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A Critique of Embodied Simulation

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Abstract

Social cognition is the capacity to understand and interact with others. The mainstream account of social cognition is mindreading, the view that we humans understanding others by interpreting their behavior in terms of mental states. Recently theorists from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience have challenged the mindreading account, arguing for a more deflationary account of social cognition. In this paper I examine a deflationary account of social cognition, embodied simulation, which is inspired by recent neuroscientific findings. I argue that embodied simulation fails to present an adequate alternative to mindreading accounts of social cognition. I defend a philosophically and empirically plausible two-systems account of social cognition, which holds that even very young children are capable of mindreading.

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Notes

  1. Embodied simulation and mentalistic simulation are not mutually exclusive, e.g., in imaginatively simulating a target’s anger one’s brain may be also simulating the target’s neural states that are associated with anger.

  2. It may be helpful to distinguish mere behavior reading—which Gallese argues against—from intentional attunement—which Gallese argues for. While both are non-metarepresentational according to ES, behavior reading is devoid of meaning for the observer, whereas intentional attunement is automatically imbued with meaning. With intentional attunement, the observer understands the target’s behavior—i.e., grasps the goal-directedness of the behavior and anticipates further behavior—from the inside. Perhaps one way to put it is that intention understanding additionally involves the understanding of what it is like to perform that act.

  3. There is not enough space here to delve deeply into the reasons for my skepticism. Briefly, though, mirror neuron theorists seem to equivocate on the notion of intention. As I mentioned above, they explicitly employ a deflationary account of intention in explicating how mirror neurons function. But when drawing conclusions for social cognition, these theorists rely on a much richer notion of intention. By equivocating on intention, theorists conclude, for example, that mirror neurons solve the problem of other minds (Iacoboni 2009). My view is that if we adhere to the deflationary notion of intention, mirror neurons cause intentional understanding, but this has very limited implications for social cognition. If we adhere to the richer notion of intention, which plays a role in sophisticated social cognition, then mirror neurons are at best tenuously related to intentional understanding.

  4. Shaun Gallagher, an EC proponent, makes a similar mistake when he argues that, “the idea that these capacities are precursors means that eventually and developmentally, they are not the capacities we employ in more sophisticated adult comprehension of others” (Gallagher, 2008, p. 166).

  5. One might be skeptical about this distinction between solipsistic behavior-reading and phenomenologically rich intentional attunement. It probably begs the question against, e.g., Perner and Ruffman, who argue for a behavioral interpretation of these studies. I shall allow the distinction for now. Once I advance my own interpretation of these studies, the distinction between behavior-reading and intention understanding becomes moot.

  6. My view has been shaped by the works of Apperly and Butterfill (2009), Carruthers (2006), and Gendler (2008).

  7. My argument assumes that employing multiple behavioral rules is less parsimonious than attributing mental states. This is not a universally accepted assumption. In this issue of Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Low and Wang argue that such assumptions about parsimony are not so straightforward. Perner (2010) also offers a challenging response to the kind of parsimony argument I offer.

  8. I am inclined to think that belief-like states are propositional attitudes, but my argument does not hinge on this claim.

  9. There is a whole literature on the various theories of concepts that I wish to sidestep here. Whatever theory of concepts one accepts, my claim is that understanding belief-like states is less sophisticated than understanding beliefs.

  10. For example, Lois Lane believes that Superman is hunky. Even though Superman is the same person as Clark Kent, Lois Lane does not believe that Clark Kent is hunky. Lois Lane’s belief that X is hunky is true under a certain description (X = the airborne caped superhero who wears his underwear on the outside of his pants) and false under other descriptions (X = the bespectacled reporter who works at the Daily Planet).

  11. For example, suppose I have an apple-shaped candle. Upon first viewing it, you believe that it is an apple. After handling the object, you come to believe that it is really a candle that merely looks like an apple. When I show this object to Sally, what will she believe it is? Grasping the appearance/reality distinction requires understanding that Sally will believe that the object is an apple because the object looks to her like an apple despite the fact that it really is a candle. Mastery of the BELIEF concept involves appreciating that people can have false beliefs based on misleading appearances.

  12. An appreciation of the types and degrees of belief is a feature of the folk psychological concept of BELIEF. Though the folk may not use philosophers’ terminology, such as occurrent and dispositional, they have no trouble understanding the gist of these ideas. Understanding the concept of BELIEF involves, among other things, appreciating that one can believe something that one is not consciously entertaining.

  13. I want to make clear that my target here is the deflationary account of social cognition. In advancing this particular two-systems account I do not aim to refute other non-deflationary two-systems accounts. The account I advance may be more or less compatible with other two-systems accounts in the literature. My goal in advocating for this two-systems account is to offer an alternative to deflationary accounts of social cognition.

  14. See Apperly and Butterfill (2009) for an excellent development of this sort of account. Several theorists offer two-systems accounts of social cognition that are, to varying degrees, compatible with this account. I do not intend to give a complete review of all two-systems accounts available, but I shall sketch a few prevalent alternatives and distinguish them from my preferred account. Nichols and Stich (2003) offer a two-system account of social cognition that differs from the account I am defending in that their first system (the Desire and Plan System) does not allow for metarepresenting targets’ beliefs or perceptual states. On the view I defend, metarepresentation is important for explaining infants’ performance on mindreading tasks. Gopnik and Wellman (1994) describe the first stages of the development of social cognition in terms of a non-representational concept of BELIEF, which in later stages develops into a fully representational concept of BELIEF. I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of non-representational beliefs, but perhaps one way of understanding my preferred account is as an explication and clarification of this transition from “non-representational” to “representational” belief understanding. Leslie and colleagues (2004) offer a two-systems account of social cognition in terms of a Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM) and selection process (SP). On their account, infants innately possess a ToMM, a mechanism of special attention that deploys innate concepts such as BELIEF, DESIRE and PRETEND and predisposes the normally developing child to pay selective attention to mental states over other things. ToMM default attributes beliefs with contents that reflect reality. But effective reasoning about belief contents (including contents that do not reflect reality) depends on a process of selection by inhibition. This SP develops slowly through the preschool period and beyond. Although the view I defend is largely compatible with Leslie’s ToMM-SP account, three differences are relevant. The view I defend is non-committal about the existence of a modular theory of mind mechanism, it is not committed to nativism about mental state concepts—in fact, it does not ascribe the BELIEF concept to infants at all,—and it does not hold that prior to the onset of the later system infants attribute only reality-based mental states. It is possible for infants and young children to attribute reality-incongruent perceptions and reality-congruent belief-like states.

  15. There remain open empirical questions about this hypothesis. For example, what is the relation between System 1 and System 2? Does System 2 develop from System 1, do they operate autonomously, or are they interrelated? These are questions that further research must aim to answer.

  16. See Scott et al. (2010) for an argument against Apperly and Butterfill’s two-systems account. Their argument against the Apperly and Butterfill account is that System 1 is allegedly sharply limited, but the experimental evidence suggests that infants’ abilities are not so sharply limited. However, Apperly and Butterfill’s account holds that System 1 is sharply limited in comparison to System 2. Pointing out the variety of reality incongruent states and contextual information to which infants are sensitive does not establish that infants’ abilities are on par with adults’ abilities. Perhaps infants’ social cognitive abilities are not sharply limited in comparison to non-human animals. But for a variety of reasons and in a number of respects, infants’ social cognitive abilities are limited in comparison to adults. I do not think that Scott, et al.’s position needs to be cast as in competition with Apperly and Butterfill’s account. Properly understood, the accounts are compatible.

  17. Behavior-reading hypotheses involve bodily orientation and behavioral rules (such as, if the dominant is oriented toward a food item, it will retrieve the food). They do not involve attributions of perceptual states and goals.

  18. See footnote 2 above.

  19. Though I find this a plausible story, this is not the only possible relation between System 1 and System 2. The two systems may operate autonomously.

  20. The empirical data on how often children are exposed to narratives makes this problem even more intractable. In America, for 9-month-olds, 32% are read to and 27% are told stories on a daily basis. For 2-year-olds, 45% are read to and 28% are told stories on a daily basis. For 4-year-olds, 39% are read to and 29% are told stories on a daily basis (Planty et al. 2009). Children often are not exposed to well-constructed exemplars of folk psychological narratives, a fact which makes learning folk psychology from mere exposure folk psychological narratives seem even more improbable.

  21. See Liu et al. (2008) for discussion.

  22. It is plausible that exposure to narratives influences System 2 reasoning, which is more flexible and subject to individual and cultural variation.

  23. It should be noted that these arguments are specific to the ES-NPH combination. The particularly problematic element for the account under consideration is the insistence that intentional attunement is non-mentalistic. And though the embodied cognition and ES accounts bear interesting similarities, Hutto’s full account of social cognition differs in significant ways from ES’s account. Importantly, Hutto has a different notion of intention and intentional attitudes and different interpretations of studies from developmental psychology, and so his account may not face the problems described in this section.

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Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Olle Blomberg, Josh Shepherd, Robert Thompson, and especially Larry Shapiro for reading many drafts of this paper and providing excellent feedback.

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  1. Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, 63130-4899, USA

    Shannon Spaulding

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Spaulding, S. A Critique of Embodied Simulation. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 579–599 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0071-2

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