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Gallagher, S. and Hutto, D. 2008. Understanding others through primary interaction and narrative
practice. In: J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha and E. Itkonen (eds). The Shared Mind: Perspectives on
Intersubjectivity (17-38). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Understanding others through Primary Interaction
and Narrative Practice
Shaun Gallagher (Universities of Central Florida and Hertfordshire)
and Daniel D. Hutto (University of Hertfordshire)
Abstract
We argue that theory-of-mind (ToM) approaches, such as “theory
theory” and “simulation theory”, are both problematic and not needed.
They account for neither our primary and pervasive way of engaging
with others nor the true basis of our folk psychological understanding,
even when narrowly construed. Developmental evidence shows that
young infants are capable of grasping the purposeful intentions of others
through the perception of bodily movements, gestures, facial
expressions, etc. Trevarthen’s notion of primary intersubjectivity can
provide a theoretical framework for understanding these capabilities. His
notion of secondary intersubjectivity shows the importance of pragmatic
contexts for infants starting around one year of age. The recent
neuroscience of resonance systems (mirror neurons, shared
representations) also supports this view. These ideas are worked out in
the context of an embodied “Interaction Theory” of social cognition.
Still, for more sophisticated intersubjective interactions in older children
and adults, one might argue that some form of ToM is required. This
thought is defused by appeal to narrative competency and the Narrative
Practice Hypothesis (or NPH). We propose that repeated encounters
with narratives of a distinctive kind is the normal route through which
children acquire an understanding of the forms and norms that enable
them to make sense of actions in terms of reasons. A potential objection
to this hypothesis is that it presupposes ToM abilities. Interaction Theory
is deployed once again to answer this by providing an alternative
approach to understanding basic narrative competency and its
development.
Gallagher and Hutto
18
Introduction
Our intention in this chapter is to explicate an account of how we come to
understand others, without appealing to the dominant theory-of-mind (ToM)
approaches of “theory theory” (e.g. Leslie 1987; Gopnik 1993) or “simulation
theory” (e.g. Gordon 1986; Goldman 2002). We have elsewhere provided
good reasons to doubt that either of these theories can give an accurate or
adequate account of our everyday intersubjective abilities for understanding
the intentions and the behaviors of other persons (see Gallagher 2001; 2004,
2007a&b; Hutto 2004, 2005, 2006a, 2007a-b, 2008). We will briefly
summarize that critique here, but our main purpose is to set out a more
positive account of just these everyday intersubjective abilities and show that
they are not reducible (or inflatable) to the mind-reading or mentalizing
described by approaches to social cognition which presume a “theory of
mind.”
This positive account involves three kinds of processes which together are
sufficient to deliver the nuanced adult capacity for understanding (as well as
for mis-understanding) others. These processes include (1) intersubjective
perceptual processes, (2) pragmatically contextualized comprehension, and (3)
narrative competence. We argue on the basis of evidence from developmental
psychology that the capacity for understanding others is, on average, well
established by the time the child reaches four or five years of age, and that it
continues to be enriched on the basis of further experience as we become
mature adults.
A brief critique of the dominant approaches to social cognition
Theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST), the standard and dominant
approaches to social cognition, share the important supposition that when we
attempt to understand the actions of others, we do so by making sense of them
in terms of their mental processes to which we have no direct access. That is,
we attempt to “mind read” their beliefs, desires, and intentions, and such mind
reading or mentalizing is our primary and pervasive way of understanding
their behavior. Furthermore, both TT and ST characterize social cognition as a
process of explaining or predicting what another person has done or will do.
TT claims that we explain another person’s behavior by appealing to an either
innate or acquired “theory” of how people behave in general; a theory that is
framed in terms of mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) causing or
motivating behavior. ST claims that we have no need for a theory like this,
because we have a model, namely, our own mind, that we can use to simulate
the other person’s mental states. We model others’ beliefs and desires as if we
were in their situation.
Claims that such theory or simulation processes are explicit (conscious)
are dubious from a phenomenological point of view. That is, if in fact such
processes are primary, pervasive, and explicit, they should show up in our
Gallagher and Hutto
19
experience – in the way that we experience others – and they rarely do.1 The
phenomenological critique also rejects the idea, clearly found in TT, that our
everyday dealings with others involve an observational, third-person stance
toward them – observing them and trying to come up with explanations of
their behavior. Rather, our everyday encounters with others tend to be second-
person and interactive.
Claims that the processes described by TT or ST are implicit (or not
explicitly conscious) run into a different set of objections. In the case of TT,
there is no evidence that such processes are implicit, or even clarity about
what precisely that means. Moreover, although TT appeals to false-belief
experiments, such experiments are set up to test for explicit rather than
implicit theory-of-mind processes (Gallagher 2001) – subjects are asked to
explicitly consider the meanings of an observed third-party’s behavior.
Implicit approaches to ST appeal to the neuroscience of mirror neurons and
shared representations (cf. Barresi and Moore, this volume), but there is no
justification for calling these subpersonal processes “simulation,” since
according to ST, simulation involves the instrumental use of a first-person
model to form third-person “as if” or “pretend” mental states. In subpersonal
processes, (1) there is no first- or third-person (activation of mirror neurons,
for example, are considered to be “neutral” in regard to who the agent is (see,
e.g., deVignemont 2004; Gallese 2005; Hurley 2005; Jeannerod and Pacherie
2004); (2) nothing (or no one) is using a model; and (3) neuronal processes
cannot pretend. As vehicles neurons cannot pretend – they either fire or they
don’t. More importantly, in terms of relevant content, if they are neutral with
respect to first- and third-person, pretence in just these terms (I pretend to be
you) is not possible. In effect, simulation, as defined by ST, is a personal-level
concept that cannot be legitimately applied to subpersonal processes.2
In addition to these phenomenological and logical objections to TT and
ST, there is good evidence from developmental psychology that our ability to
1 This is not to deny that in some circumstances, for example, in observing puzzling cases of
another person’s behavior, we may in fact explicitly appeal to theory or employ simulation.
The claim here is simply that most of our everyday interactions are not of this sort. Puzzling
cases are the exception.
2 Goldman and Sripada (2005: 208), acknowledging the discrepancy between the ST
definition of simulation and the working of subpersonal mirror processes, propose a minimal
definition of simulation: “Applied to mindreading, a minimally necessary condition [for
simulation] is that the state ascribed to the target is ascribed as a result of the attributor’s
instantiating, undergoing, or experiencing, that very state. In the case of successful simulation,
the experienced state matches that of the target”. If this is a necessary condition, it cannot be a
sufficient one, because on this minimal definition and without something further, it’s not clear
what would motivate me to ascribe the state that I was undergoing to someone else.
Furthermore, if this were as automatic as mirror neurons firing, then it would seem that we
would not be able to attribute a state different from our own to someone else. But we do this
all the time. Practically speaking, this proposal also raises puzzles about interacting with more
than one other person. Is it possible to simulate the neural/mental/emotional states of two
other people at the same time if in fact our simulations must be such that we instantiate,
undergo, or experience, those two (possibly very different) states? (see Gallagher 2007b). We
suggest that these issues would also have to be addressed by Barresi and Moore (this volume)
in order to clarify their proposal for a matching system.
Gallagher and Hutto
20
understand others emerges much earlier than TT or ST would predict. An
objection can also be raised against the idea that a general theory (folk
psychology) would have the sufficient explanatory power to explain the
particularities of a large diversity of behaviors found in everyday life, or that it
could be very reliable in the face of multiple possibilities for motivation.
Similarly it has been objected that running a first-person simulation routine,
that is, a process that is based on one’s own mental states, seems inadequate to
explain the diversity of behaviors found in the world.
These objections throw doubt on TT and ST approaches. The question,
however, is whether there is a positive account that can avoid these objections.
We turn now to the construction of that alternative account, in three parts:
intersubjective perception, pragmatically contextualized comprehension, and
narrative competency.
Intersubjective perception and interaction
Long before the child reaches the age of four, the capacities for human
interaction and intersubjective understanding are already accomplished in
certain embodied practices -- practices that are emotional, sensory-motor,
perceptual, and nonconceptual. These practices include proto-mimesis (Zlatev,
this volume), imitation, the parsing of perceived intentions (Baldwin et al.
2001), emotional interchange (Hobson 2004), and generally the processes that
fall under the heading of primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen 1979). These
embodied practices constitute our primary access for understanding others,
and they continue to do so even after we attain our more sophisticated abilities
in this regard (Gallagher 2001).
In most intersubjective situations, that is, in situations of social
interaction, we have a direct perceptual understanding of another person’s
intentions because their intentions are explicitly expressed in their embodied
actions and their expressive behaviors. This understanding does not require us
to postulate or infer a belief or a desire hidden away in the other person’s
mind. What we might reflectively or abstractly call their belief or desire is
expressed directly in their actions and behaviors. This phenomenologially
direct understanding is likely made possible by the above mentioned complex
neuronal processes described as the mirror neuron system(s) and shared
representations. In contrast to interpreting these neuronal resonance processes
as implicit simulations, which on the functional level would involve cognitive
processes over and above the perception of action, Gallagher (2005, in press)
has argued that they in fact instantiate a form of enactive social perception.
A primary, perceptual sense of others is already implicit in the behavior of
the newborn. In neonate imitation, which depends not only on a contrast, in
some sense, between self and non-self, and a proprioceptive sense of one’s
own body, but also a responsiveness to the fact that the other is of the same
sort as oneself (Bermúdez 1995; Gallagher 1996; Gallagher and Meltzoff
1996), infants are able to distinguish between inanimate objects and people.
The fact that they imitate only human faces (see Legerstee 1991; Johnson
Gallagher and Hutto
21
2000; Johnson et al. 1998) suggests that infants are able to parse the
surrounding environment into those entities that perform human actions
(people) and those that do not (things) (Meltzoff and Brooks 2001). An
intermodal tie between a proprioceptive sense of one’s body and the face that
one sees is already functioning at birth. For the infant, the other person’s body
presents opportunities for action and expressive behavior – opportunities that
it can pursue through imitation. There is, in this case, a common bodily
intentionality that is shared by the perceiving subject and the perceived other.
From early infancy humans, and perhaps some animals (see e.g., the studies
by Myowa-Yamakoshi 2001, 2004, also cited by Zlatev, this volume) have
capabilities for primary-intersubjective interaction with others.
The early capabilities that contribute to primary intersubjectivity constitute
an immediate, non-mentalizing mode of interaction. Infants, notably without
the intervention of theory or simulation, are able to see bodily movement as
goal-directed intentional movement, and to perceive other persons as agents.
This does not require advanced cognitive abilities; rather, it is a perceptual
capacity that is “fast, automatic, irresistible and highly stimulus-driven”
(Scholl and Tremoulet 2000: 299). Evidence for this early, non-mentalizing
interpretation of the intentional actions of others can be found in numerous
studies. Baldwin and colleagues, for example, have shown that infants at 10-
11 months are able to parse some kinds of continuous action according to
intentional boundaries (Baldwin and Baird 2001; Baldwin et al. 2001). The
infant follows the other person’s eyes, and perceives various movements of
the head, the mouth, the hands, and more general body movements as
meaningful, goal-directed movements. Such perceptions give the infant, by
the end of the first year of life, a non-conceptual, action-based understanding
of the intentions and dispositions of other persons which does not involve
inferences about beliefs or desires understood as mental states (Allison, Puce,
and McCarthy 2000; Baldwin, 1993; Johnson 2000; Johnson et al. 1998).
Primary intersubjectivity also includes affective coordination between the
gestures and expressions of the infant and those of caregivers with whom they
interact. Infants “vocalize and gesture in a way that seems ‘tuned’ [affectively
and temporally] to the vocalizations and gestures of the other person” (Gopnik
and Meltzoff 1997: 131). Infants at 5 to 7 months detect correspondences
between visual and auditory information that specify the expression of
emotions (Walker 1982). The perception of emotion in the movement of
others, however, does not involve taking a theoretical stance or creating a
simulation of some inner state. It is a perceptual experience of embodied
comportment (Bertenthal, Proffitt, and Cutting 1984; Moore, Hobson, and Lee
1997). This kind of perception-based understanding, therefore, is not a form of
mind-reading. In seeing the actions and expressive movements of the other
person one already sees their meaning; no inference to a hidden set of mental
states (beliefs, desires, etc.) is necessary.
The capabilities involved in primary intersubjectivity suggest that before we
are in a position to wonder what the other person believes or desires, we
already have specific perceptual understanding about what they feel, whether
they are attending to us or not, whether their intentions are friendly or not, and
Gallagher and Hutto
22
so forth. There is, in primary intersubjectivity, a common bodily intentionality
that is shared across the perceiving subject and the perceived other. As
Gopnik and Meltzoff indicate, “we innately map the visually perceived
motions of others onto our own kinesthetic sensations” (1997: 129), and the
evidence from recent research on mirror neurons and resonance systems in
social neuroscience supports this.3 Thus, before we are in a position to
theorize, simulate, explain or predict mental states in others, we are already in
a position to interact with and to understand others in terms of their
expressions, gestures, intentions, and emotions, and how they act toward
ourselves and others. Furthermore, primary intersubjectivity is not primary
simply in developmental terms. Rather it remains primary across all face-to-
face intersubjective experiences, and it underpins those developmentally later,
and occasional, practices that may involve explaining or predicting mental
states in others (see e.g., Stern’s (1985) idea of a “layered model” in which
developmentally primary understandings are not “superseded” but remain and
operate in parallel to more advanced ones).
Pragmatic intersubjectivity
If human faces are especially salient, even for the youngest infants, or if we
continue to be capable of perceptually grasping the meaning of the other’s
expressions and intentional movements, such face-to-face interaction does not
exhaust the possibilities of intersubjective understanding. Expressions,
intonations, gestures, and movements, along with the bodies that manifest
them, do not float freely in the air; we find them in the world, and infants soon
start to notice how others interact with the world. When infants begin to tie
actions to pragmatic contexts, they enter into what Trevarthen calls
‘secondary intersubjectivity’. Around the age of 1 year, infants go beyond the
person-to-person immediacy of primary intersubjectivity, and enter into
contexts of shared attention – shared situations – in which they learn what
things mean and what they are for (see Trevarthen and Hubley 1978).
Behavior representative of joint attention begins to develop around 9-14
months (Phillips, Baron-Cohen, and Rutter 1992). In such interactions the
child looks to the body and the expressive movement of the other to discern
the intention of the person or to find the meaning of some object. The child
can understand that the other person wants food or intends to open the door;
that the other can see him (the child) or is looking at the door. This is not
taking an intentional stance, i.e., treating the other as if they had desires or
beliefs hidden away in their minds; rather, the intentionality is perceived in
the embodied actions of others.4 They begin to see that another’s movements
3 In citing Gopnik and Meltzoff’s claim about the necessity for innate mappings we are not
thereby endorsing their theory-theoretic construal of what this involves. Indeed, much of the
evidence developed by Meltzoff and cited by Gopnik and Meltzoff supports the idea of a
strong intersubjective perceptual capacity in the infant.
4 Of course, the fact that another’s feelings can be hidden is completely consistent with
expressivism of this sort. As Wittgenstein says “One can say He is hiding his feelings. But
that means that it is not a priori they are always hidden” (Wittgenstein 1992, 35e). The point
Gallagher and Hutto
23
and expressions often depend on meaningful and pragmatic contexts and are
mediated by the surrounding world. Others are not given (and never were
given) primarily as objects that we encounter cognitively, or in need of
explanation. We perceive them as agents whose actions are framed in
pragmatic contexts. It follows that there is not one uniform way in which we
relate to others, but that our relations are mediated through the various
pragmatic circumstances of our encounters. Indeed, we are caught up in such
pragmatic circumstances, and are already existing in reference to others, from
the very beginning (consider for example the infant’s dependency on others
for nourishment), even if it takes some time to sort out which agents provide
sustenance, and which ones are engaged in other kinds of activities.
As we noted, children do not simply observe others; they are not passive
observers. Rather they interact with others and in doing so they develop
further capabilities in the contexts of those interactions. If the capacities of
primary intersubjectivity, like the detection of intentions in expressive
movement and eye direction, are sufficient to enable the child to recognize
dyadic relations between the other and the self, or between the other and the
world, something more is added to this in secondary intersubjectivity. As
noted, in joint attention, beginning around 9-14 months, the child alternates
between monitoring the gaze of the other and what the other is gazing at,
checking to verify that they are continuing to look at the same thing. Indeed,
the child also learns to point at approximately this same time. Eighteen-
month-old children comprehend what another person intends to do with an
instrument in a specific context. They are able to re-enact to completion the
goal-directed behavior that someone else fails to complete. Thus, the child, on
seeing an adult who tries to manipulate a toy and who appears frustrated about
being unable to do so, quite readily picks up the toy and shows the adult how
to do it (Meltzoff 1995; Meltzoff and Brooks 2001).
Our understanding of the actions of others occurs on the highest, most
appropriate pragmatic level possible. That is, we understand actions at the
most relevant pragmatic (intentional, goal-oriented) level, ignoring possible
subpersonal or lower-level descriptions, and also ignoring interpretations in
terms of beliefs, desires, or hidden mental states. Rather than making an
inference to what the other person is intending by starting with bodily
movements, and moving thence to the level of mental events, we see actions
as meaningful in the context of the physical and intersubjective environment.
If, in the vicinity of a loose board, I see you reach for a hammer and nail, I
know what your intentions are as much from the hammer, nail, and loose
board as from anything that I observe about your bodily expression or
postulate in your mind. We interpret the actions of others in terms of their
goals and intentions set in contextualized situations, rather than abstractly in
terms of either their muscular performance or their beliefs.5 The environment,
is that our initial, basic engagements with others are not estranged, even if sophisticated
creatures like us are capable of hiding or faking their emotions.
5 Our understanding of the performance of mimes who work without props depends on their
excellent ability to express intentions in their movements, but also on our familiarity with
contexts. The mime’s talent for expressive movements is clearly demonstrated in contrast to
Gallagher and Hutto
24
the situation, or the pragmatic context is never perceived neutrally (without
meaning), either in regard to our own possible actions, or in regard to the
actions and possibilities of others. As Gibson’s theory of affordances (e.g.
Gibson 1979) suggests, we see things in relation to their possible uses, and
therefore never as a disembodied observer. Likewise, our perception of the
other person, as another agent, is never of an entity existing outside of a
situation, but rather of an agent in a pragmatic context that throws light on the
intentions (or possible intentions) of that agent.
Theory-of-mind approaches, which involve theory (as an application of
folk psychology) or simulation, and which focus on the acquisition of the
concept of mental states (like belief) around age 3 or 4 years, miss some basic
and important capacities for social cognition. Yet, the acknowledgement of
capabilities for understanding others that define primary and secondary
intersubjectivity – the embodied, sensory-motor (emotion informed)
capabilities that enable us to perceive the intentions of others (from birth
onward), and the perceptual and action capabilities that enable us to
understand others in the pragmatically contextualized situations of everyday
life (from 12-18 months onward) – is not sufficient to address what are clearly
new developments around the ages of 2, 3 and 4 years. The “elephant in the
room” around the age of 2 years is, of course, language. But if language
development itself is something that depends on some of the capabilities of
primary and secondary intersubjectivity, language also carries these
capabilities forward and puts them into service in much more sophisticated
social contexts (on this point, from a different perspective, also see Zlatev,
this volume).
Do children, upon passing explicit false-belief tests, acquire the final
conceptual component needed for their mature understanding of reasons, as is
the pervasive claim in the theory-of-mind literature? Or does their newfound
understanding of false belief simply equate to a capacity to recognize that the
other (whether Maxie, or Sally-Ann, or Snoopy, etc.) has a divergent point of
view from their own, and no more? And, what lies at the root of this sort of
understanding? Is this sort of mastery of the concept of belief a natural
consequence of the maturation of theory-of-mind modules, grounded in
introspective acts of ostensive denotation or the product of extensive,
evidence-based theorizing on their part? We propose that none of these
proposals hold up well under close scrutiny (see Hutto 2008: chs. 9 and 10). If
so it is more plausible to think that an understanding of divergent cognitive
perspectives is the result of children beginning to participate in conversations
of the kind that require recognition of conflicting points of view. This sort of
activity can be seen as a natural extension of those forms of imaginative
pretend play that require children to occupy different character roles and adopt
personas that are different to their own (Hutto 2008: ch. 7).
what we often experience in the game of charades or pantomime when we haven’t a clue
about what the player is trying to represent.
Gallagher and Hutto
25
A child’s initial understanding of the concept of belief is likely to depend
on many things but it is notable that many false-belief tests are presented in
the form of a narrative and could be interpreted as tests for a certain level of
narrative competency. It also worth observing that the strongest data
concerning successful false-belief performance stems from experiments
conducted almost entirely on European and American subjects, whose early
lives are awash with folk psychological narratives encountered in fairy tales,
children books, comic books, television and films (Richner and Nicolopoulou
2001: 408; Nelson 2003: 22). The form, content and focus of the stories and
storytelling practices are much the same in these cultures. Indeed, they even
share many of the same canonical ‘texts’.
Even more important, we must ask, what role does this mature
understanding of false-belief play in the lives of children? And, what drives its
development and facilitates its incorporation into larger explanatory schemas
of explicitly making sense of actions in terms of reasons (in which attributions
of belief plays an important but nevertheless limited part)? In addressing these
questions it is vital to be aware, as Carpendale and Lewis (2004: 91) stress,
that:
Proponents of the dominant theories have been notably quiet
about what happens in development after the child’s fifth
birthday. However research that explores whether 5-year-olds
can use simple false belief knowledge to make inferences about
their own and other’s perspectives finds that they singularly
fail to do so.
Making Sense of Reasons
The ability and motivation to use one’s knowledge of false belief in wider
explanatory contexts, it seems, is late-developing. It comes into play only after
children gain an explicit, practical mastery of the concept of belief. This
suggests that false belief understanding is not the crowning moment in their
early understanding other minds; children must develop further still if they are
to make sense of actions in terms of reasons. What does this involve?
Let’s focus on an example. Someone might ask: Why is Laura going to
India? If I don’t really know Laura, and if I’ve never heard her say why she is
going to India, then I may attempt to get at her reasons in the third-person.
This is surely something we do occasionally. This sort of speculative attempt
at folk-psychological explanation might run as follows. Laura is a young,
American college student. Why do young, American college students travel to
India? Laura, like many young, American college students, may believe that
India is a romantic place and that she can learn about Eastern meditation
practices there and have an adventure. So Laura might desire to go to India for
such reasons. One reaches this conclusion by calling on background
knowledge – general knowledge or beliefs about what American college
students tend to think and value as well as one’s knowledge and beliefs about
Gallagher and Hutto
26
widely held beliefs about India. The attributed reason may be correct or
incorrect in Laura’s case, but lacking detailed information about Laura, one is
forced to appeal to generalizations informed by knowledge of an impersonal
sort.
Two things are worthy of note. First, this kind of speculation is not likely
to be very reliable in most interesting cases. Second, there is no obvious
reason to think that the background knowledge (or beliefs) in question is (are)
theoretical. To say that one is operating with theories about India and theories
about the belief-forming tendencies of American students in such cases is
surely to stretch the notion of theory beyond reasonable limits.
Let’s modify the example slightly. If I know Laura, but do not know
precisely why she is going to India, I will be able to make a more informed
guess about her reasons. Laura is the kind of person who really wants to help
children in the third world, so that is probably why she is going to India. I will
have learnt this about her from my previous exchanges with her or on the
basis of what others have told me about her. In this case too, my attribution is
knowledge-based but the knowledge in question is this time particular and
personal. Although, again, hardly theoretical my attribution remains
speculative and suppositional.
Here’s a third case. Knowing Laura I may already know her reason for
going to India or I might get at it by much more reliable means. I may know
why she is going because she may have already told me so. If not, I could
always ask her. Of course, she may be lying or self-deceived, but even
acknowledging those possibilities direct conversation is undeniably the most
secure route to her reasons.
It is important to stress that in each of these cases the capacity to
understand why Laura acted (or might have acted), our ability to digest these
answers, is framed by the activity of checking to see if her reason, as it were,
makes sense. Guessing at or learning of a person’s reason is only a small part
of the story of our everyday understanding of why others act. It is also
necessary to situate and evaluate reasons in wider contexts and against certain
normative assumptions. Would it make sense for anyone go to India for that
sort of reason? In particular, does it make sense for Laura to go? Is doing so in
line with her character, her larger ambitions, her existing projects, or her
history? What does it say about her? Does it make her a generous person, an
idealist or merely naïve? Understanding reasons for action demands more than
simply knowing which beliefs and desires have moved a person to act. To
understand intentional action requires contextualizing these, both in terms of
cultural norms and the peculiarities of a particular person’s history or values.
In this light, reasons for acting are best thought of as “the elements of a
possible storyline” (Velleman 2000: 28). As such, making explicit a person’s
narrative is the medium for understanding and evaluating reasons and making
sense of actions. Such narratives allow us to understand a person’s ‘rationale’
when this is not immediately obvious.
Gallagher and Hutto
27
Sometimes there is a need to frame and justify our reasons but more often
than not, when all proceeds normally there is simply no need. This does not
imply that in such cases we quietly grasp and deploy a set of explicit
generalizations about how others will act. Rather, it is through shared training
about roles and rules of our common world that I learn how I ought to behave
in various circumstances, and at the same time I learn how you ought to
behave as well, ceteris paribus. Knowledge of what I ought to do in certain
circumstances supplies a handy guide to the likely behaviour of others, in so
far as they do not step out of line. Such learning does not take the form of
internalizing explicit rules (at least not as a set of theoretical propositions), nor
does it depend on our applying ones that are somehow already built-in
subpersonally. Rather our expectations of others is the result of our becoming
accustomed to local norms, coming to embody them, as it were, through habit
and practice. This, we suggest, and not the wielding of theoretical
generalizations, is the crucial backdrop against which we make sense of
reason for action via narratives of the folk psychological variety.
The Narrative Practice Hypothesis
How do we get this sort of complex and nuanced understanding of why people
do what they do? People do not wear their reasons for action on their sleeves
and they cannot be readily or fully discerned or understood by deploying the
kinds of embodied heuristics described earlier in this paper. We suggest that
the pervasive presence of narrative in our daily lives, and the development of
specific kinds of narrative competency, can provide a more parsimonious
alternative to theory or simulation approaches, and a better way to account for
the more nuanced understandings (and mis-understandings) we have of others.
Competency with different kinds of narratives enables us to understand others
in a variety of ways. Distinctive kinds of narrative encounters are what first
allows us to develop our folk psychological competence. Hutto calls this “the
narrative practice hypothesis”. It claims that “children normally achieve [folk
psychological] understanding by engaging in story-telling practices, with the
support of others. The stories about those who act for reasons - i.e. folk
psychological narratives - are the foci of this practice. Stories of this special
kind provide the crucial training set needed for understanding reasons” (Hutto
2007b: 53).
Accordingly, children acquire their skilled competence in understanding
reasons by being exposed to and by engaging with narratives when
appropriately and actively supported by their care givers. For example in acts
of storytelling such active support takes the form of children being prompted
to answer certain questions and by having their attention directed at particular
events. In the case of folk psychological narratives this will normally involve
jointly attending to mentalistic terms such as “wish”, “believe” and “know”
and discussing what the story characters know, feel and want. During this
process children learn how these states of mind behave in relation to each
other and other terms in the psychological family. Importantly, these attitudes
exist in a wider context such that children learn how and why these attitudes
Gallagher and Hutto
28
matter to the protagonists of such stories. Time and time again reasons for
acting, of different types and complexity, are put on show in this way.
By attending to enough of these exemplars, it is possible for children to
develop an implicit practical understanding of how to make sense of persons
as those who act for reasons. This is nothing like fashioning the concepts of
the attitudes by means of theorizing or a having core theory about how they
interrelate. Coming to understand what it is to act for a reason – to understand
folk psychologically – requires being trained by means of a specific kind of
narrative practice. They can achieve this because even simple folk
psychological narratives, like their more sophisticated cousins “represent the
moment by moment experiences of fictional minds, as well as the coloration
that those experiences acquire from the characters’ broader cognitive and
emotional stances towards situations and events” (Herman 2007: 147).
This proposal is consistent with a number of recent empirical studies that
have established that there are important links between narrative abilities and
our capacity to understand others (Astington 1990; Dunn et al, 1991; Feldman
et al 1990; Lewis 1994, Lewis et al 1994; Nelson 2007, Peterson and McCabe
1994). Exposure to stories is a critical determiner of folk-psychological
abilities and it has been shown that this relation is stronger than mere
correlation. Apparently narrative training causally influences what are
considered to be basic ‘theory of mind’ skills for the better (Guajardo and
Watson 2002). Controlled studies have shown that narrative training is
responsible for improving performances on false belief tasks. Thus, it has
been concluded that narrative is an effective tool for “at least modest
improvements in children’s theory of mind development” (Guajardo and
Watson 2002: 320). Similarly, it has been observed that “frequent
conversations about the mind can accelerate growth of a ToM” (Garfield et al.
2001: 513).
A complementary idea is that other kinds of narrative competencies enable
a less mediated interpretation of the other’s actions and intentions, that is,
without the mediation of folk psychology. After all, folk psychological
explanation is just one kind of narrative practice. We argue here that how we
go about developing a nuanced understanding of others may involve one or
both of these paths – employing a narrative-informed folk psychology, and/or
a less mediated narrative practice – and which one is appropriate will depend
on the context.
Folk psychological and other kinds of narratives
What are narratives? This is a tricky question and providing a good answer to
it is beyond the scope of this paper. A very minimal definition will suffice for
our purposes. Larmarque tells us that for something to be a narrative “at least
two events must be depicted in a narrative and there must be some more or
less loose, albeit non-logical relation between the events. Crucially, there is a
temporal dimension in narrative” (Lamarque 2004: 394, see also Lamarque
Gallagher and Hutto
29
and Olsen 1994: 225). This neutral characterisation easily lends itself to the
idea that there are different types of narratives and that these can be classified
by such common features as their constituents and subject matter. Folk
psychological narratives – as exemplified by Little Red Riding Hood – are
distinguished by being about agents who act for reasons. Importantly,
narratives of this kind can play their special role in development by being the
objects of joint attention in early learning. That is the core claim of the NPH.
In this light it should be emphasised that, as social cognizers, we do not
use folk psychological narratives nearly as often as the tradition supposes.
They are not, for example, the basis of all interpersonal interaction. On the
contrary, they generally only come into play in those cases in which the
actions of others deviate from what is normally expected in such a way that
we encounter difficulty understanding them. In such cases the other’s actions
become noticeable, falling into the spotlight for special attention and
explanation – and potentially, explanations of a specific sort that involve
understanding the other’s reasons for taking the particular action – where this
is not in some way obvious or already known. Folk psychology is needed only
in rare cases where we are not already familiar with the other person’s story,
or are perplexed by another’s actions. For “When things ‘are as they should
be’, the narratives of folk psychology are unnecessary” (Bruner 1990: 40).
Appeal to folk psychology may come into play when culturally-based
expectations are violated. For the most part, well-rehearsed patterns of
behaviour and coordination dominate. By and large, we get by without having
to make any folk psychological attributions at all and without seeking
explications from others because most everyday social interaction takes place
in normal (and normalized) environments.
Again, we can learn a great deal from developmental psychology. Around
the age of two, children are in secure possession of “an early intentional
understanding of persons having internal goals and wants that differ from
person to person” (Wellman and Phillips 2001: 130, Bartsch and Wellman
1995). Young children are somewhat practiced in understanding things as
other people understand them in pragmatic contexts, and when the capacities
associated with primary and secondary intersubjectivity are combined with
several other newly acquired capacities, young children are ready to
understand things and people in emerging narrative structures. And in this
context it must be acknowledged that many other kinds of narratives – those
of the non-folk psychological variety – can take us a long way to the
understanding we seek, without resorting to the folk psychological framework
per se (or at least without always having to do so).
We learn to make sense of persons (others as well as ourselves) in
dramatic and narrative ways as young children. When children listen to
stories, or play-act6 (and the same applies to adults who are exposed to
6 There are “two aspects of children’s narrative activity which are too often treated in mutual
isolation: the discursive exposition of narratives in storytelling and their enactments in
pretend play” (see Richner & Nicolopoulou 2001: 408). “Children’s first narrative
productions occur in action, in episodes of symbolic play by groups of peers, accompanied by
Gallagher and Hutto
30
parables, plays, myths, novels, etc.) they become familiarized with sets of
characters and with a range of ordinary or extra-ordinary situations, and the
sorts of actions appropriate to them, all of which helps to shape their
expectations. An education in narratives of many sorts – even of the more
general and less personal variety – provides knowledge of what actions are
acceptable and in what circumstances, what sort of events are important and
noteworthy, what accounts can account for action, and what kind of
explanations constitute the giving of good reasons.
Moreover, children are well supported in this process. Typically, they are
provided with running commentaries on stories that teach them not only
which actions are suited to particular situations but also which reasons for
acting are acceptable and which are not. It is by absorbing such standards that
we first learn how to judge an action’s appropriateness (though, of course, in
time such standards are sometimes questioned and overturned). Quite
generally, stories – real or fictional – teach us what others can expect from us,
but just as importantly, what we can expect from others in certain situations.
This is not just coming to know what others ought to (and thus are likely to)
do, but what they ought to (and thus are likely to) think and feel, as indexed to
the sort of people they are. Narratives provide an important source of
guidance for staking out the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not.
Through them we learn the norms associated with social roles that pervade our
everyday environments – shops, restaurants, homes and theatres.
Engaging with narratives is not a passive affair: it presupposes a wide
range of emotive and interactive abilities. To appreciate such stories children
must be initially capable, at least to some degree, of imaginative identification
and of responding emotively, just as they do in basic social engagements. In
this respect “conversations about written and oral stories are natural
extensions of children’s earlier experiences with the sharing of event
structures” (Guajardo and Watson 2002: 307). Through them children
discover why characters act as they do in particular cases, becoming
accustomed to standard scripts – scenarios, characters, plots, etc.
The kind of emotional resonance that one finds already in infancy, in
primary intersubjectivity, seems to play an important role in gaining narrative
competency. Decety and Chaminade (2003) have shown this connection as it
plays out in the brain. In their fMRI study, subjects were presented with a
series of video clips showing actors telling sad and neutral stories, as if they
had personally experienced them. The stories were told with either congruent
or incongruent motor expression of emotion. Subjects were then asked to rate
the mood of the actor and how likable they found that person. Watching sad
stories versus neutral stories was associated with increased processing activity
in emotion related structures (including the amygdala and parieto-frontal
areas, predominantly in the right hemisphere). These areas were not activated
when the narrator showed incongruent facial expressions. The reasonable
– rather than solely though – language. Play is an important developmental source of
narrative” (Nelson 2003: 28).
Gallagher and Hutto
31
hypothesis is that conflict between what we sense as the emotional state of the
other person, simply on the basis of seeing their faces and actions, and the
narrative content they present, is disruptive to understanding. Whatever is
going on in the brain correlates not simply to features of action and expression
(and the subjectivity of the other person) but to the larger story, the scene, the
circumstance of the other person, and how features of action and expression
match or fail to match those circumstances. If the emotional character of the
other person is not in character with the narrative framework – with the story
that I could tell about her and her circumstances – it is difficult to understand
that person, the story, or both.
Narrative competency and “landscape of consciousness”
We have argued that the abilities for intersubjective interaction and
understanding that start with primary and secondary intersubjectivity, develop
along a route that in most ordinary cases exploits narrative competency rather
than the procedures, subpersonal or explicit, associated with traditional
theory-of-mind accounts.
This should provide the means of staving off a common worry about the
NPH. Janet Astington (1990) has argued that acquiring narrative competency
requires having a theory of mind. Citing Bruner’s concept of the landscape of
consciousness (“what those involved in the action know, think, or feel, or do
not know, think, or feel” [Bruner 1986: 14]), she suggests that to understand
narrative we need access to the characters’ minds, and to have the latter
requires us to have a theory of mind. But Bruner himself offers good
experimental evidence against the necessity of the landscape of consciousness
(LC) for understanding narratives. Feldman, Bruner et al. (1990), in a study of
narrative comprehension in adults, presented two different versions of the
same story to two groups, respectively. The first and original story mentioned
the mental states of the characters as the story develops, and so was rich in
LC. The second story was the very same story stripped of mental terms,
leaving only the landscape of actions (LA). The results showed no significant
differences (1) in subjects using reader-related mental verbs when they
recount the LC narrative; (2) in recounting the facts of the stories – “the
retellings were virtually indistinguishable”; (3) in recounting the order of
events; and (4) when providing a meaning summary (gist) for the story: “there
is no version difference in the kind of gist given.” A likely explanation of
these results is that the structure of these person-narratives, as revealed
explicitly in basic plots, can be identified, responded to and described on
several levels and ways. Often this happens all at once. But not everyone is
equally proficient at this. It is possible to be alive to the major events in a
drama without always being able to decipher, with full clarity or perhaps at
all, the reasons why a protagonist will have acted. It is thus possible to have
some sense of what is going on in an unfolding drama without understanding
Gallagher and Hutto
32
it in toto (this is apparently a common experience for those first encountering
Shakespearean plays).7
What is important is that seeking a narrative understanding of the other’s
reasons is not a matter of characterizing the other’s ‘inner’ life – if this is
understood as a series of causally efficacious mental states. What we are
attempting to understand is much richer; it is the other’s reasons as they figure
against the larger history and set of projects, and that is best captured in a
narrative form. Coming to understand another’s reasons should not be
understood as designating their discrete ‘mental states’ but their attitudes and
responses as whole situated persons. I encounter the other person, not
abstracted from their circumstances, but in the middle of something that has a
beginning and that is going somewhere. I see them in the framework of a story
in which either I have a part to play or I don’t. The narrative is not primarily
about what is ‘going on inside their heads’; it’s about the events going on in
the world around them, the world that we share with them, the events in their
lives and the way they understand and respond to such events.8 Crucially,
coming to appreciate the other’s story – to see why they are doing what they
are doing – does not require a capacity for mentalizing inferences or
simulations. Our understanding of others is ordinarily not based on attempts to
get into their heads; typically we do not need to access a “landscape of
consciousness” since we already have access to a “landscape of action” which
is constituted by their embodied actions and the rich worldly contexts within
which they act – contexts that operate as scaffolds for the meaning and
significance of actions and expressive movements. 9
7 For further discussion of the distinction between properly folk psychological narratives and
those dramatic re-enactments which only involve intentional attitudes, yet which share the
same basic formats see Hutto 2006.
8 This is not to deny that some narratives are more psychological than others – those of James
Joyce or Dostoyevsky, as Jordan Zlatev suggests (private correspondence). Luckily Joyce,
Dostoyevsky and other novelists put us in the heads of their characters and we do not have to
theorize or simulate our way in there. The NPH does not deny that human beings are
complicated psychological creatures, or that the psychological lives of Stephen Dedalus or
Raskolnikov are not fascinating in ways that outstrip an understanding in folk psychological
terms. The issue is how we come to understand people in our everyday interactions with them.
9 The idea that narrative understanding does not rest on or presuppose TOM abilities per se
(including simulation capacities that involve making belief/desire predictions and
explanations) is in line with Greg Currie’s (2007) recent claim that our skills in
comprehending narratives involve the adoption of frameworks through which we identify
with (and are effectively ‘asked to’ take on) certain personas, which can be understood as
embodied ‘stances’ that particular narratives invite us to adopt. The activity of framework
adoption is quite distinct from understanding a story’s content – as detailed in its plot or
fabula. As Currie characterizes it, adoption or attention to a narrative framework activates our
subpersonal mechanisms for imitative and emotional responding – thus it is something that
engages us viscerally. He contrasts this with the idea that attention to narrative framework
involves developing a ‘theory’ (even if a not very explicit one) about the persona embedded
in narrative; although he does not wholly reject the latter proposal since he acknowledges it
may have a role when it comes to communicating about narratives.
Gallagher and Hutto
33
Conclusions
In this chapter we have argued that there is no need to appeal to standard
theory-of-mind and simulative explanations of how we understand others as
the basis for making sense of them folk psychologically. What begins as
perceptual and emotional resonance processes in early infancy, which allow
us to pick up the feelings and intentions of others from their movements,
gestures, and facial expressions, feeds into the development of a more
nuanced understanding of how and why people act as they do, found in our
ability to frame their actions, and our own, in narrative ways. Our everyday
abilities for intersubjective engagement and interaction are, in the later stages
of childhood, transformed by encounters with narratives. It is exposure to
these complex objects of joint attention – and not facility with theoretical
knowledge or simulative routines – that is responsible for the development of
sophisticated folk psychological abilities and understanding; abilities which
remain importantly in play in our adult life.
Gallagher and Hutto
34
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