to disengage visual attention from a target’s actual location in deaf toddlers than in hearing toddlers (cf. Southgate and Vernetti 2014). This is clearly a topic where further research is needed.

  7. While norms governing writing are likely to be conventional, it is quite unlikely that norms of reasoning and justifications are equally conventional.

  8. Notice that by the age most children pass verbal false-belief tasks (which Heyes takes to be a hallmark of mindreading), they are still unable to read words fluently—a disparity that surprisingly does not seem to worry Heyes.

  9. Heyes (2016) offers some reasons for thinking that eye contact, contingencies, infant-directed speech, gaze cuing, and rational imitation might not be genetic adaptations for teaching. But she does not meet the specific challenge of explaining how pupils could fulfill their teachers’ communicative intention without mindreading.

  10. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this latter problem and also for his or her very useful comments that have helped us clarify the dilemma faced by Heyes about the role of pupil-mindreading.

  11. Cf. Baker (2016).

  12. For example, Powell et al. (2018) report that they attempted and failed to replicate the results of Onishi and Baillargeon’s (2005) seminal study based on the violation-of-expectations, which was the first to provide evidence of early false-belief understanding in human infancy. In their response, Baillargeon et al. (2018) highlight several aspects of the design of the familiarization trials of Powell and colleagues’ (2018) study that might have prevented infants from forming expectations about the goal of the agent’s action.

  13. For an earlier critique of Heyes’s (2014a) explanation of the infant data based on her perceptual novelty account, cf. Scott and Baillargeon (2014).

  14. Kovács and colleagues’ mentalistic interpretation of their adult study based on reaction times has been criticized by Phillips et al. (2015) on grounds independent from Heyes’s own interpretation based on retroactive interference. Phillips and colleagues have proposed that Kovács and colleagues’ findings in their adult study reflect differences in the temporal intervals between two attention checks, not participants’ computation of another’s false belief. On the one hand, Phillips and colleagues’ non-mentalistic critique does not extend to the infant study, but Heyes’s interpretation does. On the other hand, Phillips and colleagues’ non-mentalistic attention-check hypothesis has been tested and refuted in a recent study by El Kaddouri et al. (2019).

  15. An assumption Heyes (2014a, b) must accept since she applies retroactive interference to both the infant and the adult studies.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are very grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their outstanding comments and wish to gratefully acknowledge support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Seventh Programme (FP/2007-2013)/ERC Grant 609819.

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  1. Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’études cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), EHESS, CNRS, UMR 8129, PSL University, Pavillon Jardin, 29, rue d’Ulm, 75005, Paris, France

    Pierre Jacob

  2. Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Thom Scott-Phillips

  3. Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Thom Scott-Phillips

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Jacob, P., Scott-Phillips, T. Is mindreading a gadget?. Synthese 199, 1–27 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02620-4

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