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The case for mind perception

  • S.I.: Future of Social Cognition
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Abstract

The question of how we actually arrive at our knowledge of others’ mental lives is lively debated, and some philosophers defend the idea that mentality is sometimes accessible to perception. In this paper, a distinction is introduced between “mind awareness” and “mental state awareness,” and it is argued that the former at least sometimes belongs to perceptual, rather than cognitive, processing.

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Notes

  1. There are of course differences between particular TT accounts. One of the differences is that some maintain that the theory is innate (Carruthers 2013, 1996), while others think that it is gradually acquired (Gopnik and Wellman 1994; Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997).

  2. Alternatively, some researchers have argued that the two accounts are not necessarily mutually exclusive and have proposed hybrid accounts that integrate simulation and theory processes (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002; Adolphs 2002; Nichols and Stich 2003).

  3. In a similar fashion, Johnson (2000, p. 22) remarks that “mental states, and the minds that possess them, are necessarily unobservable constructs that must be inferred.”

  4. Such a “perceptual view” is often presented as an alternative to the inferential approaches, although some argue that certain forms of TT and ST might be able to accommodate it (Lavelle 2012; O’Shea 2012; Carruthers 2015).

  5. The original German passage says: “Man kann wirklich sagen: der beseelte Körper hat Schmerzen. Und ob ein Körper beseelt ist, das nimmt man durch die Sinne wahr.”

  6. The focus of the paper is the perceptual awareness of others as being minded human beings, although I acknowledge that it would be helpful to enlighten the relationship between being in a mental state and being minded. For instance, some might want to grasp this issue in light of the determinate/determinable distinction and argue that being minded might just be something like the most determinable mental property had by a certain organism. Being minded could be just being in the most general kind of mental state that is entailed by the possession of any more specific mental state (e.g., beliefs, emotions, intentions, etc.). I thank an anonymous referee for pointing this possibility out to me.

  7. While this is not the focus of this paper, one might wonder whether dreamless sleep and unconsciousness would constitute counterexamples to such a claim. I’m indebted to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.

  8. This form of dehumanization is best exemplified in the context of interethnic antagonism. In extreme cases, animal or organism metaphors for ethnic out-groups are commonplace. Examples include the characterization of Jews in the Holocaust or Tutsis in Rwanda as vermin (Haslam 2006). In less extreme cases, out-group members are perceived as less capable of experiencing complex emotions such as nostalgia and compassion (Leyens et al. 2001; Demoulin et al. 2009).

  9. There are, of course, also important differences. When we perceive a minded human being, we don’t just perceive animacy and attribute behavioral or dispositional aspects that we might attribute to dots on a screen. Perceiving a mind in others enables individuals to regard others as deserving moral consideration (Gray et al. 2007, 2012). Also, the literature on dehumanization confirms that failure to perceive minds in other people may aggravate prejudice and facilitate humiliation and torture (Harris and Fiske 2006, 2011; Haslam and Loughnan 2014; Viki et al. 2013).

  10. Except in cases of abnormal development (Abell 2000; Rutherford et al. 2006), children at early ages interpret simple geometric shapes as intentional agents (Gergely 1995; Csibra 1999; Rochat 1997), and this is robust across individuals and consistent across a wide range of cultures (Morris and Peng 1994; Hashimoto 1966).

  11. Put simply, the phenomenal character of experience E refers to “what it is like to consciously undergo” E.

  12. This question is often formulated as a question about phenomenal or representational content (see Chalmers 2006).

  13. While this is not the place to provide a full defense of this claim, one problem is that such approaches only allow an indirect analysis of the relevant contents, via informational states (see Siegel 2011, pp. 83–87).

  14. Introspection appears to be the most natural method for settling this question, as most would agree that the phenomenal character of experience is accessible to introspection. But while introspection is helpful in getting us closer to answering the question about the contents of perceptual experience, it has specific limitations. It does not reveal with sufficient precision what we want to know about the contents of experience. If we think of introspection as a domain-general faculty, it might reveal what’s “on one’s mind,” for instance, that we’re having an experience of the high-level property “being a mailbox,” but it will fail to discern whether such experience is perceptual (visual) or post-perceptual (cognitive). Also, if introspection alone could reveal whether or not high-level properties can be presented in perceptual experience, then we would expect less disagreement about the correct answer. However, this is clearly not the case in the literature (see Siegel 2011, p. 80).

  15. I take this first premise to be plausible, and I will not seek to provide additional support for it.

  16. I thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out to me.

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    Somogy Varga

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Varga, S. The case for mind perception. Synthese 194, 787–807 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0994-8

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