Abstract
Minimal theory of mind (ToM) is presented in the theory of mind literature as a middle ground between full-blown ToM and mere behavior-reading. Minimal ToM seems to be a useful construct for studying and understanding the minds of nonhuman animals and infants. However, providing an account of minimal ToM on which minimal mindreading is significantly less demanding than full-blown mindreading yet more than just a behavior-reading process is a challenge. In this paper, I argue that to address this challenge, we need to depart from the traditional framework of mindreading in more radical ways than offered by current minimal theory of mind accounts. First, I explain the traditional view of mindreading on which mental state attribution is treated as essential for mindreading and analyze the general respects in which it makes mindreading demanding for the mindreader, such as requiring the mindreader to have concepts of mental states, engage in inferential reasoning processes involving mental states, and form meta-representations. Then I discuss and critically evaluate two accounts of minimal ToM and argue that these accounts either do not depart sufficiently from the demanding requirements of traditional mindreading or risk becoming re-descriptions of behavior-reading accounts. Finally, I present an alternative Millikanian account of minimal ToM that avoids this risk while departing more radically from the traditional view of mindreading by providing a way for minimal mindreaders to represent the mental states of others and respond to them without engaging in conceptual mental state attribution.
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Notes
In order to conceptually represent mental states, the attributor must have the full range of mental state concepts.
See Low & Perner (2012) for a detailed discussion of this point.
This distinction between how and what in mental state attribution and representation is due to Dorit Bar-On.
The example is due to Anscombe (1957).
Millikan calls these representations “PPRs” and Danón calls them “PPs,” but both refer to pushmi-pullyu representations.
A factic thought is a purely descriptive propositional attitude (Millikan, 2017, 67), such as the belief that snow is white. An example of a factic thought about someone else’s mental state would be the descriptive belief that Kelly knows/believes that the banana is in the box.
Millikan (1995) is relying on the Gibsonian idea that “in perception we perceive certain affordances (opportunities for action)” which she argues suggests that “perceptual representations are PPRs” (191).
Plausibly, as Danón suggests, the squirrel’s motivational state may itself only be a PPR (or perhaps a PPP/PMP), rather than a full-blown (human-like) intention – in which case what the dog represents is only an intention-like PPR.
Millikan (2020) provides an overview of this framework of representation and discusses the convergence between the understanding of the notion of representation on this framework and the understanding of representation in neuroscience.
For a detailed discussion of teleosemantics, see Millikan (1989), (1995), (2004) and, most recently, (2020) in which she defends the claim that representation is a function term, arguing that “[i]f it were not there would be no standard by reference to which representations would be correct or incorrect, true or false, fulfilled or unfulfilled, satisfied or unsatisfied” (2).
See Chaps. 1 and 2 of Millikan (1984) for a precise explanation of the notion of “proper function.”
Millikan clarifies: “What is normal (common, average) is by no means always Normal, not always of a kind that has helped to proliferate the mechanisms involved during the historical selection processes that formed them” (2017, 85). A detailed analysis of this special use of “Normal” is given in Millikan (1984) Chaps. 1–2.
For a detailed analysis of this view of perception, see Chap. 14 in Beyond Concepts especially pgs. 190–202.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I incorporate Millikan’s theory of infosigns and perception as sign reading into my account of minimal mindreading.
An anonymous reviewer raises the worry that PPRs might themselves be attributive because they are presented as having indicative and directive contents or as belief-desire pairs that are bound up together. But it is important to keep in mind that a Millikanian PPR does not amount to the conjunction of a pure descriptive representation and a pure directive representation. It is more primitive than either type of representation (Millikan, 1995). Thus, PPRs should not be conceptualized as belief-desire pairs with contents in the form of conjunctions. And as I explained earlier, the descriptive aspect of PPRs does not involve attributing properties to situations or individuals. For this reason, PPRs of mental states need not involve attributing mental states as psychological properties of agents.
See Chap. 4 of Beyond Concepts for an overview of the distinction between same-tracking and unitracking. Same-tracking something or merely tracking it in the environment does not require individuals to have unitrackers or unicepts of that thing.
Whether the dog is actually a sophisticated minimal mindreader would be an empirical question that cannot be answered here.
The subordinate chimpanzee could use pushmi-multiple pullyu representations (PMPs) to represent the dominant’s different perceptual states and different responses to those states.
Artiga (2014), for example, is skeptical about the very existence of PPRs and has raised problems for teleosemantic theories that endorse PPRs. Bauer (2020) offers some responses to Artiga’s objections and provides some support for the role of PPRs in explaining primitive systems. Millikan herself has acknowledged that the “very possibility of pushmi-pullyu representations requires defense” and has offered such a defense and responses to Artiga’s objections in (2021). However, analyzing the objections and evaluating possible responses to them goes beyond the scope of this paper.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dorit Bar-On for helpful feedback, detailed comments, and many conversations throughout the various stages of writing this paper. I am grateful to Ruth Millikan for inspiring me with her work and discussing the ideas in this paper with me. I am also thankful to William Lycan and Richard Moore for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to the anonymous reviewers for feedback that led to valuable improvements in my paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning (ECOM) research group (December 2020); I wish to thank members of the group for their feedback. The writing of this paper was in part supported by an ECOM fellowship (summer 2020).
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Asif, N. Minimal theory of mind – a Millikanian Approach. Synthese 200, 150 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03662-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03662-6