How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition
... Similarly, Spaulding [19] and Gallagher [8] emphasize that narrative scaffolding plays a critical role in how humans interpret agent-like behavior in artificial systems, reinforcing the idea that coherence in linguistic form may suffice to evoke perceived intentionality, even in the absence of genuine mental states. ...
... This stance allows us to evaluate LLM responses behaviorally, focusing on output regularities that resemble introspective discourse without attributing internal experience or belief. This interpretive position aligns with Spaulding's analysis of social cognition, which emphasizes behavioral regularities as sufficient grounds for mind attribution in social contexts, even when internal access is unavailable [19], and with Zednik's normative framework for explainable AI, which frames transparency as an observer-relative relation between model behavior and user understanding [23]. ...
... We adopt this stance heuristically: rather than ascribe agency or consciousness to language models, we examine whether their responses to introspective prompts exhibit behavioral regularities that support such an interpretive lens. This interpretive position aligns with Spaulding's analysis of social cognition, which emphasizes behavioral regularities as sufficient grounds for attribution of the mind in social contexts, even when internal access is unavailable [19]. ...
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly produce outputs that resemble introspection, including self-reference, epistemic modulation, and claims about internal states. This study investigates whether such behaviors display consistent patterns across repeated prompts or reflect surface-level generative artifacts. We evaluated five open-weight, stateless LLMs using a structured battery of 21 introspective prompts, each repeated ten times, yielding 1,050 completions. These outputs are analyzed across three behavioral dimensions: surface-level similarity (via token overlap), semantic coherence (via sentence embeddings), and inferential consistency (via natural language inference). Although some models demonstrate localized thematic stability—especially in identity - and consciousness-related prompts—none sustain diachronic coherence. High rates of contradiction are observed, often arising from tensions between mechanistic disclaimers and anthropomorphic phrasing. We introduce the concept of pseudo-consciousness to describe structured but non-experiential self-referential output. Based on Dennett’s intentional stance, our analysis avoids ontological claims and instead focuses on behavioral regularities. The study contributes a reproducible framework for evaluating simulated introspection in LLMs and offers a graded taxonomy for classifying self-referential output. Our LLM findings have implications for interpretability, alignment, and user perception, highlighting the need for caution in attributing mental states to stateless generative systems based solely on linguistic fluency.
... Similarly, Spaulding [19] and Gallagher [8] emphasize that narrative scaffolding plays a critical role in how humans interpret agent-like behavior in artificial systems, reinforcing the idea that coherence in linguistic form may suffice to evoke perceived intentionality, even in the absence of genuine mental states. ...
... This stance allows us to evaluate LLM responses behaviorally, focusing on output regularities that resemble introspective discourse without attributing internal experience or belief. This interpretive position aligns with Spaulding's analysis of social cognition, which emphasizes behavioral regularities as sufficient grounds for mind attribution in social contexts, even when internal access is unavailable [19], and with Zednik's normative framework for explainable AI, which frames transparency as an observer-relative relation between model behavior and user understanding [23]. ...
... We adopt this stance heuristically: rather than ascribe agency or consciousness to language models, we examine whether their responses to introspective prompts exhibit behavioral regularities that support such an interpretive lens. This interpretive position aligns with Spaulding's analysis of social cognition, which emphasizes behavioral regularities as sufficient grounds for attribution of the mind in social contexts, even when internal access is unavailable [19]. ...
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly produce outputs that resemble introspection, including self-reference, epistemic modulation, and claims about internal states. This study investigates whether such behaviors display consistent patterns across repeated prompts or reflect surface-level generative artifacts. We evaluated five open-weight, stateless LLMs using a structured battery of 21 introspective prompts, each repeated ten times, yielding 1,050 completions. These outputs are analyzed across three behavioral dimensions: surface-level similarity (via token overlap), semantic coherence (via sentence embeddings), and inferential consistency (via natural language inference). Although some models demonstrate localized thematic stability—especially in identity - and consciousness-related prompts—none sustain diachronic coherence. High rates of contradiction are observed, often arising from tensions between mechanistic disclaimers and anthropomorphic phrasing. We introduce the concept of pseudo-consciousness to describe structured but non experiential self-referential output. Based on Dennett’s intentional stance, our analysis avoids ontological claims and instead focuses on behavioral regularities. The study contributes a reproducible framework for evaluating simulated introspection in LLMs and offers a graded taxonomy for classifying self-referential output. Our LLM findings have implications for interpretability, alignment, and user perception, highlighting the need for caution in attributing mental states to stateless generative systems based solely on linguistic fluency.
... Both laboratory studies and resulting theories offer simplified cases, in which the emphasis is on explaining and predicting mental states (see Hutto & Ravenscroft, 2021;Spaulding, 2018b). But this emphasis has been called into question -for example, in direct perception approaches (Gallagher, 2001(Gallagher, , 2005a(Gallagher, , 2005b(Gallagher, , 2008a(Gallagher, , 2008b(Gallagher, , 2008cGallagher & Hutto, 2008;Zahavi, 2011;Ratcliffe, 2007) and situated and enactive approaches (Newen et al. 2015;De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007;Robbins & Aydede, 2009) by emphasizing interaction before cognition but also approaches that defend a more hybrid approach to social cognition (Nichols & Stich, 2003;Apperly & Butterfill;Lavelle, 2012;Spaulding, 2018aSpaulding, , 2018b by emphasizing the flexibility of social cognition, or approaches that mention the role of scripts for social cognition (Bermúdez, 2003a(Bermúdez, , 2003b(Bermúdez, , 2005Eickers, 2023aEickers, , 2024a. ...
... Both laboratory studies and resulting theories offer simplified cases, in which the emphasis is on explaining and predicting mental states (see Hutto & Ravenscroft, 2021;Spaulding, 2018b). But this emphasis has been called into question -for example, in direct perception approaches (Gallagher, 2001(Gallagher, , 2005a(Gallagher, , 2005b(Gallagher, , 2008a(Gallagher, , 2008b(Gallagher, , 2008cGallagher & Hutto, 2008;Zahavi, 2011;Ratcliffe, 2007) and situated and enactive approaches (Newen et al. 2015;De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007;Robbins & Aydede, 2009) by emphasizing interaction before cognition but also approaches that defend a more hybrid approach to social cognition (Nichols & Stich, 2003;Apperly & Butterfill;Lavelle, 2012;Spaulding, 2018aSpaulding, , 2018b by emphasizing the flexibility of social cognition, or approaches that mention the role of scripts for social cognition (Bermúdez, 2003a(Bermúdez, , 2003b(Bermúdez, , 2005Eickers, 2023aEickers, , 2024a. To explain how social cognition works in real life, we need to ask how we interact with others, how we manage to coordinate behaviors in interaction, and how social factors influence our interactions, rather than how one individual disengaged mind predicts and explains the behavior of another mind. ...
... Recent approaches to social cognition have pointed out that the social interactions considered in standard debates on social cognition appear to Introduction 3 be context-free and ahistorical -that is, standard approaches have failed to address the role that context, social norms, and bias play in social interaction, among other things (Spaulding, 2018b;Musholt, 2018;Coninx & Newen, 2018;McGeer, 2007McGeer, , 2015McGeer, , 2021Andrews, 2003Andrews, , 2020Eickers, 2019Eickers, , 2023aEickers, , 2024a. That is, the philosophy of social cognition increasingly acknowledges that social cognition and interaction may be heavily influenced by social norms (e.g., Zawidzki, 2013;McGeer, 2007McGeer, , 2015 as well as by social identity, situational context, biases, and stereotypes (Spaulding, 2018b;Westra, 2018Westra, , 2019. ...
This book argues that our success in navigating the social world depends heavily on scripts. Scripts play a central role in our ability to understand social interactions shaped by different contextual factors.
In philosophy of social cognition, scholars have asked what mechanisms we employ when interacting with other people or when cognizing about other people. Recent approaches acknowledge that social cognition and interaction depend heavily on contextual, cultural, and social factors that contribute to the way individuals make sense of the social interactions they take part in. This book offers the first integrative account of scripts in social cognition and interaction. It argues that we need to make contextual factors and social identity central when trying to explain how social interaction works, and that this is possible via scripts. Additionally, scripts can help us understand bias and injustice in social interaction. The author’s approach combines several different areas of philosophy – philosophy of mind, social epistemology, feminist philosophy – as well as sociology and psychology to show why paying attention to injustice in interaction is much needed in social cognition research, and in philosophy of mind more generally.
Scripts and Social Cognition: How We Interact with Others will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, social epistemology, social ontology, sociology, and social psychology.
... Scripts, I argue, offer a promising avenue for addressing context and identity. Scripts have received uptake in recent approaches to social cognition (e.g., Bermúdez, 2003Bermúdez, , 2005Andrews 2012Andrews , 2020Spaulding 2018) but, I believe, scripts should be motivated beyond the consideration they have been given recently. ...
... Scripts still tend to be treated rather passingly (see Harris 2017;Zawidzki 2013;Bermúdez 2003Bermúdez , 2005Maibom 2007;Spaulding 2018;Andrews 2020). Bermúdez was the first author to promote scripts in the context of debates about standard accounts of social cognition, but, as we will see, he advocates a hybrid model in which scripts play a limited role alongside these standard accounts. ...
... This is a shift away from theories of social cognition that emphasize an external observer's perspective on social situations. Often, in the literature on standard accounts, the task of social cognition is presented in a highly detached an individualistic way: a person observing social behavior instead of different people interacting with each other (see Musholt, 2018;Spaulding, 2018;Zawidzki, 2013). ...
To explain how social cognition normally serves us in real life, we need to ask which factors contribute to specific social interactions. Recent accounts, and mostly pluralistic models, have started incorporating contextual and social factors in explanations of social cognition. In this paper, I further motivate the importance of contextual and identity factors for social cognition. This paper presents scripts as an alternative resource in social cognition that can account for contextual and identity factors. Scripts are normative and context-sensitive knowledge structures that describe behavior in terms of corresponding events, situations, social roles, individuals, or mental state types in a way that guides action. The script approach presented here builds on recent accounts of social cognition but points out important differences and possible advantages it has over them: e.g., the script approach focuses even more strongly on context and identity.
... Scripts have already been acknowledged in the philosophy of social cognition and interaction as tools that tell people how to interact in different situational and cultural contexts (Andrews, 2012(Andrews, , 2020Bicchieri, 2006;Spaulding, 2018) but have been neglected in standard approaches to social cognition (e.g., Gopnik & Wellman, 1994). The goal of this paper is to draw on newer accounts of social cognition that consider scripts relevant, and to emphasize the central role scripts play for the coordination of behaviors. ...
... Newer accounts of social cognition have taken scripts into consideration but have yet to emphasize the central role scripts play. Newer accounts have mostly either emphasized a pluralistic understanding of social cognition (e.g., Coninx & Newen, 2018;Maibom, 2007;Wolf et al., 2021) or an understanding that still emphasizes mindreading (e.g., Spaulding, 2018). The primary objective of this paper is to show that scripts are the fundamental tool to explain coordinated behaviors in social interactions. ...
... Andrews is also among the theorists who have considered a role of scripts in social cognition (Andrews, 2012(Andrews, , 2020. Others include Shannon Spaulding (2018), Heidi Maibom (2007) and Christina Bicchieri (2006). Scripts are in the forefront of philosophers and cognitive scientists working in social cognition but, as I argue, they deserve even more attention. ...
Some philosophical and psychological approaches to social interaction posit a powerful explanatory tool for explaining how we navigate social situations: scripts. Scripts tell people how to interact in different situational and cultural contexts depending on social roles such as gender. A script theory of social interaction puts emphasis on understanding the world as normatively structured. Social structures place demands, roles, and ways to behave in the social world upon us, which, in turn, guide the ways we interact with one another and the ways we coordinate our behaviors. In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of coordinated behaviors in social interactions in humans. I argue that looking closely at everyday interactions, for which social coordination is central, strongly points to a fundamental role of scripts for social cognition and interaction. In order to explain some social interactions, like those based on social coordination, we do not need to recourse to mental state attribution. Rather, I argue, scripts are a powerful resource for explaining social interaction and especially coordinated behaviors. Scripts have been neglected in standard approaches to social cognition but are (re‐)gaining attention via the normative turn in social cognition.
... Even if they allow for the general possibility of multiple strategies to be employed in social cognition, only one of them is supposed to function as the default or basis underlying the others. In recent years, however, there has been a move away from such unitary theories towards Pluralist Accounts (Andrews, 2012;Fiebich, 2015;Fiebich et al., 2017;Newen, 2015;Spaulding, 2018). That is, IT was right in arguing that not all our social cognition depends on mindreading, we have alternative, more basic and interactive means of understanding others. ...
... In other words, we can interact with others on the bases of rule following without attributing any mental states. Social interaction is often significantly shaped by stereotypes and social biases about how members of certain groups act (Andrews, 2012;Spaulding, 2018), by our expectations concerning the behavioral routines of an individual (Fiebich & Coltheart, 2015;Newen, 2015), or the scripts applying to standardized interactions in social situations (Coninx & Newen, 2018;Newen, 2015). For example, I can make predictions about the driving style of taxi drivers based on stereotypes I have about people of this profession; or about a friends' behavior based on my knowledge of their habits. ...
... In the contrary, humans use all available means in a situation to predict, interpret, and react to the behavior of others in the best possible manner. Therefore, it seems more likely that theory-based inference-making, simulation, direct perception, and rule following are used simultaneously as complementary strategies (see also Spaulding, 2018;Westra, 2018). For example, in aiming to understand and predict the behavior of another person, perceptual cues as well as stereotypes might feed into the ascription of a mental state via mindreading. ...
How do we manage to understand the minds of others and usefully interact with them? In the last decade, the debate on these issues has developed from unitary to pluralist approaches. According to the latter, we make use of multiple socio-cognitive strategies when predicting, interpretating, and reacting to the behavior of others. This means a departure from the view of mindreading as the main strategy underlying social cognition. In this paper, we address the question of the controversial status of mindreading within such a pluralist framework. Contrary to many other accounts, we ascribe mindreading an equal status in a pluralist framework. Mindreading is required for a variety of central situations in life and importantly underlies the way in which we understand other people. Mindreading is also no less reliable than alternative strategies; reliability is not so much a matter of different competing socio-cognitive strategies, but rather of their complementary use.
... With this framework in hand, we can simply ask how often people have these motivations. If we frequently have the motivation to intervene on others' thoughts and behavior, 13 or if we are frequently motivated to general-12 In other works, I argued that phenomenology plays other roles, as well (Spaulding, 2015(Spaulding, , 2018a. Specifically, phenomenology helps us carve out the phenomenon of social cognition, may be essential for studying the role of emotions in social cognition, and weakly constrains theories of social cognition insofar as these theories should not have false predictions about our phenomenological experience of social interactions. ...
... Mentalizing is a necessary element in almost all the social practices highlighted by the critics above (Spaulding, 2018b(Spaulding, , 2019. For example, mindshaping and regulative folk psychology presuppose mentalizing insofar as one needs to know what a target thinks and feels in order to shape or regulate their minds and behavior. ...
The orthodox view of social cognition maintains that mentalizing is an important and pervasive element of our ordinary social interactions. The orthodoxy has come under scrutiny from various sources recently. Critics from the phenomenological tradition argue that phenomenological reflection on our social interactions tells against the orthodox view. Proponents of pluralistic folk psychology argue that our ordinary social interactions extend far beyond mentalizing. Both sorts of critics argue that emphasis in social cognition research ought to be on other elements of our social practices. In this paper, I consider social explanations specifically and argue that social explanations are implicated in many of the social practices highlighted by critics of the orthodox view.
... It is not surprising that humans are very good at mind-reading: we are thoroughly social beings who are deeply reliant on other people and our ability to understand them, and since human behavior varies widely, we need to have the ability to accurately judge across a similarly wide range. And we have that ability, as social beings so dependent on the judgments of others really ought to have (for a recent survey, see Spaulding, 2018a). ...
... To our knowledge, there is as yet no systematic treatment of how groups can be the target of mind-reading. As noted by Spaulding (2018a), failures of mindreading are an understudied area in general (for the view that there is not much to study, see Westra, 2020), and what little exists on that topic deals with the central case of individuals ascribing mental states to other individuals. There is some work on how membership of a group may affect mindreading (Spaulding, 2018b;Tullmann, 2019), which is a related but different question. ...
There is not as much resistance to COVID-19 mitigation as there seems, but there are structural features that make resistance seem worse than it is. Here, we describe two ways that the problem seeming to be worse than it is can make it worse. First, visible hesitation to implement COVID-19 responses signals to the wider society that mitigation measures may not succeed, which undermines people’s conditional willingness to join in on those efforts. Second, our evaluations of others’ willingness to implement these measures are informed by our attempts to mind-read them. Yet attempts to mind-read groups often mislead us, because groups invariably act from diverse motives, whereas mind-reading works best when identifying relatively stable and consistent motivations. This means that a small minority of people refusing to implement measures can have an outsized prominence that prompts mind-reading to diagnose widespread hesitation. These two factors form a feedback loop with each other: we see some people’s hesitation, which prompts us to mind-read other people as being more uncertain about the responses than they actually are, which undermines our confidence in the responses, which in turn encourages others to mind-read this hesitation, which further undermines confidence.
... Jedná se v podstatě o triviální potřebu jasné definice řešeného problému, která byla ovšem často přehlížena. V posledních dvaceti letech je naštěstí možné sledovat rostoucí zájem o otázku obsahu lidové psychologie a snahu o jasné vymezení tohoto kontroverzního a mnohoznačného tématu (Andrews 2007(Andrews , 2008(Andrews , 2012Bermúdez 2003Bermúdez , 2005Spaulding 2018). ...
... Tento předpoklad, že se lidová psychologie používaná každodenně běžnými lidmi v podstatě rovná psychologii propozičních postojů, se nicméně dočkal i četné kritiky. Především v posledních více než dvaceti letech lze sledovat nárůst odmítání standardního pojetí a snahy o rozpracování alternativních a širších pojetí lidové psychologie (Andrews 2007(Andrews , 2008(Andrews , 2012Bermúdez 2005;Fiebich 2019;Morton 2007;Ratcliffe 2007;Spaulding 2018). ...
Lidová psychologie coby základ naší schopnosti vysvětlovat a předvídat jednání je významné téma filozofie mysli. Debaty, které ji obklopují, se nicméně v minulosti zaměřovaly primárně na otázky jejího statusu v rámci vědeckého zkoumání mysli a formy ji zakládajících mechanismů (teorie, simulace aj.). Relativně menší pozornost byla věnována otázce obsahu lidové psychologie – tedy tomu, které koncepty či schopnosti pod označení „lidová psychologie“ řadit. V článku se zabývám právě otázkou obsahu a možné odpovědi na otázku obsahu předloženou pluralistickým pojetím lidové psychologie. Nejdříve uvádím některé argumenty zpochybňující standardní pojetí lidové psychologie a následně představuji pojetí pluralismu rozšiřující lidovou psychologii o řadu sociálně kognitivních schopností. V závěru se krátce věnuji tomu, jaké dopady by takto šířeji pojímaná lidová psychologie mohla mít pro otázky jejího statusu a formy.
... The second section provides an overview of the enactivist perspective on social cognition and details how its approach to autistic social disablement goes beyond the dominant Theory of Mind paradigm. I begin by explaining the key aspects of the Theory of Mind hypothesis as it has been presented by some of its proponents (Baron-Cohen, 1995, 1999Baron-Cohen et al., 1985;Dennett, 1987;Frith & Happé, 1999;Happé, 1995;Spaulding, 2010Spaulding, , 2018. I then lay out important discrepancies between these accounts and empirical research on the autistic ability to mindread (Prior et al., 1990;Reed & Paterson, 1990;Sommer et al., 2018). ...
Despite some remarkable accomplishments, enactivist and phenomenological approaches to autistic social difficulties remain highly problematic. Their conceptualization of social disablement as a disturbance of our pre-reflective understanding of others is promising and constitutes a better explanation than Theory of Mind. However, more care is needed when it comes to analyzing the causes of such disturbance. This article argues that any account of autistic social cognition that aims to provide an accurate picture should engage with the following three roots of autistic social difficulties: (1) intersubjective differences, (2) systemic discrimination and (3) sensory modulation. This article also examines how established literature has approached these causes, what limitations it presents and how more recent enactivist and phenomenological perspectives are overcoming them. Suggestions on how such three roots should be studied follow from this analysis. Firstly, I contend that intersubjective differences act as a source of difficulties for both autistic and non-autistic people, as already stated by the double-empathy problem (Milton in Disabil Soc 27(6):883–887, 2012). Additionally, I show that the systemic exclusion of autistic embodiment from participatory sense-making must be analyzed as the result of power dynamics and not as stemming from mere atypicality. Finally, I detail how sensory/attentional modulation in autistic individuals interacts with the other two sources of social difficulties but should not be taken to be their cause. Overall, a nuanced perspective that includes the political, intersubjective, and sensory roots of autistic social disablement is presented as a necessary step towards creating better research and more inclusive practices.
... Este tipo de estudios han tenido un impacto enorme en las distintas maneras en que se han construido los enfoques o teorías de la cognición social, razón por la cual han tomado fuerza en los últimos años los enfoques denominados pluralistas o amplios de la cognición social (Andrews 2012, McGeer 2007Spaulding 2018). Estos enfoques, a su vez, han sido reforzados por la abrumadora cantidad de estudios acerca de los sesgos cognitivos y la cognición implícita. ...
En este artículo me propongo examinar algunos casos de reconocimiento de emociones que parecieran estar constreñidos por información cognitiva de algún tipo. Usualmente, se ha explicado al reconocimiento de emociones como una habilidad directa, no-inferencial, que descansa en la detección de un conjunto de información perceptiva de carácter multimodal. No obstante, existe evidencia empírica relativa al reconocimiento de emociones que no pareciera ser explicada fácilmente por los enfoques no-inferencialistas debido a que existe algún tipo de influencia top-down entre cierto tipo estados cognitivos y perceptuales que desafía el carácter directo o no inferencial de esta habilidad. Específicamente, la integración de esa información podría involucrar mecanismos inferenciales o cognitivamente más demandantes que los propuestos por las teorías de la percepción directa de emociones. Particularmente, me refiero a la evidencia de la influencia que poseen los sesgos cognitivos, prejuicios y otras creencias en el reconocimiento de emociones. Propondré que estos casos de reconocimiento de emociones si pueden explicarse por medio de enfoques no inferencialistas si se apela a fenómenos como el de la penetrabilidad cognitiva.
... At the same time, such mindshaping ensures reliability, since all who participate are trained to develop the same dispositions and expectations. According to the mindshaping hypothesis, such "tricks" are essential to human coordination more broadly: what sets us apart from other primates is not better mindreading, but, rather, a palette of neural mechanisms and social practices, e.g., fine-grained imitation (Lyons et al., 2007;Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010), pedagogy (Csibra & Gergely, 2011;Sterelny, 2012), conformism (Klucharev et al., 2009;Muthukrishna et al., 2016), norm institution and enforcement (Henrich et al., 2006;Sripada & Stich, 2006), social scripts and stereotypes (Eickers, 2023;Bermúdez, 2003;Andrews, 2012Andrews, , 2020Spaulding, 2018;Schank & Abelson, 2013), self-constitution in terms of public narratives (Schechtman, 2018), etc., that make us more alike and familiar to each other, thereby dramatically simplifying coordinative tasks which, independently of mindshaping, appear intractable (Zawidzki, 2013). This is why we are able to coordinate on largescale, temporally extended cooperative tasks with countless unfamiliar individuals: we are shaped, typically culturally, to think, feel, and act in ways that make such tasks tractable. ...
There is evidence that mental illness is partly socially constituted: diagnoses are historically “transient” (Hacking, Rewriting the soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. Princeton University Press, 1998a; Mad travelers. University of Virginia, 1998b) and culturally variable (Toh, Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(2), 72–86, 2022). However, this view risks pernicious relativism. On most social constitution views, mental illness is what (some suitably expert part of) society takes it to be. But this has morally abhorrent implications, e.g., it legitimizes many spurious and harmful diagnoses (like “drapetomania”) and makes mental illness a matter of fashion rather than an objective challenge. This paper defends a conception of mental illness according to which it is partly socially constituted, yet which avoids such pernicious relativism: mental illness consists in an objective inability - a deficit in the skilled metacognitive self-regulation required to be rationally interpretable by one’s community, including oneself. Such reasons responsiveness requires skilled regulation of cognition, conation, and behavior, such that they respect relevant interpretive norms. Because such norms vary culturally, such skills are partly socially constituted.
... Moreover, enactive and embodied theories of cognition have challenged the assumption that social cognition involves (explicit) mental state attributions at all and have offered non-mentalistic alternatives (e.g.Gallagher, 2005;Hutto, 2008). For an overview and discussion of these different approaches, seeSpaulding (2018). ...
Bringing together recent case studies and insights into current developments, this collection introduces philosophers to a range of experimental methods from neuroscience. Chapters provide a comprehensive survey of the discipline, covering neuroimaging such as EEG and MRI, causal interventions, for instance brain stimulation or psychopharmacology, advanced statistical methods, and approaches drawing on research into the development of human individuals and humankind.
A team of experts combine clear explanations of complex methods with reports of cutting-edge research, advancing our understanding of how these tools can be applied to further philosophical inquiries into agency, emotions, enhancement, perception, personhood and more. With contributions organised by neuroscientific method, this volume provides an accessible overview for students and scholars coming to neurophilosophy for the first time, presenting a range of topics from responsibility to metacognition.
... Moreover, readers should be skeptical of Grethlein's claim that "the notion of the Theory of Mind has long lost its lustre in psychology" (2017a: 45). One can consult, by contrast, Oatley 2016, Calarco et al. 2017, Oatley and Djikic 2018, Spaulding 2018, and Wimmer et al. 2021 as well as the 2017 meta-analysis by Mumper and Gerrig in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. ...
Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad explains why people care about this foundational epic poem and its characters. It represents the first book-length application to the Iliad of research in communications, literary studies, media studies, and psychology on how readers of a story or viewers of a play, movie, or television show find themselves immersed in the tale and identify with the characters. Immersed recipients get wrapped up in a narrative and the world it depicts and lose track to some degree of their real-world surroundings. Identification occurs when recipients interpret the storyworld from a character’s perspective, feel emotions congruent with those of a character, and/or root for a character to succeed. This volume situates modern research on these experiences in relation to ancient criticism on how audiences react to narratives. It then offers close readings of select episodes and detailed analyses of recurring features to show how the Iliad immerses both ancient and modern recipients and encourages them to identify with its characters. Accessible to students and researchers, to those inside and outside of classical studies, this interdisciplinary project aligns research on the Iliad with contemporary approaches to storyworlds in a range of media. It thereby opens new frontiers in the study of ancient Greek literature and helps investigators of audience engagement from antiquity to the present contextualize and historicize their own work.
... Traditional narratives tend to reflect societal priorities of control, regulation, and cooperation by privileging trait attribution, stereotyping, and behavior schemata -techniques of "mindshaping." 35 It seems that mindshaping works as well as mindreading in building dramatic tension and propelling the plot. In such narratives, readers keep track of the merry-go-round of character types through dialogues and actions that do not deviate erratically from what is typical for a character with "such a personality in such circumstances." ...
This essay takes the standpoint of a specialist of Chinese literature to consider the question of what kind of knowledge literary studies produces. I believe that confronting this question head-on is critical to our discipline's renewal. Moving between the personal and the theoretical, I suggest that anthropology can provide useful tools in making sense of politically and culturally distant texts in the age of world literature. To illustrate my point, I revisit the question of flat characters in traditional Chinese fiction in light of new research in the anthropology of mind. In the end, I propose that literary studies move toward the "new humanities" in order to make itself relevant to broader constituencies.
... mindreading is the main aspect of folk psychology, and whether mindreading can be separated from other tools in our folk-psychological toolkit. 12 For example, whilst Andrews (2012, p. 102) tentatively suggests that non-human animals might use character in socially cognitive judgments (despite not having mindreading capacities), Spaulding (2018a) argues that social interactions are too complex to separate mindreading from other tools; trait attributions affect mindreading, and mindreading affects trait attributions. This view is also shared by Westra (2018), who conceives of trait attribution as being a part of a mindreading hierarchy of informational processing. ...
We make character trait attributions to predict and explain others’ behaviour. How
should we understand character trait attribution in context across the domains of
philosophy, folk psychology, developmental psychology, and evolutionary psychology?
For example, how does trait attribution relate to our ability to attribute mental states to
others, to ‘mindread’? This thesis uses philosophical methods and empirical data to
argue for character trait attribution as a practice dependent upon our ability to
mindread, which develops as a product of natural selection acting on culture instead of
genes. This analysis carves out trait attribution’s distinct place within an emerging
complex and mature scholarship on pluralistic social cognition.
... Soziales Verstehen ist kein passiver Mechanismus, der lediglich dazu dient, einen mentalen Zustand mit einem beobachteten Verhalten in Verbindung zu bringen, sondern beruht immer auch auf Vorannahmen, die bewusst oder unbewusst, aber aktiv vom Wahrnehmenden eingebracht werden. Das bedeutet auch, dass soziales Verstehen Wissen über vorhandene soziale Strukturen impliziert (Spaulding 2018;Zawidzki 2013;Harris 2017). Wenn wir sozial verstehen, können wir die Verhaltensweisen oder Handlungen einer anderen Person nachvollziehen. ...
Wenn wir davon sprechen, dass etwas sozial unangemessen ist, meinen wir damit in der Regel, dass es keine Übereinstimmung gibt zwischen dem erwarteten Verhalten und dem tatsächlichen Verhalten. Soziale Angemessenheit betrifft dementsprechend Fragestellungen, die (soziale) Normen betreffen. Betrachten wir Angemessenheitskriterien durch die Positionen bestimmter sozialer Gruppen, ist es uns möglich, gruppenspezifische Angemessenheitskriterien zu beleuchten und kritisch zu betrachten. Hier geht es um Fragen wie: Ist mein Verhalten meinem wahrgenommenen Geschlecht angemessen? Mit diesem Blickwinkel wird deutlicher, dass unseren Vorstellungen von sozialer Angemessenheit unter Umständen widersprüchliche Normen zugrunde liegen. Gerade wenn es um gruppenspezifische Fragen zur sozialen Angemessenheit geht, die etwa das Geschlecht, physische und mentale Befähigungen oder die Ethnie einer Person betreffen, kann Dehumanisierung eine Rolle spielen. Moderne Normen, so die Argumentation in diesem Kapitel, berücksichtigen Aspekte der Dehumanisierung, während traditionellere Normen diese tendenziell ignorieren. Hierdurch ergibt sich die Existenz widersprüchlicher Normen rund um soziale Angemessenheit. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird erklärt, wie soziale Angemessenheit und dehumanisierende Interaktionsstrukturen zusammenhängen, um die Frage erörtern zu können, wie widersprüchliche Kriterien für soziale Angemessenheit zustande kommen und wie diese eventuell auch verändert werden können. Hierzu wird das Konzept der Skripte herangezogen.
... En el mismo sentido, se identificaron una variedad de procesos y capacidades precursoras de la ToM. En suma, la reformulación de las distintas hipótesis y modelos comenzaran a mostrar signos de convergencia hacia una concepción menos restrictiva o estrecha de los fenómenos abarcados por la LM (Spaulding 2019) y hacia variedades cada vez más híbridas (Spaulding 2018). ...
Psychological understanding is a required capacity for moral competence in the sense that understanding the intentions, beliefs, and interests of others is a critical input for evaluating the responsibilities involved in their behaviors and understanding, in turn, how to interact with them to achieve our purposes. For its part, interaction with others is at the heart of both capacities, since both are essential and closely related components of human social life. My aim in this paper, in relation to both assumptions, will be to highlight a structural similarity between ordinary psychological cognition and moral cognition, showing as certain differentiated types of explanations on one domain and the other allows to identify a theoretical framework consistent that, in turn, it can account for the relationships between the two. For this, I will refer first, synthetically, to the Social Intuitionist Model (MIS) of J. Haidt (2001), as it exemplifies a non-classical and dual approach to moral cognition in which moral intuitions play a more basic role than reasons. In the field of psychological cognition, I will refer with more detail to the interactive or second-person approach, enriched by the dual approach to cognition, in particular by the proposals on implicit or “minimal” varieties of mental attribution. In this context, I will identify the so-called expressive behaviors: their nature and role in human behavior and interactions, and their significance as the evidential basis for psychological understanding. They constitute the primary objects of psychological intuitions. I hope to show that expressive signals are “readable” through the intuitive abilities that detect them and understand their psychological significance in efficient ways. Having exposed the theoretical affinities between the MIS and the interactive-dual approach, I will emphasize that, just as for the first, moral intuitions come first, and reasons later, also for the interactive-dual approach of psychological understanding, psychological intuitions come first, and reasons later.
Keywords: moral intuitionism, dual-approach of cognition, interactive-dual approach, implicit cognition, psychological intuitions.
... Because representations of knowledge play central roles in navigating social life, cases in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower are especially harmful. Generally, given that knowledge representations are central to social cognition, it is important to empirically study their signature biases and the social ramifications thereof (Gerken, 2017a;Spaulding, 2018). ...
We summarize research and theory to show that, from early in human ontogeny, much information about other minds can be gleaned from reading the eyes. This analysis suggests that eyes serve as uniquely human windows into other minds, which critically extends the target article by drawing attention to what might be considered the neurodevelopmental origins of knowledge attribution in humans.
... Because representations of knowledge play central roles in navigating social life, cases in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower are especially harmful. Generally, given that knowledge representations are central to social cognition, it is important to empirically study their signature biases and the social ramifications thereof (Gerken, 2017a;Spaulding, 2018). ...
I accept the main thesis of the article according to which representation of knowledge is more basic than representation of belief. But I question the authors’ contention that humans' unique capacity to represent belief does not underwrite the capacity for the accumulation of cultural knowledge.
... Theoretical models are ubiquitous in science. Godfrey-Smith(2005), Maibom (2003Maibom ( , 2007Maibom ( , 2009) and Spaulding (2018) have appealed to the notion of a theoretical model to 25 The epistemological backdrop of the approach I am developing here is the "knowledge first" programme most prominently defended by Williamson (2000). The approach I am recommending is sympathetic to Nagel's (2017) view that the contrast that matters for mental state attribution is not between true and false beliefs but between factive and non-factive mental states, and that observation of perceptual access is a promising entry point for mental state attribution; thanks go to one of my reviewers for highlighting the connection. ...
I put forward an externalist theory of social understanding. On this view, psychological sense making takes place in environments that contain both agent and interpreter. The spatial structure of such environments is social, in the sense that its occupants locate its objects by an exercise in triangulation relative to each of their standpoints. This triangulation is achieved in intersubjective interaction and gives rise to a triadic model of the social mind. This model can then be used to make sense of others’ observed actions. Its possession plays a vital role in the development of the capacity for false belief reasoning. The view offers an integrated account of the development of social cognition from primary intersubjectivity to level-2 perspective taking. It incorporates insights from interactionism and mindreading theories of social cognition and thus offers a way out of the stalemate between defenders of the two views. Because psychological sense making is perspectival, the frame problem does not arise for social reasoners: the perspective they bring to bear on the action that is to be interpreted constrains the information they can select to make sense of what others do.
... The kind of pluralism we have in mind for the psychology of norms is modeled after pluralistic approaches to folk psychology and social cognition (Andrews 2012; Andrews, Spaulding, and Westra 2020;Fiebich and Coltheart 2015;Spaulding 2018). While early approaches to that field took it for granted that we came to understand the social world by predicting and explaining behavior in terms of propositional attitudes, pluralistic approaches have stressed the importance of alternative strategies for prediction and explanation, including representations of the situation, traits, stereotypes and (notably) social norms; pluralists also emphasized the importance of regulative or "mindshaping" processes that did not involve prediction or explanation at all (McGeer 2007;Zawidzki 2013). ...
Social Norms – rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community – permeate all aspects of human life. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to evolved psychological adaptations. However, most of these accounts share what we call the psychological unity assumption, which holds that there is something psychologically distinctive about social norms, and that social norm adherence is driven by a single system or process. We argue that this assumption is mistaken. In this paper, we propose a methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. According to this framework, we should treat norms first and foremost as a community-level pattern of social behavior that might be realized by a variety of different cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms. Norm psychologists should not presuppose that social norms are underpinned by a unified set of processes, nor that there is anything particularly distinctive about normative cognition as such. We argue that this pluralistic approach offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of norms.
... This does not present a refutation of the CGH (Heyes having offered extensive independent empirical evidence for its plausibility in Cognitive Gadgets (Heyes 2018) and elsewhere (Heyes, 2019a(Heyes, , b, c, 2020, but it does point to places where the account, and related accounts of social cognition which emphasise cultural inheritance (e.g. Fiebich & Coltheart, 2015;Haslanger, 2019;McGeer, 2015;Spaulding, 2018;Zawidzki, 2013), are lacking. Although dealing directly with the CGH, this analysis highlights some key concerns that any evolutionarily plausible account of social cognition that relies heavily on cultural inheritance must address. ...
Against the background of “arms race” style competitive explanations for complex human cognition, such as the Social Intelligence Hypothesis (Byrne & Whiten, 1988; Humphrey, 1976; Jolly, 1966), and theories that tie complex cognition with environmental variability more broadly (Godfrey-Smith, 1996, 2001), the idea that culturally inherited mechanisms for social cognition would be more capable of responding to the labile social environment is a compelling one. Whilst it is tempting to think that the evolvability of culturally inherited cognitive mechanisms such as Cecilia Heyes’ (2018) cognitive gadgets would be akin to culturally inherited tools like axes or canoes (i.e., relatively easy to modify to adaptive benefit, and relatively robustly inherited), I draw on established theory in evolutionary developmental biology to show that this is a mistake. Their causal translucency, along with the degree to which they would be integrated within the organism, make cognitive gadgets far more like genetically inherited traits with respect to their evolvability. Consequently, their evolution is unlikely to be particularly fast or nimble. In making clear the constraints on the evolution of culturally inherited cognition and how they must influence our theorising, the discussion also highlights the value of thinking about evolvability in this domain.
... La comprensión intencional involucra la capacidad de entender, describir y/o predecir el comportamiento propio y ajeno (Spaulding, 2018). En psicología y filosofía esta capacidad fue tradicionalmente explicada desde el cognitivismo clásico. ...
Existe evidencia empírica de que las interacciones diádicas contribuyen con la emergencia de la comprensión intencional. No obstante, poco se sabe acerca del rol que las interacciones triádicas (adulto-objeto-bebé) tienen en este proceso. Presentamos un análisis cualitativo de cuatro observaciones realizadas en el hogar, en Ensenada (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Dichas observaciones fueron un recorte de un estudio más amplio en el que se observaron, una vez por mes a lo largo de 7 meses, las interacciones de bebés con sus tutores y objetos. Los resultados muestran que los bebés anticipan corporalmente las acciones que los adultos realizan empleando objetos en situaciones de interacción triádica (adulto-objeto-bebé). La participación de los bebés en interacciones triádicas contribuye con la emergencia de anticipaciones corporales cada vez más complejas, coordinadas con el comportamiento de los demás y ajustadas a los usos canónicos de los objetos. Se defiende que estas anticipaciones son casos de comprensión intencional enactiva. // There is empirical evidence that dyadic interactions contribute to the emergence of intentional understanding. However, little is known about the role that triadic (adult-object-baby) interactions play in this process. We present a qualitative analysis of four observations made at home in Ensenada (Buenos Aires, Argentina). These observations were part of a larger study in which infants' interactions with their caregivers and objects were observed once a month for 7 months. The results show that infants anticipate with their bodies the actions that adults perform using objects within triadic interactions (adult-object-infant). Infants' participation in triadic interactions contributes to the emergence of increasingly complex bodily anticipations that are coordinated with the behaviour of others and adjusted to the canonical uses of objects.
It is argued that these anticipations are cases of enactive intentional understanding.
... Naturally, there are many ways in 43 which this commonality is achieved, and what falls under the label of folk psychology is likely varied and cognitively differentiated structures that are deployed in various contexts, and towards various goals. Recent work within the so-called pluralist approaches to folk psychology has explored the landscape of these structures (Andrews, 2012(Andrews, , 2015Fiebich, 2019;Fiebich & Coltheart, 2015;Newen, 2015;Spaulding, 2018). The pluralist approaches to social cognition can be viewed as a culminating point in the long and variegated critique of the ToM conception to social cognition that puts belief-attribution at its base. ...
We argue that the traditional theory of mind models of social cognition face in-principle problems in accounting for enculturation of social cognition, and offer an alternative model advanced within the interactivist framework. In the critical section, we argue that theory of mind accounts’ encodingist model of mental representation renders them unable to account for enculturation. We focus on the three problems: (1) the copy problem and impossibility of internalization; (2) foundationalism and the impossibility of acquisition of culturally specific content; and (3) the frame problems and the inadequacy of mental-state attribution as a way of coordinating social interaction among (encultured) individuals. The positive section begins with a brief sketch of the theoretical basics of interactivism, followed by a more focused presentation of the interactivist model of social cognition, and concludes with a discussion of a number of issues most widely debated in the social cognition literature.
... Sin embargo, no queda claro que la teoría de la mente necesariamente tenga un impacto positivo en la monitorización o comprensión de los otros agentes que se traduzca en una mejora del aprendizaje. Parte de la razón es que existe evidencia empírica importante que muestra que nuestras atribuciones de estados mentales están sesgadas y reflejan varios prejuicios y limitaciones (Spaulding 2018, Westra 2017. Por poner algunos ejemplos, tendemos clasificar a las personas según sus categorías sociales, como la edad, la raza y el género que facilitan la atribución de rasgos de la personalidad, como la la agresividad y la confianza (Olivola y Todorov 2010, Rule y otros 2009). ...
De acuerdo con algunas posiciones en ciencia cognitiva y filosofía, la capacidad humana de invocar estados mentales para predecir y explicar la conducta humana es un producto de la evolución cultural; es decir, su aparición no se debe a la selección de estructuras heredadas genéticamente sino frutos de la variación hereditaria mediante mecanismos de aprendizaje social. El objetivo de este artículo es proponer un modelo de la teoría de la mente como mecanismo lingüístico de resguardo social y promoción de la reputación dentro del marco de la evolución cultural. Esta posición, que denominaré El Modelo de Resguardo Social, se presenta y defiende en contraposición a otras tres posiciones que se evaluarán críticamente. Finalmente, se defenderá el modelo de dos posibles objeciones
In contemporary philosophy of mind, understanding others is often presented as an activity of attributing mental states to agents or mindreading – the central question being then how to access their minds. The paper argues that this pervasive approach should be rejected, in favour of the view along which identifying an action comes from exercising conceptual skills acquired through being inserted into shared practices characterizing a social world. Examining the conditions of their acquisition then sheds new light on the semantics of psychological concepts as well as on the roots of misunderstanding.
In this article, I explore how researchers’ metaphysical commitments can be conducive—or unconducive—to progress in animal cognition research. The methodological dictum known as Morgan's Canon exhorts comparative psychologists to countenance the least mentalistic fair interpretation of animal actions. This exhortation has frequently been misread as a blanket condemnation of mentalistic interpretations of animal behaviors that could be interpreted behavioristically. But Morgan meant to demand only that researchers refrain from accepting default interpretations of (apparent) actions until other fair interpretations have been duly considered. The Canon backfired largely because of Morgan's background metaphysical commitment to a univocal, hierarchical, and anthropocentric account of cognitive architecture. I make the case that, going forward, comparative psychologists would do well to pair judicious use of Morgan's Canon with an openness to the existence of non‐humanlike animal minds comprising phenomena belonging to distinct cognitive and folk psychological ontologies. And I argue that this case gives us pragmatic reason to reconcile deep—e.g., psychofunctionalist—and superficial—e.g., dispositionalist—approaches to the metaphysics of belief.
Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain mundane instrumental actions (e.g., Neil believes the switch is connected to the light, so he flipped the switch to illuminate the room). Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain group affiliation or identity (e.g., in order to belong to the Christian Reformed Church Neil must believe that God is triune). If we set aside the commonality of the word "belief," we can pose a crucial question: Is the cognitive attitude typically involved in the first "light switch" sort of case the same as the cognitive attitude typically involved in the second "Trinity" sort of case? Or: Is mundanely believing the same cognitive relation as groupishly believing? In this essay, I argue that the answer is no. Mundane Beliefs play their instrumental roles well if they are true, and their manner of processing is accordingly sensitive to evidence. Groupish Beliefs play their identity-constituting roles well if they are distinctive, and their manners of processing accordingly allow for and often support distortions of evidence and truth. The manners of processing are thus so different that--despite the common word "belief"--philosophy of mind and epistemology would do well to recognize distinct cognitive attitudes.
In contemporary philosophy of mind, understanding others is often presented as a result achieved through a complex activity of attributing mental states to agents, or mindreading. Hence, the central question seems to be how to access the mind of another. The paper argues that this pervasive approach should be rejected in favour of an elucidation of understanding that pays more attention to what our ability to spontaneously describe what someone is doing does consists in. Identifying an action turns out to be the exercise of conceptual skills acquired through being inserted into an entanglement of practices characterizing a social world. Examining the conditions of the acquisition of these skills then sheds new light on the semantics of psychological concepts as well as on the phenomenon of misunderstanding.
Critics of empathy argue that empathy is exhausting, easily manipulated, exacerbates rather than relieves conflict, and is too focused on individual experiences. Apparently, empathy not only fails to stop negative acts like sadism, bullying, and terrorism, it motivates and promotes such acts. These scholars argue that empathy will not save us from partisanship and division. In fact, it might make us worse off. I will argue that empathy exhibits bias in the ways critics describe because empathy is motivated . Conceiving of empathy as motivated leads to surprising conclusions about our tools for moral decision‐making.
Einsamkeit spielt nicht erst seit der Corona-Pandemie eine bedeutsame Rolle. Obwohl die meisten Menschen im Laufe ihres Lebens von Einsamkeit betroffen sind, ist sie schambehaftet und wird im Alltag tabuisiert. Durch eine interdisziplinäre und multiperspektivische Betrachtungsweise wird die Vielfalt der Einsamkeitserfahrungen sowie deren persönliche und gesamtgesellschaftliche Bedeutung in diesem Sammelband greifbar - kognitiv wie emotional. Betroffenenperspektiven werden dabei mit wissenschaftlichen sowie praxisnahen Erkenntnissen vereint. Damit soll ein Beitrag geleistet werden, Einsamkeit innerhalb der Gesellschaft zu enttabuisieren und als soziale Herausforderung anzunehmen.
Gilbert Plumer has recently argued in his (2017) that psychologically rich novels offer the reader an opportunity to draw a transcendental inference: what seems to us believable about the psychology of the characters, can be inferred to be actually true about real human psychology. We propose, first, to disambiguate a key term of art in Plumer’s argument, “believable”. Given that disambiguation, the empirically contingent nature of one of Plumer’s premises comes into view. We raise two main lines of empirically-motivated debunking arguments against that premise, drawing particularly upon the psychological literatures about processing fluency, and the illusion of explanatory depth. We then conclude with some further implications for naturalistic approaches to aesthetics, and the relevance of such debunking arguments.
Collaborative research is quite common in contemporary society; indeed, it may be thought that scientists cannot live without it. Yet, it seems difficult to engage in good interdisciplinary collaboration when research methods and background assumptions often differ widely. I suggest in this paper that a disposition to inquire into another person is essential to good collaborative research. I first explain what I mean by “empersonal inquisitiveness” and why it is important in interdisciplinary collaboration. Inquiring into a person serves as an important precursor to engaging in interdisciplinary collaboration, because it allows researchers to form shared frameworks and develop a shared plan for the research project. I then discuss social-cognitive mechanisms and their ability to generate knowledge of other persons. In the final section of the paper, I explain how social cognition can allow persons to engage in truly collaborative projects, in particular by way of shared mental models and shared reasoning. The result is that empersonal inquisitiveness, when employed by potential research partners, produces important empersonal knowledge that advances collaborative research.
What is the role of face perception in mindreading? I explore this question by focusing on our quick impressions of others when we look at their faces. Drawing on a contrast between quick impressions of emotional expressions and quick impressions of character traits, I suggest that face perception can be a double-edged sword for mindreading: in some cases, it can correctly track some aspects of the mental life of others, while in other cases it can give rise to visual illusions that trick the viewer into misreading others. This suggests that some cases of mind misreading might have a perceptual source.
A central claim of many embodied approaches to cognition is that understanding others’ actions is achieved by covertly simulating the observed actions and their consequences in one’s own motor system. If such a simulation occurs, it may be accomplished through forward models, a component of the motor system already known to perform simulations of actions and their consequences in order to support sensory-monitoring of one’s own actions. Forward-model simulations cause an attenuation of sensory intensity, so if the simulations hypothesized by embodied cognition are indeed provided by forward models, then action observation should trigger this sensory attenuation. To test this hypothesis, the experiments reported here measured the perceived intensity of a touch sensation on the finger when participants observed an active touch (a finger reaching to touch a ball) vs. a passive touch (a ball rolling to touch an unmoving finger). The touch sensation was perceived as less intense during observation of active touch in comparison with observation of passive touch, providing evidence that forward models are indeed engaged during action observation. The strength of this sensory attenuation is compared and contrasted with a well-established sensory-amplification effect caused by visual attention. This sensory-amplification effect has not generally been considered in studies related to sensory attenuation in action observation, which may explain conflicting results reported in the field.
La ricerca scientifica in psichiatria sta creando un divario nei confronti delle nozioni di psichiatria che posseggono le persone comuni, in maniera analoga alla progressiva distanza fra psicologia scientifica e psicologia popolare e di senso comune. Vengono indagate le nozioni che la psichia-tria scientifica e quella popolare condividono, e quelle in cui si differenziano spesso con aspetti controintuitivi. Dopo aver delineato i tratti essenziali del concetto di senso comune e di psicologia popolare e delle loro teorie più rappresentative, viene sottolineato il ruolo centrale che i concetti popolari svolgono non solo nella teoria psichiatrica, in particolare nella diagnosi, ma anche nella pratica quotidiana. Questi concetti entrano poi nella immagine di sé stessi, del mondo e nelle rela-zioni interpersonali, mostrando la improponibilità di una psichiatria che miri a fare a meno del senso comune e la necessità di una attenta mediazione fra psichiatria scientifica e psichiatria popolare. Questo aspetto è ancora più importante nella psichiatria pratica che si rivela simile per molti aspetti alla psichiatria popolare.
The aim of this paper is to show that Curry’s recent defence of the interpretivist approach to beliefs is unsuccessful. Curry tries to argue that his version of interpretivism, which is based on the model-theoretic approach to folk-psychological attributions, is well-suited to resisting the epistemological argument that is directed at interpretivism. In this paper, I argue that even if Curry’s defence is successful in this case, his theory does not have enough resources to solve the metaphysical problems of interpretivism. In particular, I argue that the model-theoretic version of interpretivism that Curry espouses does not explain the claim that beliefs are constituted by the process of attribution, which is central to the interpretivist project. In the final parts of the paper, I discuss the issue of the relation between interpretivism and other forms of the broadly superficial/deflationary approach to beliefs, especially dispositionalism. I contend that if one wants to adopt a superficial/deflationary approach, it is best not to adopt interpretivism as it is an unnecessarily complex and problematic version of this broad view.
Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the (sometimes mixed) explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a minimally psychological construct that we call normative regularities. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms.
What’s the difference between those psychological posits that are ‘me” and those that are not? Distinguishing between these psychological kinds is important in many domains, but an account of what the distinction consists in is challenging. I argue for Psychological Constructionism: those psychological posits that correspond to the kinds within folk psychology are personal, and those that don’t, aren’t. I suggest that only constructionism can answer a fundamental challenge in characterizing the personal level – the plurality problem. The things that plausibly qualify as personal are motley. Other attempts at accounting for the personal level either cannot accommodate this plurality, or cannot explain what unifies the personal. Given arguments others have given for a pluralistic conception of folk psychology, constructionism explains and predicts this plurality in a systematic and unified way, thereby solving the plurality problem.
Much has been made about the ways that implicit biases and other apparently unreflective attitudes can affect our actions and judgments in ways that negatively affect our ability to do right. What has been discussed less is that these attitudes negatively affect our freedom. In this paper, I argue that implicit biases pose a problem for free will. My analysis focuses on the compatibilist notion of free will according to which acting freely consists in acting in accordance with our reflectively endorsed beliefs and desires. Though bias presents a problem for free action, I argue that there are steps agents can take to regain their freedom. One such strategy is for agents to cultivate better self‐knowledge of the ways that their freedom depends on the relationship between their conscious and unconscious attitudes, and the way these work together to inform action and judgment. This knowledge can act as an important catalyst for agents to seek out and implement short‐ and long‐term strategies for reducing the influence of bias, and I offer four proposals along these lines. The upshot is that though bias is a powerful influence on our actions, we need not resign ourselves to its negative effects for freedom.
The cognitive ability to think about other people's psychological states is known as `mindreading'. This Element critiques assumptions that have been formative in shaping philosophical theories of mindreading: that mindreading is ubiquitous, underpinning the vast majority of our social interactions; and that its primary goal is to provide predictions and explanations of other people's behaviour. It begins with an overview of key positions and empirical literature in the debate. It then introduces and motivates the pluralist turn in this literature, which challenges the core assumptions of the traditional views. The second part of the Element uses case studies to further motivate the pluralist framework, and to advocate the pluralist approach as the best way to progress our understanding of social cognitive phenomena.
I argue for three points: First, evidence of the primacy of knowledge representation is not evidence of primacy of knowledge. Second, knowledge-oriented mindreading research should also focus on misrepresentations and biased representations of knowledge. Third, knowledge-oriented mindreading research must confront the problem of the gold standard that arises when disagreement about knowledge complicates the interpretation of empirical findings.
Questions about the social and moral importance of empathy have garnered much debate in recent years. On the one hand, critics of empathy have pointed out its susceptibility to morally troubling biases and group preferences. On the other hand, proponents of empathy maintain that empathy is a motivated response that can be trained and developed to avoid these so-called empathic failures. Yet, both sides focus on the individual psychological factors that contribute to empathy’s success or failure in a range of cases, thereby overlooking the importance of social contexts and institutions in facilitating or inhibiting empathy. The aim of this paper is thus to offer an account of the role that institutionally structured social contexts can and should play in promoting empathy across group divides and helping to overcome empathy’s morally troubling tendency to fail in cases where outgroup members are concerned.
The Theoretical Framework in Phenomenological Research: Development and Application is an introduction to phenomenology in which the authors overview its origin, main ideas and core concepts. They show the application and relevancy of phenomenological tenets in practical qualitative research, as well as demonstrate how aligning theory and method enhances research credibility. In this detailed but digestible explanation of phenomenological theories, the authors explore the ideas of the main founders pertaining to the meaning of perceived reality and the meaning of being, and how these founders articulated their methodologies. In doing so, The Theoretical Framework in Phenomenological Research fills the well-documented gap between theory and practice within phenomenology by providing a much-needed bridge between the foundational literature and applied research on the subject, focusing equally on theory and practice. The book includes practical demonstrations on how to create theoretical/conceptual frameworks in applied phenomenological research. It also features detailed, step-by-step illustrations and examples regarding how researchers can develop frameworks and use their concepts to inform the development of themes at the data analysis stage. A reliable guide underpinned by foundational phenomenology literature, The Theoretical Framework in Phenomenological Research is an essential text for researchers, instructors, practitioners and students looking to design and conduct phenomenological studies in a manner that ensures credible outcomes.
In this paper, I argue that by attributing beliefs the attributer is pushed toward taking a stand on the content of those beliefs and that what stand they take partially depends on the relationship between the attributer and the attributee. In particular, if the attributee enjoys a higher social standing than the attributer, the latter is disposed to adopt the attributed belief, as long as certain other conditions are met. I will call this view the Adoption-by-Attribution model. Because of the non-epistemic influence that derives from the relation of inequality, belief attribution can reinforce the existing unequal power relations and contribute to epistemic injustice.
In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general "submentalizing" processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalizing processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g. arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from "novel entity" paradigms from infant gaze-following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic "perspective-taking" effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalizing interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct.
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