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In Defense of Phenomenological Approaches to Social Cognition: Interacting with the Critics

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Abstract

I clarify recently developed phenomenological approaches to social cognition. These are approaches that, drawing on developmental science, social neuroscience, and dynamic systems theory, emphasize the involvement of embodied and enactive processes together with communicative and narrative practices in contexts of intersubjective understanding. I review some of the evidence that supports these approaches. I consider a variety of criticisms leveled against them, and defend the role of phenomenology in the explanation of social cognition. Finally, I show how these phenomenological approaches can solve the “starting problem” of social cognition.

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Notes

  1. I refer to phenomenological approaches in the plural to include those that draw not only from phenomenological philosophy, but also from enactive theories of perception, developmental studies of social interaction, and/or narrative theory. There are a number of authors who take such approaches to social cognition, but who give different weight to these different aspects. They are in general agreement in their criticism of ToM approaches, but are not in full agreement in their positive accounts. See, for example, De Jaegher et al. (2010); Fuchs and De Jaegher (2009); Gallagher (2001, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008); Gallagher and Hutto (2008); Gallagher and Zahavi (2008); Hutto (2008; Hobson (1993); Ratcliffe (2007); Reddy (2008); Trevarthen (1979).

  2. By citing the work of Baron-Cohen, Gopnik and Meltzoff, I do not mean to endorse their ToM interpretations of the experimental data. Rather, I suggest that the data, some of which was developed in their experiments, supports the IT view of primary intersubjectivity.

  3. By “standard” false-belief tests I mean the experiments conducted with 3–4 year old children. See below for discussion of the more recent experiments with infants who are under 2 years of age.

  4. Some ToM theorists complain that it’s difficult to make sense out of the concepts of third-person observation and second-person interaction in the IT account (e.g., Spaulding 2010, p. 129, n12). One of the clearest examples of this distinction, however, is to be found here in the standard false-belief tasks. The child is in a third-person relation to the person (or puppet or character) she is asked about. In other words, she is observing, but not interacting with that person. She is, however, in a second-person interactive relation to the experimenter to whom she is responding when asked the questions. It follows that false-belief experiments are not testing our everyday interactions with others, but what seem to be more specialized third-person, observational mindreading abilities.

  5. Thus Baron-Cohen and Swettenham (1996) explicitly state “mind-reading allows flexible social interaction (based on shared plans) …” (p. 159). Astington (1996) acknowledges the importance of interaction as a process between the child and the social world and explains that “in theory-theory the social world provides data that are used in the construction of concepts, or it lays out analogies for the child’s benefit .... Thus the issue is not whether social interaction is important, because it is of some importance in everybody’s view” (p. 198).

  6. The underlying thought is that the sort of pretense involved depends on being able to distinguish self from other. Part of the argument against the simulationist interpretation of MNs is that, as claimed by many of the same people who claim that MNs are simulating neurons (e.g., Gallese 2005; Hurley 2005; Jeannerod and Pacherie 2004), MNs are neutral in regard to the agent. That is, they are activated whether I am engaged in action, or I see you engaged in action. On such accounts, there is no ‘I’ or ‘you’ in the subpersonal activation of MNs, and therefore there can be no ‘I’ pretending to be ‘you’, or ‘me’ putting myself in ‘your’ place in such activations (Gallagher 2007; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008). Even if, in fact, MNs are not neutral with respect to distinguishing self from other (e.g., firing rate patterns are different for action vs. observation) pretense involves more than simply this differentiation.

  7. Ordering a coffee is an embodied process since it depends on bodily positions, postures, facial expressions, gestures, etc. on both sides of the counter. That both customer and coffee-man are playing socially defined roles, however, may play a larger part in how this gets worked out (we still get our coffee even if the coffee-man is daydreaming or emotionally upset and manifesting this in his bodily comportment).

  8. One of the journal’s anonymous reviewers suggested that the two cases (emergency room vs social cognition) are different in that the correlations are known in the medical context but that “what's at issue in the phenomenology/social cognition debate is precisely the [yet to be determined] correlation between personal and subpersonal.” Although it’s not clear to me that in the medical condition the correlations are always well known, it is clear that if in the case of social cognition what is at issue is to discover the correlation between personal and subpersonal then phenomenology is directly relevant.

  9. I take predicting in these contexts to mean a rather commonsense operation on the same order as explaining. The two seem to always go hand-in-hand in this literature. I would distinguish prediction in this sense from the kind of automatic anticipation that one finds in motor responses. I think that anticipation is ubiquitous in human behavior, but predicting, in this sense, is a more specialized cognitive ability.

  10. The ‘simple phenomenological argument’, simply stated, is that if inferential mindreading or simulation is both explicit/conscious and pervasive in our social encounters, as some claim, then there should be phenomenological evidence for this; but there’s not. See e.g., Gallagher (2007, 356)

  11. Thus, for example, Goldman writes: ‘“High-level” mindreading is mindreading with one or more of the following features: (a) it targets mental states of a relatively complex nature, such as propositional attitudes; (b) some components of the mindreading process are subject to voluntary control; and (c) the process has some degree of accessibility to consciousness” (Goldman 2006, 147).

  12. Or consider Nichols and Stich (2003): ‘The basic idea of what we call the ‘off-line simulation theory’ is that in predicting and explaining people’s behavior we take our own decision making system ‘off-line’, supply it with ‘pretend’ inputs that have the same content as the beliefs and desires of the person whose behavior we're concerned with, and let it make a decision on what to do’ (pp. 39–40).

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Acknowledgement

I want to thank Peter Hobson, Dan Hutto, Pierre Jacob, Dorothée Legrand, Jennifer Mundale, Garrett Riggs, Philippe Rochat, Jean-Michel Roy, Dan Zahavi, and the participants of a colloquium at the Institut Jean Nicod where parts of this paper were first presented, for their helpful comments. I also thank the journal editor, Christophe Heintz, and three anonymous reviewers for comments that pushed me to clarify several issues. Thanks also to the support offered by CNRS research grants for my work on this paper while a visiting professor at the Center for the Epistemology of Cognitive Science at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and visiting researcher at the Centre de Recherche en Epistémelogie Appliquée, École Polytechnique, Paris.

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    Shaun Gallagher

  2. School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK

    Shaun Gallagher

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Gallagher, S. In Defense of Phenomenological Approaches to Social Cognition: Interacting with the Critics. Rev.Phil.Psych. 3, 187–212 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-011-0080-1

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