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THEORY OF MIND AND THE SOCIAL DESIGN OF THE MIND
An OPEN MIND workshop
Bucharest June 14-15, 2013
ABSTRACTS OF INVITED PAPERS
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R. Peter Hobson and Jessica A. Hobson (University College London)
Interpersonal engagement, communication, and understanding: What leads to
what?
We shall set a critique of classic Theory of Mind theorizing within a broad
conceptual framework. How does biology prepare an individual to embed in
culture? How far do interpersonal engagements provide the basis for
intrapsychic development (and vice versa)? How far is human embodied
relatedness (with cognitive, affective and motivational aspects) foundational for
the development of relatively separable components of thought, feeling and
motive? We suggest that the biologically given propensity to identify with the
attitudes of others plays a pivotal role in the developmental story – and we shall
cite evidence from autism to illustrate what follows when this propensity is fragile.
Patricia Ganea (University of Toronto)
Mapping language to the mind: Toddlers’ understanding of the mentalistic and
representational nature of language
Language can be used to communicate one’s beliefs about reality and thus it
provides a means to assess children’s understanding of the relation between
verbal statements, beliefs and reality. When do young children develop the
understanding that the language they hear is a reflection of a person’s mental
state, rather than a direct reflection of what is perceptually accessible? In this talk
I will present several recent studies that use language as a medium for assessing
toddlers’ sensitivity to others’ mental content. I will first discuss a series of
findings indicating that comprehension of references to things that are not visible
is related to developments in representational ability and intentional
understanding. Then I will present research showing that by their second birthday
toddlers have come to realize the mentalistic aspect of language use and show
surprise when language violates what people know about reality. Further I will
show that toddlers can use language to update their representation of an absent
object and contrast this with their ability to update their representation of other
people’s mental states via language.
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Josef Perner (University of Salzburg)
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Object of Thought meets Object
Objects of thought are simply the things we think about, inspired by the notion of
discourse referents as things we talk about. I elaborate empirically the notion that
objects of thought have to be anchored to external objects (Kamp 1990), which is
typically an automatic, unreflective process that is not itself an object of thought.
Given sensible assumptions about anchoring it can mimic pragmatic concerns
without having to represent speaker and listener intentions or knowledge. I will
illustrate this with an example from mutual exclusivity research.
Some tasks, however, require that the anchoring becomes itself an object
of thought. This ability emerges in development around 4 years of age and can
account for the fact that at this age children start to master various perspectivetaking tasks. I illustrate this with their success on false belief tasks and their
understanding identity statements. There is also evidence that anchoring
awareness reliably activates a particular brain region: left inferior parietal lobe
(IPL).
Gyorgy Gergely (Central European University)
Ostension, Epistemsic Trust, and Deferential Beliefs: The social origins and
cultural transmission of cognitively opaque knowledge about kinds
In this talk I’ll discuss the evolutionary origins and adaptive role of cognitive
opacity of beliefs in human conceptual and cultural development in light of new
evidence from preverbal infants’ early understanding of ostensive communicative
demonstrations of cultural knowledge about artefact and social kinds. The issue
of opaque beliefs was originally ignited by Dan Sperber’s (1997) proposal that
humans’ evolved a cognitive attitude to acquire and hold ‘reflective semipropositional’ beliefs justified by deference to the authority of their source. I’ll
argue that evidence showing young infants’ preparedness to interpret ostensive
demonstrative displays as making reference to abstract kinds provides strong
support for Sperber’s insight. Natural pedagogy theory (Gergely & Csibra, 2006)
proposed that selective pressure for trust-based ostensively guided
communicative transmission of relevant cultural knowledge was first created by
the emergence of hominid tool use and tool manufacturing technologies whose
cognitive opacity for naïve observational learners represented a learneability
problem of relevance selection that endangered their intergenerational
transmission. Here I’ll extend this argument to the domain of ‘distributed social
technologies’ or ‘collaborative tools’ involving cooperatively performed
coordinated means actions with complementary roles to achieve joint goals
(Tomasello, 2008). I’ll argue that early emerging socially distributed collaborative
cultural skills and practices of our hunter-gatherer ancestors – such as hunting or
making and using fire – also represent cogent examples of cognitively opaque
cultural skills whose intergenerational transmission requires ostensive
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communicative relevance-guidance. I’ll speculate that new evidence about early
hominid adaptations to cooked food (Wrangham, 2009) suggests that cognitively
opaque socially distributed technologies of making, keeping, and using fire may
have emerged as early as 1.8m years ago which may have necessitated the coevolution of early forms of ostensive communicative skills of pedagogical
knowledge transfer.
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Hannes Rakoczy (University of Gottingen)
How human children and non-human primates represent regularities and rules:
the difference made by social norms and theory of mind
Much recent research in cognitive development has shown that the core of our
adult way of viewing the natural world is already in place early in ontogeny. Even
infants conceive of their environment as made up of enduring objects and
governed by general regularities that they swiftly infer from limited observations.
In this talk, I will first report new comparative work showing far-reaching
commonalities in these core cognitive capacities in human children and nonhuman primates. Just like human infants, non-human primates engage in basic
forms of intuitive statistical reasoning and inductive learning of regularities. And
they do not just reason about regularities and relations of superficial features of
objects and events. Rather, much like human children, apes are psychological
essentialists: they individuate objects according to their deep, essential
properties that are responsible for their identity and that are more informative for
predicting and explaining the regularities in the objects’ behavior than surface
features.
In the second part, I report new developmental work that shows that young
children’s inductive learning crucially goes beyond that of non-human primates in
not being confined to carving the world at its statistical joints. Human inductive
learning is not only about the extraction of descriptive regularities. Rather, from
very early in development, children swiftly engage in rational inductive learning of
prescriptive rules and norms from limited observations – learning about what one
ought to do rather than about what generally happens. In several domains (such
as pretend play, games, language use, ownership, morality), young children have
been found to infer, understand and actively enforce agent-neutral rules applying
to themselves and others alike. Their grasp of such norms is rather sophisticated:
they understand, for example, that such norms are context-relative and arbitrary
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to a greater or lesser degree and that some such rules (so-called constitutive
ones) actually bring into existence socially constructed objects and facts; and
their reasoning about such social norms is systematically integrated with other
forms of social cognition such as Theory of Mind from early on– in contrast, for
example, to strong modularist claims about different forms of social cognition.
Humans and other primates thus share a basic natural worldview – conceiving of
the world as made up of natural objects defined by their essential properties and
governed by general regularities. Humans’ core worldview, however, goes far
beyond this in including distinctively social and normative categories.
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Wolfgang Prinz (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences)
How mirrors make minds
This talk addresses putative mechanisms underlying the social making of human
mentality. At the heart of the discussion is the notion of social mirroring which
has a long tradition in social philosophy and social anthropology. Taking the
existence of mirror-like devices in minds and brains for granted, I argue that
social mirroring is a prerequisite for the constitution of mental self and, hence,
subjectivity. However, the fact that self and subjectivity are socially created
should not be taken to indicate that they are illusory. Social facts are as real as
natural facts are: Social theory creates functional reality.
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Radu Bogdan (Tulane University and University of Bucharest)
Intuitive Psychology as Mind Designer
There are several ways – evolutionary, developmental and conceptual -- in which
it can be plausibly argued that intuitive psychology is a mind designer. On this
occasion I propose to focus on a particular developmental argument that starts
from the hypothesis that there are three major phases and versions of intuitive
psychology in the human ontogeny –- an infantile and implicit sense of other
minds, a naïve psychology of early childhood and a commonsense psychology of
later childhood and adulthood. The main argument is that at each phase each
particular version of intuitive psychology is essentially if not uniquely responsible
for specific and novel mental acquisitions.