“Skilled practices literally shape the way we look at the world…” – Cristina Grasseni, Skilled Visions.
“… [A]fter thirty years of research and many hundreds of papers [on ‘theory of mind’] it may seem strange, even impertinent, to question what it is that we are talking about” – Ian Apperly, “What is ‘theory of mind’?”
Abstract
This paper argues that our folk-psychological expertise is a special case of extended and enculturated cognition where we learn to regulate both our own and others’ thought and action in accord with a wide array of culturally shaped folk-psychological norms. The view has three noteworthy features: (1) it challenges a common assumption that the foundational capacity at work in folk-psychological expertise is one of interpreting behaviour in mentalistic terms (mindreading), arguing instead that successful mindreading is largely a consequence of successful mindshaping; (2) it argues that our folk-psychological expertise is not only socially scaffolded in development, it continues to be socially supported and maintained in maturity, thereby presenting a radically different picture of what mature folk-psychological competency amounts to; (3) it provides grounds for resisting a recent trend in theoretical explanations of quotidian social interaction that downplays the deployment of sophisticated mentalizing resources in understanding what others are doing.
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Notes
See, for instance: Andrews (2009), de Bruin (2008), De Jaegher (2009), De Jaegher et al. (2010), Gallagher (2001, 2005, 2008b), Gallagher and Hutto (2008), Herschbach (2008), Hutto (2004, 2007, 2009), Hutto and Ratcliffe (2007), Kiverstein (2011), Morton (2007), Ratcliffe (2007) and Zawidzki (2008, 2013).
Simulation theorists agree that our capacity to know other minds can be limited—specifically, it will be limited to the degree that we can adjust for minds that are unlike our own. But simulation theorists also seem to hold that all human minds, or at least typically developing human minds, are pretty much alike; hence, our ‘simulative’ limitations shouldn’t be a problem in most day-to-day encounters with conspecifics. As noted here, and explored in more depth elsewhere (McGeer 2009a, 2015), the regulative view allows for greater cultural variation in the way minds are shaped—hence, greater cultural variation in how easy it is to interpret what others are up to; in any case, the mechanism underlying interpretation is not simulation on the regulative view. A number of alternative perspectives also agree that our mindreading capacities are importantly limited, but often suppose (sophisticated) mindreading isn’t required for (or at least doesn’t occur in) most quotidian encounters (Andrews 2008, 2012; Apperly 2011, 2012; Apperly and Butterfill 2009; Gallagher 2001, 2008a; Gallagher and Hutto 2008; Heyes 2014; Hutto 2007, 2009; Zawidzki, 2013). I challenge this point in my conclusion.
According to Menary, the ‘parity principle’ as defended by Clark and Chalmers (1998) holds that external processes should count as genuinely ‘cognitive’ in so far as they are functionally equivalent to internal cognitive processes. A yet weaker interpretation of this principle, perhaps intended by Clark, holds that no matter how different external processes are from internal processes, we should consider them genuinely ‘cognitive’ so long as they would be considered cognitive were they in fact internal (my thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this reading of the principle). On either interpretation, extended mind theorists articulate this principle in order to focus attention on how the mind can extend into the world, as against integrationists who focus on how the world can extend into the mind. For further discussion, see Menary (2012).
To survey these rules in more depth (and to assure the reader I am not making them up), see: https://laws.worldrugby.org/?law=9.
In fact, the phenomenon of norm violations can often make participants in a normative regime newly aware of the fact that they are operating in accordance with implicitly internalized norms, where heretofore they had simply taken it for granted that this is how something is done (Garfinkel 1967).
More needs to be said in support of this observation. After all, if it takes one to know one (as the enculturation view maintains), then how can there be rugby fans (i.e. those who understand the game of rugby) who have never actually played the game at all? How do they become enculturated in the sport without themselves becoming rugby-players? A satisfying answer to this question requires focussing in more detail on what it takes to engage in ‘practice’, a many-splendored motor-perceptual-cognitive phenomenon.
For most activities that involve a bodily component, it seems a truism to say that practice requires bodily movement—riding a bicycle, knitting a scarf, playing the piano, tackling a player, driving a car. Body and mind are generally tuned up together in the context of physically trying to do the thing in question, often with instructional feedback from those already adept in the practice. But practice can be accomplished mentally, and not just physically—or if physically, then in an attenuated sense: for instance, through observing someone else’s movements and simulating those movements in one’s own body (either in physical or imaginative mimicry).
Consider for instance the fine art of learning to play the “air guitar”, where no actual guitar is required to learn how to hold the guitar for playing, to move left and right hands as appropriate for fret work, strumming, picking, and so on. Notice, too, that someone who becomes adept at ‘air guitar’ perceives the playing of other (real and/or air) guitarists in a skilled way—i.e., understands their movements as intended to produce this or that quality of sound, drama, movement, pitch. Such air guitarists have trained themselves to become skilled perceivers in the service of becoming skilled (simulative) players—and vice versa: the perceiving and the doing develop together (Goodwin 1994; Grasseni 2009). Notice, too, that air-guitarists simulate the activities of real guitarists, not with the aim (per impossibile) of discovering how real guitarists think and/or feel (as simulation theorists might suggest); rather, they do so with the aim of learning how to move, think and feel like a real guitar-player.
The same can be said about would-be rugby fans, a.k.a. would-be (simulative) rugby players. Someone who develops rugby-playing expertise by observing others play must get on the pitch with those players in perceptually-guided imagination, moving to and fro in rugby-proscribed ways: tracking the ball, anticipating where to move in order to receive a pass or tackle someone carrying the ball, looking for openings whilst carrying the ball, placing the ball in a penalty kick, arguing with the ref over ‘bad calls’, and so on and so forth. They must simulate the activities of real rugby players. But, once again, they do so, not with the aim of discovering how real rugby-players think and feel, but with the aim of learning how to move, think and feel like a rugby-player. Hence, someone who develops rugby-playing expertise by observing others would at last have some idea what to do with the ball if placed on a rugby pitch themselves. Of course, developing such know-how (whether on the pitch or off) takes cognitive effort and persistent rehearsal, which perhaps explains why many fans find watching rugby games both fascinating and exhausting, not to mention an endless source of imaginative reliving with their rugby mates: reviewing and discussing plays, speculating about the potential success of alternative strategies, worrying over ‘bad calls’ and what might-have-beens, and generally considering what ‘they’ would have done in O'Driscoll's or Lomu's place, as the savvy, well-trained (couch-coach) players they are.
Some representative passages (as quoted in Sutton et al. 2011): Herbert Dreyfus: “Mindedness is the enemy of embodied coping” (2007, p. 353); Fred Dretske: “In the case of all skilled actions, whether it be tying your shoelaces, playing a musical instrument, or dribbling a basketball—the mind goes elsewhere” (1998).
For a sympathetic and insightful account of the social scaffolding of moral emotions (especially shame and guilt), see Harcourt (2016).
Though perhaps less so than we imagine, as many well-documented cases of cross-cultural misunderstanding attest.
We might think of these as akin to the constitutive rules of rugby, except, of course, as elaborated shortly, they are not simply the result of enculturation.
Hobbes (1991, 1998) was virtually unique amongst early modern philosophers in arguing that human linguistic capacities are responsible for the dramatic differences in our social-cognitive powers relative to other creatures. The importance of Hobbes’ work on this theme is explored at length in Pettit (2008).
As indicated, Hobbes’ discussion of the evil consequences that arise from our linguistic capacities proceeds at some length, and is well worth a read. See, too Leviathan (1991, esp. Chs. 4–5).
By using a historical example to illustrate this point, I don’t mean to imply that our own norms of rational agency don’t exhibit their own blind spots and oddities, not to mention morally objectionable biases and distortions. Some of these may even by visible to us now, but are likely to become more visible in subsequent generations.
By ‘engaged 1st-personal attributions’, I mean attributions that do not involve taking a reflective distance on our own minds and reporting what might be going on with us, psychologically speaking, as if from an observer’s point of view. Rather, when we make such attributions, we are taking a stand on what we believe, desire, hope and fear; we are speaking for ourselves as minded in those particular ways. Hence, such attributions have a characteristic ‘commissive’ quality. The fact that we are in a position to make commissive 1st-personal attributions has important implications for the topic of authoritative self-knowledge (Bar-On 2004; McGeer 1996, 2008; Moran 2001; Zawidzki 2016)—and, indeed, a wider range of topics concerning the moral and political dimensions of our social engagement with others (McGeer 2015; Pettit 2018).
One complexity that should certainly be mentioned is that we sometimes engage in counter-normative behaviour intentionally and with various purposes in mind—e.g. to challenge and change prevailing norms that we find annoying, impractical, oppressive or worse. We may also engage in counter-normative behaviour in a playful way, to surprise or delight, perhaps simply to ‘shake things up’. The possibilities here are numerous, with such possibilities likewise inviting a variety of different responses from others than I have focussed on here—viz., correction or sanction.
Sometimes, of course, our attributions are simply a facon-de-parler: for instance, when we attribute mental states to agent-like entities that we know have no psychology at all (I discuss an example of this in my concluding section). We also sometimes make such attributions even if we are unsure about the underlying psychological nature of the creatures in question—i.e. whether we should count them as actually ‘having’ the mental states in question: for instance, to various animals, very young children, and so on. And we may do so for a variety of reasons—e.g., because these attributions work well enough for predictive/explanatory purposes (as it may be in the case of animals); or because these attributions provide a pedagogic/regulative framework (as they may do in the case of young children).
In an article somewhat critical of the mindshaping view (at least the strong version he attributes to McGeer and Zawidski), Peters (2019) raises an important question regarding the function of mentalistic (especially propositional attitude) ascriptions: namely, is mindshaping the primary function of such attributions versus simply describing pre-existing mental states – he calls this the “strong” mindshaping view? Or is it, as Peters claims, that both functions are served ‘in equal measure’ (presumably he means in the overall pattern of attributions) – Peters calls this the “weak” mindshaping view? While I resist Peters’ interpretation of my earlier work as endorsing a “strong” mindshaping view, his “weak” mindshaping view does not really capture what I had in mind either. In any case, he is right to press for clarification of this point, and I hope this present discussion (here partly inspired by his critical reflections) goes some way to providing it—and my thanks to an anonymous referee for drawing Peters’ work to my attention.
Two important considerations that I have alluded to in the text above, but not yet emphasized enough, are relevant to this question: namely, the grammatical voice in which such attributions are made (1st-, 2nd- or 3rd-person attributions), and the social position and/or psychological development of the target of attribution (child, adult, foreigner…). For the function of our attributions is not equally distributed across these variations. For instance, we generally don’t make 3rd-person attributions in a regulative mode, though perhaps we occasionally do so in a pedagogic mode (as when we are talking about characters in a story to a young child); we generally don’t make 1st- person attributions in a descriptive mode (i.e. merely reporting our states of minds to another, as if from an observer’s point of view); and we generally don’t make 2nd-person attributions in a pedagogic mode unless we are talking to young children. The fact that so much of the theory of mind literature focusses almost exclusively on 3rd- person attributions where the descriptive function surely dominates may partially explain the standard bias towards highlighting that function, as well as a consequent focus on explanation and prediction.
I say ‘typically developing’ individuals to highlight a point that is rarely noticed in the literature: that we are not very good at predicting/explaining the behaviour of individuals with autism, despite the fact that the deficit in social cognition is apparently all on their side. This symmetry in interpretive difficulties is hard to explain on the standard epistemic view of what our social cognitive skills consist in (for further discussion, see: McGeer (2005, 2009b)).
In a compelling illustration of this, Ami Klin compared the spontaneous descriptions of the Heider-Simmel film clip in two groups of adolescent subjects: neurotypically developing control subjects and high-functioning individuals with autism (Klin 2000). Importantly, the subjects with autism passed standard theory of mind tests, so had some (effortfully deployed) mentalizing capacity. Nevertheless, in spontaneous descriptions, the subjects with autism focussed on the actual movement of the geometric figures—e.g. “The big triangle went into the rectangle. There was a small triangle and a circle. The big triangle went out. The shapes bounce off each other….”; whereas the neurotypical controls focussed interpretatively on the apparent social interaction – e.g. “What happened is that the larger triangle—which was like a bigger kid or bully—and he had isolated himself from everything else until two new kids came along and the little one was a bit more shy, scared, and the smaller triangle more like stood up for himself and protected the little one…” (Klin 2000, p. 840).
For further discussion of this point, see Fenici and Zawidzki (2020).
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at workshops at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), York University (Toronto, Canada) and the Australian National University (Canberra, Australia). I am particularly grateful to the organizers of those events, Richard Menary (Macquarie), Kristin Andrews (York), and Rachael Brown (ANU), for assembling such a range of thoughtful participants—and, to them, for the critical feedback I received on those occasions . In addition, I am extremely grateful to two anonymous referees for Synthese and to Philip Pettit for helpful and detailed comments on the final draft. I may not have dealt adequately with all their concerns, but this paper is certainly improved as a result of their careful reading. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [Grant Number DP140102468] and generous ongoing support from Princeton University.
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McGeer, V. Enculturating folk psychologists. Synthese 199, 1039–1063 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02760-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02760-7