Abstract
How should we understand the claim that people comply with social norms because they possess the right kinds of beliefs and preferences? I answer this question by considering two approaches to what it is to believe (and prefer), namely: representationalism and dispositionalism. I argue for a variety of representationalism, viz. neural representationalism. Neural representationalism is the conjunction of two claims. First, what it is essential to have beliefs and preferences is to have certain neural representations. Second, neural representations are often necessary to adequately explain behaviour. After having canvassed one promising way to understand what neural representations could be, I argue that the appeal to beliefs and preferences in explanations of paradigmatic cases of norm compliance should be understood as an appeal to neural representations.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Decision theorists tend to talk of ‘preferences’ instead of ‘desires.’ In what follows, ‘preference’ and ‘desire’ are used interchangeably, consistently with the accounts of norms I consider.
Interestingly, some psychological theories seem to take into account some features of both representationalism and dispositionalism: e.g. Daniel Kahneman’s dual-process theory, and the distinction between systems 1 and system 2 (cf. Kahneman 2003). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer to draw my attention to this point.
The following parallels an example in Haugeland (1998, p. 143).
Different types of agents in Ray et al. (2009) account of the Trust Game were defined by the extent to which they were averse to unequal outcomes and by their level of strategic thinking.
Recall that in their account beliefs about your cognitive and volitional profile influence my preferences about payoffs in the game. Interestingly, also in Bicchieri’s (2006) account of norm compliance preferences are dependent on beliefs. On her model, an agent’s preferences are conditional on his or her own beliefs regarding other people’s actions and expectations. So one prefers to follow a norm if he or she believes that certain conditions occur.
References
Beer, R. D. (2008). The dynamics of brain-body-environment systems: a status report. In P. Calvo & A. Gomila (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive science: an embodied approach (pp. 99–120). San Diego: Elsevier.
Bicchieri, C. (2006). The grammar of society: the nature and dynamics of social norms. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bicchieri, C., & Xiao, E. (2009). Do the right thing: but only if others do so. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 22(2), 191–208.
Camerer, C. (2003). Behavioral game theory: experiments on strategic interaction. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chemero, A. (2000). Anti-representationalism and the dynamical stance. Philosophy of Science, 67, 625–647.
Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1–61.
Churchland, P. S., & Sejnowski, T. J. (1992). The computational brain. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (2002). Skills, spills, and the nature of mindful action. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1, 385–387.
Clark, A. (2000). Making moral space. A reply to Churchland. In: Campbell R, Hunter B (Eds.), Moral epistemology naturalized: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary VolumeXXVI, 307–312.
Clark, A., & Toribio, J. (1994). Doing without representing? Synthese, 101, 401–431.
Colombo, M. (2010). How ‘authentic intentionality’ can be enabled: a neurocomputational hypothesis. Minds and Machines, 20(2), 183–202.
Colombo, M., & Seriès, P. (2012). Bayes in the brain. On Bayesian modelling in neuroscience. The British Journal for Philosophy of Science, 63, 697–723.
Dayan, P., & Abbott, L. (2001). Theoretical neuroscience. Cambridge: MIT Press.
deCharms, R. C., & Zador, A. (2000). Neural representation and the cortical code. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 23, 613–647.
Dennett, D. (1982/83). Styles of mental representation. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, LXXXIII, 213–26.
Dreyfus, H. (2002a). Intelligence without representation: Merleau-Ponty's critique of mental representation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1, 367–383.
Dreyfus, H. (2002b). Refocusing the question: can there be skillful coping without propositional representations or brain representations? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1, 413–425.
Eliasmith, C. (2003). Moving beyond metaphors: understanding the mind for what it is. Journal of Philosophy, C(10), 493–520.
Elster, J. (1989). Social norms and economic theory. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 3(4), 99–117.
Engel, P. (2005). Tacit Belief. In W. Østreng (Ed.), Synergies: interdisciplinary communications (pp. 98–100). Oslo: Center for Advanced Study.
Fodor, J. A. (1968). The appeal to tacit knowledge in psychological explanation. Journal of Philosophy, 65, 627–640.
Fodor, J. A., & Pylyshyn, Z. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture: a critical analysis. Cognition, 28, 3–71.
Freeman, W. J. (1991). The physiology of perception. Scientific American, 264, 78–85.
Freeman, W. J., & Skarda, C. A. (1990). Representations: who needs them? In L. McGaugh & N. M. Weinberge (Eds.), Brain organization and memory: cells, systems, and circuits (pp. 375–380). London: Oxford University Press.
Friston, K., & Stephan, K. E. (2007). Free energy and the brain. Synthese, 159, 417–458.
Gershman, S. J., & Daw, N. D. (2012). Perception, action and utility: the tangled skein. In M. Rabinovich, K. Friston, & P. Varona (Eds.), Principles of brain dynamics: global state interactions. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Haugeland, J. (1998). Having thought: essays in the metaphysics of mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hubel, D. H., & Wiesel, T. N. (1962). Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat’s visual cortex. The Journal of Physiology, 160, 106–154.
Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58, 697–720.
Kawato, M. (2008a). From "Understanding the brain by creating the brain" towards manipulative neuroscience. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 363, 2201–2214.
Kawato, M. (2008b). Brain controlled robots. HFSP Journal, 2, 136–142.
King-Casas, B., Tomlin, D., Anen, C., Camerer, C. F., Quartz, S. R., & Montague, P. R. (2005). Getting to know you: reputation and trust in a two-person economic exchange. Science, 308, 78–83.
King-Casas, B., Sharp, C., Lomax-Bream, L., Lohrenz, T., Fonagy, P., & Montague, P. R. (2008). The rupture and repair of cooperation in borderline personality disorder. Science, 321, 806–810.
Knill, D. C., & Richards, W. (Eds.). (1996). Perception as Bayesian inference. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, D. K. (1969). Convention: a philosophical study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
MacKay, D. J. C. (2003). Information theory, inference and learning algorithms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Newell, A., & Simon, H. (1972). Human problem solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Pettit, P. (1990). Virtus Normativa: rational choice perspectives. Ethics, 100, 725–755.
Pouget, A., Dayan, P., & Zemel, R. S. (2003). Inference and computation with population codes. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 26, 381–410.
Ramsey, W. M. (2007). Representation reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ray, D., King-Casas, B., Montague, P. R., & Dayan, P. (2009). Bayesian model of behaviour in economic games. In D. Koller, D. Schuurmans, Y. Bengio, & L. Bottou (Eds.), Advances in neural information processing systems (Vol. 21, pp. 1345–1352). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rust, N. C., & Stocker, A. A. (2010). Ambiguity and invariance: two fundamental challenges for visual processing. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 20, 382–388.
Sato, H., & Maharbiz, M. M. (2010). Recent developments in the remote radio control of insect flight. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 4(199), 1–12.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2006/2010). Belief. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief. Accessed 14 Jan 2013.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2002). A phenomenal, dispositional account of belief. Nous, 36, 249–275.
Shannon, C. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell Systems Technical Journal, 27(279–423), 623–656.
Sugden, R. (1986). The economics of rights, cooperation and welfare. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tenenbaum, J. B., Kemp, C., Griffiths, T. L., & Goodman, N. D. (2011). How to grow a mind: statistics, structure and abstraction. Science, 331, 1279–1285.
Ullmann-Margalit, E. (1977). The emergence of norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vanderbeeken, R., & Weber, E. (2002). Dispositional explanations of behavior. Behavior and Philosophy, 30, 43–59.
Acknowledgments
I am sincerely grateful to Andy Clark, Dave Des Roches-Dueck, Angelica Kaufmann, Julian Kiverstein, Suilin Lavelle, Ray Debajyoti and Mark Sprevak for their generous feedback on previous versions of this paper, and/or for fun discussion of specific ideas in the paper. A special thank you to two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions. This work was supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the priority program “New Frameworks of Rationality” (SPP 1516). The usual disclaimers about any error or mistake in the paper apply.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Colombo, M. Explaining social norm compliance. A plea for neural representations. Phenom Cogn Sci 13, 217–238 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9296-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9296-0