Abstract
It is a widely accepted assumption within the philosophy of mind and psychology that our ability for complex social interaction is based on the mastery of a common folk psychology, that is to say that social cognition consists in reasoning about the mental states of others in order to predict and explain their behavior. This, in turn, requires the possession of mental-state concepts, such as the concepts belief and desire. In recent years, this standard conception of social cognition has been called into question by proponents of so-called ‘direct-perception’ approaches to social cognition (e.g., Gallagher 2001, 2005, 2007, 2012; Gallagher and Hutto 2008; Zahavi 2005, 2011) and by those who argue that the ‘received view’ implies a degree of computational complexity that is implausible (e.g., Bermúdez 2003; Apperly and Butterfill 2009). In response, it has been argued that these attacks on the classical view of social cognition have no bite at the subpersonal level of explanation, and that it is the latter which is at issue in the debate in question (e.g., Herschbach 2008; Spaulding 2010, 2015). In this paper, I critically examine this response by considering in more detail the distinction between personal and subpersonal level explanations. There are two main ways in which the distinction has been developed (Drayson 2014). I will argue that on either of these, the response proposed by defenders of the received view is unconvincing. This shows that the dispute between the standard conception and alternative approaches to mindreading is a dispute concerning personal-level explanations - what is at stake in the debate between proponents of the classical view of social cognition and their critics is how we, as persons, navigate our social world. I will conclude by proposing a pluralistic approach to social cognition, which is better able to do justice to the multi-faceted nature of our social interactions as well as being able to account for recent empirical findings regarding the social cognitive abilities of young infants.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
There is one caveat to this claim for there is a version of the simulation theory that allows for a form of simulation that does not require forming conceptual judgements attributing mental states to others (Gordon 1986).
At the time when most of these criticisms were developed, this was typically taken to be the case at about 4–5 years of age, when children are able to pass verbal “false-belief” tasks. However, since then, evidence based on nonverbal mindreading tasks has been put forward that challenges the age at which mental state concepts are acquired (see Onishi and Baillargeon 2010 for a review). The authors of these studies generally interpret them as evidence of mental state concept possession years earlier, and even before the acquisition of language. Hence, the age at which children acquire mental state concepts is currently disputed. We will discuss this issue in more detail further below.
It is not entirely clear how the ‘direct perception’ of mental states is to be understood. As I will explain below, we might take this to mean that we have a nonconceptual, non-inferential understanding of the mental states of others.Also see Michael and DeBruin (2015) for a detailed discussion of the notion of social perception.
Notice that more recently, proponents of TT and ST have argued that this in fact mischaracterizes their view and have put forward interpretations of TT and ST that are compatible with a direct, perception-like access to the minds of others, as an anonymous referee helpfully pointed out to me. For a detailed debate of the social perception thesis, see Michael and DeBruin (2015).
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising these points.
Though note current discussions on the relation between the concepts of knowledge and belief (Nagel 2013).
An alternative way to look at these findings (which was put forward by a referee for this journal) is that while children younger than four years old do not yet possess concepts of mental states as propositional attitudes they might have simpler concepts that are still genuinely representations of mental states. Indeed, although they have tended to receive less philosophical attention, there are mental states that are arguably best characterized as being non-propositional, though it’s not clear that these are simpler (see Grzankowski 2013). However, the question at issue in the studies cited here was whether children possess the concept of belief, which is a propositional attitude. Moreover, the received view as it has been laid out implies an understanding of propositional attitude psychology. Thus, insofar as children younger than four seem to lack this, they do not seem to engage in mindreading as it is being construed on the received view.
Notice that simulation theorists are ambiguous as to whether the assumed projection into the situation of another requires a specification of the others’ mental state, or whether we simply adopt their perceptual perspective. However, as Bermúdez (2003) has pointed out, adopting someone’s perceptual perspective is of limited use with regard to a prediction of their behaviour. In order to know how their perceptual states will affect their behaviour, we need to know how they relate to other mental states. Thus, at least some attitudes need to be attributed in order to get the simulation process started.
Accordingly, Bermúdez sees his worry regarding the computional complexitiy as being ultimately orthogonal to the frame problem.
Hence, on this view, TT and ST don’t have to be thought of as being incompatible with the ability to “directly perceive” the mental states of others. Notice that Spaulding’s useage of the term “non-mentalistic” is potentially confusing here. Standardly, this term is used behavioristically, referring to cognitive abilities that do not involve the representation or tracking of mental states (as a referee helpfully pointed out to me). This doesn’t seem to be the way Spaulding uses the term, though.
This way of framing the issue was suggested to me by an anonymous referee.
Also see Spaulding (2015) who admits that while the terms “prediction” and “explanation” might be considered to be personal-level terms (in the sense of involving conscious reflection), “anticipation” and “interpretation” can occur subconsciously. For this as well as for other reasons, she claims that the latter are more appropriate terms.
Notice that while Herschbach is not explicitly concerned with the role of concept possession in social cognition, Spaulding’s explicit aim in her 2010 paper is to defend the received view of social cognition (understood as involving conceptual mental state attributions) against views involving pre-theoretical, nonconceptual forms of intersubjectivity.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for pointing me towards Drayson’s paper.
This is not to say that subpersonal level processes cannot be genuinely representational. To the contrary, it has been argued that it is one of the attractions of the notion of nonconceptual content that it enables us to do justice to explanations in the cognitive sciences that attribute (nonconceptual) representational content to subpersonal level processes while at the same time capturing the intuition that the realm of reasons (and hence of conceptual representations) is limited to persons (Bermúdez 2007). Notice, however, that McDowell (1994) denies that there is genuine content at the subpersonal level.
For instance, it could be claimed that ST requires something like the mirror neuron network whereas TT does not. However, this is rather controversial; for a recent critical discussion of the claim that mirror neurons are evidence for ST, see Spaulding (2012). Alternatively, the difference between TT and ST might be seen in the fact that TT posits the existence of an abstract set of laws – which might, in turn, presuppose a GOFAI architecture –, while ST could be based on statistical patterns or heuristics – which might, in turn, be compatible with connectionist approaches to cognition (cf. Herschbach 2008).
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.
Carruthers (2013) suggests that rather than thinking of two independent systems for mindreading, we should assume the existence of a core mindreading system (as one of a set of systems subsumed under System 1) and to think of System 2 as a general purpose system.
Also see Newen (2015) for an account of social cognition that encompasses multiple epistemic strategies for understanding others based on the background information available to us.
See Fiebich and Coltheart (2015) for a promising proposal with respect to this question.
References
Andrews, K. (2012). Do apes read minds? Cambridge: MIT Press.
Apperly, I., & Butterfill, S. (2009). Do humans have two systems to track beliefs and belief-like states? Psychological Review, 116(4), 953–970.
Astington, J., & Jenkins, J. (1999). A longitudinal study of the relation between language and theory-of-mind development. Developmental Psychology, 35, 1311–1320.
Baillargeon, R., Scott, R. M., & He, Z. (2010). False-belief understanding in infants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(3), 110–118.
Barresi, J., & Moore, C. (1996). Intentional relations and social understanding. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19(01), 107–122.
Bermúdez, J. L. (2003). The domain of folk psychology. In Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 53, 25–48.
Bermúdez, J. L. (2007). What is at stake in the debate on nonconceptual content? Philosophical Perspectives, 21(1), 55–72.
Buttelmann, D., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active hel** paradigm. Cognition, 112, 337–342.
Butterfill, S., & Apperly, I. (2013). How to construct a minimal theory of mind. Mind & Language, 28(5), 606–637.
Camp, E. (2009). Putting thoughts to work: Concepts, systematicity, and stimulus-independence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 78(2), 275–311.
Carruthers, P. (2013). Mindreading in infancy. Mind & Language, 28(2), 141–172.
Cohen, A. S., & German, T. C. (2009). Encoding of others' beliefs without overt instruction. Cognition, 111(3), 356–363.
De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(4), 485–507.
Dennett, D. C. (1969). Content and consciousness. Oxford: Humanities Press.
Drayson, Z. (2014). The personal/subpersonal distinction. Philosophy Compass, 9(5), 338–346.
Evans, G. (1982). The varieties of reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Feinman, S. (1982). Social referencing in infancy. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 28, 445–470.
Fiebich, A., & Coltheart, M. (2015). Various ways to understand other minds: Towards a pluralistic approach to the explanation of social understanding. Mind & Language, 30(3), 235–258.
Fodor, J. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fuchs, T. (2013). The phenomenology and development of social perspectives. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 12(4), 655-683.
Gallagher, S. (2001). The practice of mind: Theory, simulation, or primary interaction? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(5–7), 83–107.
Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, S. (2007). Simulation trouble. Social Neuroscience, 2, 353–365.
Gallagher, S. (2012). In defense of phenomenological approaches to social cognition: Interacting with the critics. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 3(2), 187–212.
Gallagher, S., & Hutto, D. (2008). Understanding others through primary interaction and narrative practice. In J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha, & E. Itkonen (Eds.), The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity (pp. 17–38). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goldman, A. (1989). Interpretation psychologized. Mind & Language, 4, 161–185.
Goldman, A. (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. N. (1997). Words, thoughts and theories. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gordon, R. (1986). Folk psychology as simulation. Mind & Language, 1, 158–171.
Grzankowski, A. (2013). Non-Propositional Attitudes. Philosophy Compass, 8, 1123–1137.
Heal, J. (1996). Simulation, theory and content. In Carruthers & Smith (Eds.), Theories of theories of mind (pp. 75–89). Cambridge University Press.
Herschbach, M. (2008). Folk psychological and phenomenological accounts of social perception. Philosophical Explorations, 11(3), 223–235.
Herschbach, M. (2012). On the role of social interaction in social cognition: A mechanistic alternative to enactivism. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 11(4), 467–486.
Hopp, W. (2011). Perception and knowledge: A phenomenological account. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hornsby, J. (2000). Personal and sub-personal: A defence of Dennett's early distinction. Philosophical Explorations, 3(1), 6–24.
Hurley, S. (2006). Making sense of animals. In S. Hurley & M. Nudds (Eds.), Rational animals (pp. 231–256). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hutto, D. D. (2008). Folk psychological narratives: The sociocultural basis of understanding reasons. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Klinnert, M., et al. (1983). Emotions as behavior regulators: Social referencing in infancy. Emotions in Early Development, 2, 57–86.
Knudsen, B., & Liszkowski, U. (2012). 18-month-olds predict specific action mistakes through attribution of false belief, not ignorance, and intervene accordingly. Infancy, 17, 672–691.
Kovács, A. M., Teglas, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to others' beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830–1834.
Leslie, A. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind”. Psychological Review, 94(4), 412–426.
Maibom, H. (2007). Social systems. Philosophical Psychology, 20(5), 557.
McDowell, J. (1994). The content of perceptual experience. Philological Quarterly, 44(175), 190–205.
Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, K. (1977). Imitation of facial and manual gestures by newborn infants. Science, 198, 75–78.
Michael, J., & DeBruin, L. (Eds.). (2015). Special Issue: Social Perception. Consciousness and Cognition, 36, 1–572.
Milligan, K., Astington, J., & Dack, L. (2007). Language and theory of mind: Metaanalysis of the relation between language ability and false-belief understanding. Child Development, 78, 622–646.
Moll, H., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Level 1 perspective-taking at 24 months of age. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24, 603–613.
Musholt, K. (2015). Thinking about oneself. From nonconceptual content to the concept of a self. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Nagel, J. (2013). Knowledge as a mental state. Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 4, 273–308.
Nagy, E. (2008). Innate intersubjectivity: Newborn’s sensitivity to communication disturbance. Developmental Psychology, 44(6), 1779–1784.
Neisser, U. (1993). The self perceived. In U. Neisser (Ed.), The perceived self: Ecological and interpersonal sources of self-knowledge (pp. 3–21). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Newen, A. (2015). Understanding Others - The Person Model Theory. In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds.), Open MIND: 26(T). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi:10.15502/9783958570320
Onishi, K., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-month-olds understand false beliefs? Science, 308, 255–258.
Peacocke, C. (1992). A study of concepts. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Perner, J., & Roessler, J. (2012). From infants' to children's appreciation of belief. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(10), 519–525.
Perner, J., & Ruffman, T. (2005). Infants’ insight into the mind: How deep? Science, 308, 214–216.
Rakoczy, H. (2012). Do infants have a theory of mind? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 30(1), 59–74.
Rakoczy, H. (2015). In defense of a developmental dogma: Children acquire propositional attitude folk psychology around age 4. Synthese, 1–19.
Ratcliffe, M. (2006). Folk psychology’ is not folk psychology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5(1), 31–52.
Samson, D., et al. (2010). Seeing it their way: Evidence for rapid and involuntary computation of what other people see. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 36(5), 1255–1266.
Schneider, D., Bayliss, A. P., Becker, S. I., & Dux, P. E. (2012). Eye movements reveal sustained implicit processing of others' mental states. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 433–438.
Schneider, D., Nott, Z. E., & Dux, P. E. (2014). Task instructions and implicit theory of mind. Cognition, 133(1), 43–47.
Sellars, W. (1956). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1(19), 253–329.
Slade, L., & Ruffman, T. (2005). How language does (and does not) relate to theory of mind: A longitudinal study of syntax, semantics, working memory and false belief. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23, 117–141.
Southgate, V., Senju, A., & Csibra, G. (2007). Action anticipation through attribution of false belief in two-year-olds. Psychological Science, 18(7), 587–592.
Spaulding, S. (2010). Embodied cognition and mindreading. Mind & Language, 25(1), 119–140.
Spaulding, S. (2012). Mirror neurons are not evidence for the simulation theory. Synthese, 189(3), 515–534.
Spaulding, S. (2015). Phenomenology of social cognition. Erkenntnis, 80(5), 1069–1089.
Spelke, E. (2003). What makes us smart? Core knowledge and natural language. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind. Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 277–311). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Stich, S. (1978). Beliefs and subdoxastic states. Philosophy of Science, 45(4), 499–518.
Striano, T., & Rochat, P. (2000). Emergence of selective social referencing in infancy. Infancy, 1(2), 253–264.
Tomasello, M., et al. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 675–691.
Trevarthen, C. (1979). Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity. In M. Bullowa (Ed.), Before speech: The beginning of interpersonal communication (pp. 321–347). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wellman, H., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72, 655–684.
Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and selfhood: Investigating the first-person perspective. Cambrige: MIT Press.
Zahavi, D. (2011). Empathy and direct social perception: A phenomenological proposal. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2(3), 541–558.
Acknowledgements
Early drafts of this paper were presented at a conference on the personal and the subpersonal at the Institute of Philosophy in London, at the Philosophy Department at the LSE, at conferences of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology and the German Society for Philosophy of Science, and at the Department of Philosophy in Leipzig. I am grateful for the feedback received from the audiences on these occasions. I am also indebted to two anonymous referees for this journal for their extraordinarily detailed and constructive criticisms which were invaluable for improving this manuscript. Sonja Priesmeyer helped with the final editing. Finally, I am grateful to the organizers of the workshop “Investigating the Social Self” in Parma, Katja Crone and Wolfgang Huemer, for providing me with the opportunity to present my work and for putting together this special issue.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Musholt, K. The personal and the subpersonal in the theory of mind debate. Phenom Cogn Sci 17, 305–324 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9504-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9504-4