Abstract
Over the last several decades, there has been a wealth of illuminating work on processes implicated in social cognition. Much less has been done in articulating how we learn the contours of particular concepts deployed in social cognition, like the concept MENTALISTIC AGENT. Recent developments in learning theory afford new tools for approaching these questions. In this article, I describe some rudimentary ways in which learning theoretic considerations can illuminate philosophically important aspects of the MENTALISTIC AGENT concept. I maintain that MENTALISTIC AGENT is an essentialized concept (cf. Gelman, in The essential child, 2003; Keil, in Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development, 1992) and that learning-theoretic considerations help explain why the concept is not tied to particular traits.
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Notes
Some of this earlier work focuses on the distinctive functional role of the I-concept (see Nichols 2008). But this work provided no constructive account of the content of the category associated with the I-concept. Here I develop an account of the content in terms of essential agency.
The term “mind” is perhaps more apt, and is certainly more familiar to philosophical audiences. But I follow the theory-of-mind literature in using the term “mentalistic agent” to refer broadly to individuals with mental states (e.g., Johnson 2000, p. 22; Barrett 2000), including conscious states (Arico et al. 2011). (Gray et al. 2007 adopt a more restrictive usage on which “agency” does not include experiential states).
I will follow the familiar notational expedient of using all caps for concepts.
As we will see, unlike biological kinds, artifactual kinds (e.g., shoelaces) are typically thought not to be essentialized.
A small, flat-footed survey study confirmed that people explicitly affirm this view of essences. Participants were asked to indicate whether they thought some unspecified trait was the essence of a raccoon. Trait A was possessed by all raccoons and all skunks; trait B was possessed by most, but not all, raccoons and no other animals; trait C was possessed by all raccoon and no other animals. Participants were overwhelmingly more likely to think that trait C—which was both unique to raccoons and a common factor to all raccoons—was the essence. Indeed, several participants’ explanations explicitly expressed the idea that an essence must be a distinguishing common factor:
“It’s clear that Trait C is the essence of being raccoon -no other animal possesses trait C, but all raccoons have it.”
“The essence of being a raccoon can be something only they have and all of them have it. Therefore only trait C can be the essence of being a raccoon.”
“To be considered the essence of an animal the trait should be present in all of those animals and not seen in any other animal.”
“All raccoons have the essence of being a raccoon, and no other animal can have this.”
The study was within subject, presented in fixed order from trait A to trait C. On a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree), participants agreed more strongly that trait C (unique + common factor) was the essence (\(M=6.58\)) than that trait A (nonunique, common factor) was the essence (\(M=2.69\)) (\(t(35)=11.21, \hbox { p}<.0001\)) or that trait B (unique, not common factor) was the essence (\(M=4.0) (t(35)=7.57, \hbox { p}<.0001\)).
Gelman (2003) resists the view that statistical learning theory can explain why children are essentialists. However, she focuses on empiricist accounts of the structure of the concept, rather than an empiricist account of the acquisition of the concepts. Even if empiricist accounts of the structure of the concept (in terms that exclude a hidden essence) are inadequate to the data, one can defend an account of the acquisition of essentialized concepts in terms of empiricist learning mechanisms. For instance, Bayesian learning (see, e.g., Perfors et al. 2011) might offer a promising approach to learning concepts that have the essentialist structure. An essence placeholder can be naturally captured by a naïve Bayes model with the ‘essence’ as a hidden variable that explains the observable features. This would stand in contrast to perceptual kinds [e.g., PAISLEY or PLAID) or prototype kinds (e.g. DSM categories or maybe even the folk concepts of GAME (Wittgenstein 1953) or RELATIONAL BOREDOM (Harasymchuk and Fehr 2013)]. Such perceptual and prototype categories can be modeled by graphs with no hidden “essence” variables.
By “content”, I mean to include both the denotation of the concept (e.g., the essence) and the inferential roles associated with the concept.
Laurence and Margolis maintain that their model for learning natural kind concepts is not a hypothesis testing model (2011, p. 523). Iris Oved presents an alternative learning theory for natural kind concepts that is explicitly developed as a hypothesis testing account (Oved 2015). For present purposes we can remain neutral on this issue. As with Laurence and Margolis’ account, Oved’s account appeals to perceptual information as a way of roughly demarcating the kinds.
It’s important to note that the process of identifying an individual as a member of a category can be independent from the process of learning the content of the category. For instance, a learner might be explicitly told that an individual is a horse, and then the learner can try to adjust the kind-syndrome so that this new individual is included. Or a new individual might fit well enough into the kind-syndrome associated with HORSE that you identify it as a member, but this too might require adjustments to the kind syndrome associated with the category.
One prediction of the Distinguishing Factor component of the theory is that people should treat essentialized kinds as autonomous, to some extent. Although all dogs are alive, being alive doesn’t distinguish dogs from cats or lizards or ants. So if essences are distinguishing common factors, the essence associated with DOG should not include the property of being alive. People should be inclined to find it conceptually available that an individual can have the dog essence (i.e., be a dog) without being alive. There is a smattering of evidence in favor of this view (Nichols & Weinberg, MS).
We see something like the Common Factor learning component illustrated in Gelman’s discussion of the role of names in determining content for categories:
Similarly, the fact that a category is lexicalized might highlight “the relative coherence and stability of a set of entities” (Gelman 2003, p. 238).
Often, the learner will come to posit a Distinguishing Common Factor in deference to experts. So, to use Putnam’s example, I know from botanists that elms and beeches have different essences, even though I don’t know what they are. But the botanical taxonomy tells us that there must be some factor for each that distinguishes it from the other (as well as from poplars, spruces, and polar bears).
Of course, a lot of these immediate attributions of agency might be retracted on reflection as not really counting as agents.
The characterization of a ‘kind syndrome’ from Laurence & Margolis might be somewhat narrower than my usage in this paragraph. Laurence & Margolis claim that the collection of properties in the kind syndrome is “accessible in perceptual encounters” (Laurence and Margolis 2002, p. 38). But internal mental states (e.g., thoughts, desires, and feelings) will be among the key properties of mentalistic agents, and those properties are presumably not directly accessible in perceptual encounters. Nonetheless, it’s plausible to extend the basic idea of a kind syndrome to include properties, like mental states, that aren’t directly perceived. After all, for many natural kinds, some of the most highly indicative features are internal. For instance, the property loves eating ants is plausibly part of the kind syndrome of the lay concept of aardvarks—it’s highly indicative of the kind. Knowledge of love can only be inferred, not directly accessed in perceptual encounters. And yet even in the absence of perceptual encounters, knowing that an animal loves eating ants would contribute to identifying the animal as an aardvark.
The means for the other items were as follows: things that can break 5.07, chair 4.70. The study was within subjects (N \(=\) 41) with items randomized.
I’ve argued that MENTALISTIC AGENT is essentialized. It is of course a further question why that kind is essentialized. I don’t try to address that question here. But part of the explanation might be that individuals categorized as MENTALISTIC AGENTS continue to exhibit goal-seeking behavior across major changes to observable features (e.g., loss of limbs).
For a control case, we used an example from Keil (1992) in which a tire is changed so that it looked just like a boot. As expected, people in this case did not think that the object was still a tire.
Kurt Gray and colleagues explored intuitions about the minds of PVS patients. They found that participants regarded a PVS patient as not possessing mental states (Gray et al. 2011; cf. Gomes et al. forthcoming). However, they did not ask the most general question, whether the PVS patient still has a mind. It is an interesting question for future research whether participants are more likely to regard PVS patients has having a mind than as having mental states.
The point here applies to typical cases in which the kind syndrome is present. But of course essentialism allows for an individual to be a member of an essentialized category even if it doesn’t exhibit the kind syndrome, and it also allows for an individual to exhibit the kind syndrome without being a member of the category (see, e.g., Laurence and Margolis 2002, p. 40). Although essentialism can accommodate these atypical cases, such cases will not be the normal basis for learning the content of the category.
This might help explain the finding that children drew fewer inferences concerning ANIMAL than concerning DOG (Gelman and O’Reilly 1988). Since DOG has a more restrictive essence than ANIMAL, it’s not surprising that DOG funds a richer set of inferences.
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank John Doris, Josh Knobe, Victor Kumar, Ron Mallon, Eric Margolis, Philip Robbins, Carolina Sartorio, Nina Strohminger, Hannah Tierney, Jonathan Weinberg, two anonymous referees, and especially Alisabeth Ayars and Iris Oved for comments and discussion on earlier versions of this paper.
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Nichols, S. The essence of mentalistic agents. Synthese 194, 809–825 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0893-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0893-z