Abstract
I argue that proponents of embodied social cognition (ESC) can usefully supplement their views if they enlist the help of an unlikely ally: Daniel Dennett. On Dennett’s view, human social cognition involves adopting the intentional stance (IS), i.e., assuming that an interpretive target’s behavior is an optimally rational attempt to fulfill some desire relative to her beliefs. Characterized this way, proponents of ESC would reject any alliance with Dennett. However, for Dennett, to attribute mental states from the intentional stance is not to attribute concrete, unobservable mental causes of behavior. Once this is appreciated, the kinship between IS—understood as a model of our quotidian interpretive practices—and ESC is apparent: both assume that quotidian interpretation involves tracking abstract, observable, behavioral patterns, not attributing unobservable, concrete, mental causes, i.e., both assume social cognition is possible without metapsychology. I argue that this affinity constitutes an opportunity: proponents of ESC can use IS as a characterization of the subpersonal basis for social cognition. In the process, I make my interpretation of IS more precise and relate it to current empirical literature in developmental psychology.
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Notes
Dan Hutto, a prominent proponent of ESC, explicitly denies this:
[I]f it is generally true that our primary engagements with the world (or aspects of it) are mediated by mental representations, then our primary engagements with others will be mediated by mentally representing their mental representations. If so, any credible candidate explanation of basic social cognition ‘must’ regard it as being conducted by means of sub-personal processes involving the manipulation of contentful mental representations about the target phenomena — e.g. mental states of various kinds. (2009, p. 544)
I argue against this below by defending a cognitivist account of basic social cognition, Dennett’s IS, that does not assume that it involves representing or attributing mental states.
Many of Hutto’s (2008) examples, drawn from quotidian life, are also meant to highlight the phenomenological implausibility of metapsychological models of social cognition: he stresses how, when interaction goes smoothly, we are aware of no attributions of psychological states when interpreting our interactants (13).
Here I focus on the sorts of cognitive capacities they claim explain typical quotidian social interactions. The reason is that their claims against metapsychological theories are strongest in this domain, since the phenomenology and tractability criticisms have the most traction regarding fluid, dynamic, everyday interactions. Gallagher and Hutto also offer an alternative way of understanding less common, explicit reasoning about propositional attitudes, drawing on Hutto’s (2008) “narrative practice hypothesis.” However, this involves the kind of slow, conscious, explicit reasoning about which metapsychological theories say little. The most striking disagreements between metapsychological approaches and ESC concern our seemingly automatic capacity to respond very rapidly in dynamic, quotidian interactions: whereas metapsychological theories explain this capacity in terms of unconscious, subpersonal cognitive mechanisms that attribute propositional attitudes, ESC theories offer a different explanation.
Gallagher and Hutto (2008, p. 21) briefly consider two neural mechanisms that they allege could support the socio-cognitive competence that they characterize at the phenomenological and behavioral levels: “the mirror neuron system(s) and shared representations.” They see these as “neuronal resonance processes … that … instantiate a form of enactive social perception” (Ibid.). But this suggestion is clearly insufficient. Mirror neuron systems are present in numerous species, most of which are incapable of secondary intersubjectivity. For example, mirror neurons were first discovered in macaques, who, like all non-human primates, cannot enter into bouts of joint attention in the way human infants do when displaying secondary intersubjectivity at around 1 year of age (Tomasello and Carpenter 2007). As Gallagher (2008a, p. 541, fn10) himself notes, “mirror neurons are only part of the story and likely not sufficient for social perception of intentions.”
De Jaegher et al. (2010) illustrate this new perspective with detailed analysis of an experimental paradigm.
It is important to keep in mind that, for Dennett (1991a), this does not necessarily impugn the ontological importance of beliefs and desires. They are indispensable to tracking “real patterns,” and hence not mere matters of interpretation.
There is also reason to think that he intends IS as a methodology for at least some parts of cognitive science (Dennett 1987, pp. 58–60). I do not discuss this role for IS here because it is not directly relevant to the nature of quotidian social cognition.
This is actually an important limitation to IS, since human interpreters are sensitive, from a very young age, to emotions, sensations, and other psychological phenomena that do not bear rational relations to behavior (Gallagher 2008b, p. 167), and it may be possible to detect intentions and other psychological phenomena that do typically bear rational relations to behavior without assuming that they do (Nichols and Stich 2003, pp. 147–148). However, Dennett (1987, pp. 53–54) himself admits that sensitivity to propositional attitudes may sometimes rely on brute connections between propositional attitudes and behavior unconstrained by rationality. Presumably, similar heuristics may account for sensitivity to emotions and sensations.
Furthermore, there are ways of construing apparent folk irrationality as a kind of contextualized rationality. Take the routine flouting of norms of probabilistic reasoning mentioned above. Hertwig and Gigerenzer (1999) argue that such inferences are the result of a non-mathematical interpretation of the word “probability”: when asked to rate the relative probabilities that Linda is a bank teller or both a bank teller and a feminist, most subjects do not interpret the task as involving the application of a content-independent rule of probability; rather, they interpret the task as inferring the most likely stereotype applicable to Linda. Furthermore, they likely interpret the question as asking whether Linda is a bank teller who is not a feminist, or a bank teller who is a feminist. Relative to this interpretation of the task, the “irrational” answer is actually quite rational.
Ryle’s assumption that there is a one-to-one mapping between mental states and behavioral dispositions leaves him open to one of the classic objections to logical behaviorism (Chisholm 1957; Putnam 1965): what an agent is disposed to do depends not just on individual mental states, but on whole constellations of them. Dennett’s IS takes this criticism into account because it claims that a bout of behavior should be related to the set of propositional attitudes that best rationalizes it. Given my interpretation of IS, this can be rephrased as “the set of goals and accessed information that best rationalizes it.”
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me.
To this, proponents of ESC might add that it also gets the phenomenology wrong.
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Zawidzki, T.W. Unlikely allies: embodied social cognition and the intentional stance. Phenom Cogn Sci 11, 487–506 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9218-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9218-y