Abstract
I defend an alternative to the two traditional accounts of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition: metacognition as primary versus social cognition as primary. These accounts have complementary explanatory vices and virtues. They also share a natural assumption: that interpretation in terms of mental states is “spectatorial”, aiming exclusively for an objective description of the mental facts about self and others. I argue that if one rejects this assumption in favor of the view that interpretation in terms of mental states also plays important regulative roles with respect to minds and behavior, a new and superior conception of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition comes into view. On this conception, person-level metacognitive concepts are socio-cognitive tools that shape us into better cognitive agents and more predictable cognitive objects, thereby enhancing our abilities at social coordination. Mastery of these metacognitive concepts relies on subpersonal, non-conceptual, procedural metacognition. This reconceptualization of the relationship between metacognition and social cognition combines the complementary explanatory virtues of the two traditional conceptions, while avoiding their complementary explanatory vices.
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Notes
Although Moore does not think of this form of interpretation as “sub-personal”, but, rather, as an “unreflective and undemanding personal level” phenomenon. (personal communication).
See McGeer (2015, p. 266, 271) for a similar point.
I thank Richard Moore for the objection and the examples.
What about MP? Recall that one of its main advantages over SP is that it does not require knowledge of generalizations linking mental states to their observable triggers and consequences. It is true that MP versions of SC do not succumb to this objection. However, they face another problem: given inter-individual cognitive and motivational variability, MP, on its own, cannot explain the reliability of interpretation. This is a problem because, if interpretation is not reliable, it is hard to see how it could perform descriptive and predictive functions. Of course, as many proponents of MP argue, perhaps there is sufficient inter-individual similarity to support reliable interpretation (Goldman 1989). However, the evidence from Barrett (2017) regarding emotions, and from Lillard (1998) and Vinden (1999) regarding cross-cultural variation, suggests that, to the extent that there is such inter-individual similarity, it is the product of regulative functions of interpretation.
We see a similar dynamic in games and sports. By learning chess, one not only gains new tools for understanding and predicting other chess players, one also becomes easier to understand and predict by other chess players (McGeer 2015, pp. 261–262).
For a congenial discussion, see McGeer (2015, pp. 265–267).
For an anticipation of this idea, see Nietzsche (1881/1997, pp. 26–27).
See McGeer (2015, pp. 261–267) for an insightful discussion of such “folk psychological know-how or expertise”.
This is not to suggest that such socially inflected, procedural metacognition is sufficient for learning how to use words like “sad”. All language-learning requires, in addition, enormously complex socio-cognitive machinery that enables the kinds of pragmatic inferences by means of which language learners infer the intended messages of their interlocutors. Richard Moore, whom I thank for raising this point in response to an earlier draft, has argued (2017, 2018) that such Gricean mechanisms needn’t involve sophisticated metacognitive concepts, of the kind we use in person-level, reflective, and language-involving interpretation. For example, he argues that non-humans and human infants can engage in Gricean forms of communication without a concept of belief or the ability to attribute recursively nested mental states.
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I thank Richard Moore for extremely helpful, extensive comments on an earlier draft.
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Zawidzki, T.W. A new perspective on the relationship between metacognition and social cognition: metacognitive concepts as socio-cognitive tools. Synthese 198, 6573–6596 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02477-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02477-2