Abstract
In this paper, I examine the plausibility of Embodied Accounts of Social Cognition by finding fault with the most detailed and convincing version of such an account, as articulated by Daniel Hutto (2008). I argue that this account fails to offer a plausible ontogeny for folk psychological abilities due to its inability to address recent evidence from implicit false belief tasks that suggest a radically different timeline for the development of these abilities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Hutto adds this note: “I say ‘if’ so as not to prejudge the possibility that children may ‘have’ the belief concept earlier even though they show no outward signs of being able to use it. This might be so if they lack the capacity or motivation to apply it, perhaps because they favour simpler heuristics instead” (p. 265). This is on the right track, but this concession would only help Hutto if I only tried to show evidence of the presence of a grasp of false belief that had no consequences for the mental life of the child. As will become clear, younger children grasp (false) beliefs and this enters into their understanding of others in ways that manifest themselves outwardly.
An anonymous reviewer noted that in debates about the ontogeny of social cognition, there is a commonly held, yet rarely defended, assumption that this mastery of (false) belief is the crowning achievement of social cognition—not the final development or tweak for these abilities, but the major milestone that when reached, signals a mature grasp of the PAs. This reviewer wonders why belief should play this starring (or explanatorily central) role. Indeed, Hutto is to be admired for noting that there is no conceptual reason why a creature could not grasp one of the PA types without the others, specifically that a creature could grasp beliefs and not grasp desires (and so could not grasp the critical reasons that involve a belief–desire pair with interlocking contents working in tandem; p. 26–27). But, one can agree with Hutto that both beliefs and desires need to conspire together in motivational crime, yet still note that grasping false belief signals a sort of final critical step in FP.
Most theorists would agree that children understand that intentional behavior involves the interplay of a motivational state (something desire-like) and an informational state (something belief-like), and children seem to understand this interplay for a while before these states are understood in their mature folk psychological form. The motivational state that real folk psychologists possess and grasp is a representational one that allows for the possibility that the mind-to-world directedness may not be satisfied, and where it is understood that different agents can have states with conflicting contents. The informational state that real folk psychologists possess and grasp is a representational one that allows for the possibility that the world-to-mind directedness may not be accurate, and where it is understood that different agents can have states with conflicting contents. With this in mind, the reason that the grasping of false belief has been taken to be such a milestone is that all sides agree that it seems to be the tougher one to master—it is not a milestone because belief is central and desire is not. If this claim about the ease of grasping the representational nature of belief (versus the representational nature of desire) is right (and the future infant data could certainly give us reasons to revise it), then evidence for a grasp of false belief will continue to have a more finalizing quality to it than similar evidence for desire. (It should be noted that the standard FP categories studied in cognitive science hopefully will soon benefit from the ongoing analysis of those who hope to expand the number and subtlety of these categories (e.g., Gendler 2010)).
These statements have not been cherry-picked—similar claims appear throughout Hutto's discussion, as in the following:
children below the age of four cannot make sense of the possibility that others might have false thoughts about situations (p. 134);
An understanding of metarepresentation requires grasping the possibility that either oneself or the other might be making errors of judgment. It is only in recognizing this possibility which involves a capacity to imagine contrasting perspectives, that one can understand what it is to aim at truth (p. 135);
to think of oneself as having a possibly fallible view of things entails being able to think of one's cognitive take as having, potentially, the same epistemic status as divergent others. It seems that young children do not begin life with this understanding (p. 135).
The most prominent feature of such interchanges is that of participants being unavoidably forced to come to terms with others’ peculiar takes (Hutto 2008, p. 136)
Assuming the children already understand propositional utterances, know how that-clauses work, and have their perspective-shifting capacities intact, they are ready to come to grips with the concept of belief. All they require is enough experience participating in conversations that require them to take stock of the cognitive takes of others. This forces recognition of the fact that one's own take on things is but one among many (Hutto 2008, p. 137)
At present, there are three converging types of evidence for an implicit grasp of false belief: Violation of Expectation (VOE) evidence, Anticipatory Looking (AL) evidence, and Active Helping (AH) evidence (for reviews of this evidence, see Baillargeon et al. 2010; Caron 2009). In response to critiques by Perner and Ruffman (2005; Ruffman and Perner 2005), the flexible use of this SC under different conditions and concerning different mental states has been stressed in these experiments. Such flexibility has been established in the following respects for children aged 13 to 30 months:
Flexibility regarding the type of false informational state:
False beliefs about the location of an object (e.g., VOE: (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005; Surian et al. 2007); AL: (Southgate et al. 2007); AH: (Buttlemann et al. 2009; Southgate et al. 2010))
False perceptual information about an object, e.g. whether an agent would use a visual cue about an object as an indicator of its location (VOE: (Song and Baillargeon 2008))
False beliefs about the identity of an object, e.g. whether an object was one that came apart into two pieces (or was one of the objects that could not), and could, therefore, be used to hide another object (VOE: (Scott and Baillargeon 2009))
False beliefs about the non-obvious properties of an object, e.g. whether an object would exhibit a non-obvious property like making a rattling noise, based on its perceptual similarity (or dissimilarity) to another rattling object (VOE: (Scott et al. 2010))
Flexibility regarding the type of task or scenario:
False beliefs in an unexpected contents task, e.g., where the usual contents of a box of a recognized brand are switched with the contents of another box of a recognized brand (VOE: (He et al. 2011))
False beliefs in a change of location tasks (see references for location of object tasks above)
Flexibility regarding the type of response required:
False beliefs in a non-search tasks, e.g., where instead of dealing with a scenario is which a protagonist is looking for an object in some location, the protagonist must select from an array of objects the one sharing a salient property with the object used by the experimenter (VOE: (Scott et al. (2010)))
False beliefs in standard search tasks (see rest of references above)
An anonymous reviewer noted that this list includes experiments that do not authoritatively suggest a grasp of something like modes of presentation in the manner that will become critical in the discussion below. I agree and would note that which of these suggest this grasp and which do not may require further analysis and interpretation, given just how early these varied abilities are emerging. Reanalyzing more of these results as likely involving the representation of an object or property as an object or property (pre-linguistically) may not seem as strange in the near future as it does today. But, the mere fact that such young children in the penguin study already seem to grasp modes of presentation puts the NPH in serious jeopardy. I think that it would not be too difficult to give similar modes-of-presentation analyses of at least the Scott et al. (2010) and Song and Baillargeon (2008) results, but I won’t attempt to do so here due to space limitations.
The same reviewer also wondered whether the flexibility described here might satisfy the challenges offered in primatology by Povinelli and colleagues that attempt to replace mentalistic explanations with more parsimonious ones that directly link observed to anticipated or expected behavior (Penn and Povenelli 2007, 2009; Povenelli and Vonk 2004). This is a deeply important topic I will not be able to address adequately in this venue. But briefly, this analysis has been directly extended to infant cognition by Perner (2010) and challenged in much more detail by Sober (2011) and Thompson (2011). Suffice it to say that it appears that the range and flexibility of the abilities uncovered in these experiments make it increasingly unlikely that even for young infants, any such behavior-reading hypothesis will capture all of their subtleties. And, as Sober and Thompson point out, there are more general reasons to think that the notion of parsimony that is invoked in these arguments needs a much deeper defense than Povinelli, Perner, et al. have offered.
Hutto stresses that any legitimate form of FP will need to allow for the different psychological consequences that result from something even more fine-grained than modes of presentation, what he describes as total forms, so as to include differences in orthography, etc. in satisfying the IRR. (2008, p. 230–33). I don’t think it is obvious that this level of specificity (as opposed to the sort of modes of presentation described here) need to be grasped by preverbal children, but if it is needed, the LoT should be able to account for this level of specificity.
References
Asch, S. (1952). Social psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Baillargeon, R., Scott, R. M., & He, Z. (2010). False-belief understanding in infants. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(3), 110–118.
Buttlemann, D., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Eighteen-month-old infants show false belief understanding in an active helping paradigm. Cognition, 112, 337–342.
Caron, A. J. (2009). Comprehension of the representational mind in infancy. Developmental Review, 29, 69–95.
Friedman, O., & Leslie, A. M. (2007). The conceptual underpinnings of pretense: Pretending is not 'behaving-as-if'. Cognition, 105, 103–124.
Friedman, O., Neary, K. R., Burnstein, C. L., & Leslie, A. M. (2010). Is young children's recognition of pretense metarepresentational or merely behavioral? Evidence from 2- and 3-year-olds' understanding of pretend sounds and speech. Cognition, 115, 314–319.
Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, S. (2007). Pathologies in narrative structure. In D. D. Hutto (Ed.), Narrative and understanding persons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gendler, T. S. (2010). Intuition, imagination, and philosophical methodology. Oxford: Oxford Universtiy Press.
He, Z., Bolz, M., & Baillargeon, R. (2011). False-belief understanding in 2.5-year-olds: Evidence from violation of expectation change-of-location and unexpected-contents tasks. Developmental Science, 14(2), 292–305.
Hutto, D. D. (2008). Folk psychological narratives: The sociological basis of understanding reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hutto, D. D. (2009). ToM rules, but it is not OK. In I. Leudar & A. Costall (Eds.), Against Theory of Mind (pp. 221–238). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hutto, D. D., & Ratcliffe, M. (Eds.). (2007). Folk psychology re-assessed. Dordrecht: Springer.
Leudar, I., & Costall, A. (2009a). Introduction: Against 'Theory of Mind'. In I. Leudar & A. Costall (Eds.), Against Theory of Mind (pp. 1–18). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Leudar, I., & Costall, A. (Eds.). (2009b). Against Theory of Mind. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Meltzoff, A. N., Gopnik, A., & Repacholi, B. M. (1999). Toddlers' understanding of intentions, desires and emotions: Explorations of the dark ages. In P. Zelazo, J. W. Astington, & D. R. Olson (Eds.), Developing theories of intention. Earlbaum: Mahwah, NJ.
Moses, L. J. (2001). Executive accounts of theory-of-mind development. Child Development, 72(3), 688–690.
Onishi, K. H., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-month-old infants understand false belief? Science, 308, 255–258.
Penn, D. C., & Povenelli, D. (2007). On the lack of evidence that non-human animals possess anything remotely resembling a "theory of mind". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B(362), 731–744.
Penn, D. C., & Povenelli, D. (2009). The comparative delusion: The "behavioristic"/"mentailistic" dichotomy in comarative theory of mind research. In R. Samuels & S. P. Stich (Eds.), Oxford handbook of philosophy and cognitive science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perner, J. (2010). Who took the cog out of cognitive science? Mentalism in an era of anti-cognitivism. In P. Frensch & R. Schwarzer (Eds.), Cognition and neuropsychology: International perspectives on psychological science (Vol. 1, pp. 241–261). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Perner, J., & Ruffman, T. (2005). Infants' insight into the mind: How deep? Science, 308, 214–216.
Povenelli, D., & Vonk, J. (2004). We don't need a microscope to explore the chimpanzee's mind. Mind and Language, 19(1), 1–28.
Ratcliffe, M. (2007). Rethinking commonsense psychology: A critique of folk psychology, theory of mind, and simulation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ruffman, T., & Perner, J. (2005). Do infants really understand false belief? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(10), 462–463.
Scholl, B. J., & Leslie, A. M. (2001). Minds, modules, and meta-analysis. Child Development, 72(3), 696–701.
Scott, R. M., & Baillargeon, R. (2009). Which penguin Is this? Attributing false beliefs about object identity at 18 months. Child Development, 80(4), 1172–1196.
Scott, R. M., Baillargeon, R., Song, H.-J., & Leslie, A. M. (2010). Attributing false beliefs about non-obvious properties at 18 months. Cognitive Psychology, 61, 366–395.
Sober, E. (2011). Parsimony and models of animal minds. University of Wisconsin.
Song, H.-J., & Baillargeon, R. (2008). Infants' reasoning about others' false perceptions. Developmental Psychology, 44(6), 1789–1795.
Southgate, V., Senju, A., & Csibra, G. (2007). Action anticipation through attribution of false belief by 2-year-olds. Psychological Science, 18(7), 587–592.
Southgate, V., Chevallier, C., & Csibra, G. (2010). Seventeen-month-olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others’ referential communication. Developmental Science.
Surian, L., Caldi, S., & Sperber, D. (2007). Attribution of beliefs by 13-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 18(7), 580–586.
Thompson, J. R. (2011). Stalking the representational mind. Mississippi State University.
Tomasello, M., & Rakoczy, H. (2003). What makes human cognition unique? From individual to shared to collective intentionality. Mind and Language, 18(2), 121–147.
Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72(3), 655–684.
Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition, 13, 103–128.
Yazdi, A. A., German, T. P., Defeyter, M. A., & Siegal, M. (2006). Competence and performance in belief-desire reasoning across two cultures: The truth, the wole truth, and nothing but the truth. Cognition, 100, 343–368.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
The author wishes to thank Shannon Spaulding and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions for improving this paper.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Thompson, J.R. Implicit mindreading and embodied cognition. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 449–466 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9213-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9213-3