Abstract
According to the thesis of natural mindreading (NMRT), mindreading—i.e., the capacity to attribute mental states to predict and explain behavior—is an intrinsic component of the human biological endowment, thus being innately specified by natural selection within particular neurocognitive structures. In this article, we challenge the NMRT as a phylogenetic and ontogenetic account of the development of the socio-cognitive capacities of our species. In detail, we argue that basic capacities of social cognition (e.g., the traces of early systems of bodily ornamentation within the archeological record, and infants’ selective attention at others’ beliefs in spontaneous-response false belief tasks) do not involve meta-representational mindreading but are better explained by appealing to situated embodied capacities acquired in social interaction. While we acknowledge that more flexible capacities of social cognition (e.g., those implied by the use of political emblems in industrialized societies, or by 4-year-olds’ success in elicited-response false belief tasks) involve genuine mindreading, we argue that this ability is elicited and scaffolded by linguistic communication. We conclude that mindreading has emerged as the outcome of a highly derivative long-term constructivist process of biocultural becoming that led to a relatively recent restructuring of the human mind in multiple worldly locations at different times. In particular, we conjecture that humans gradually converged on establishing linguistic practices allowing the understanding of others’ actions in terms of mental reasons. These practices were bequeathed to further generations, and continue nowadays to scaffold the acquisition of mindreading in early childhood.
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Notes
Some partisans of the mentalistic approach argue that body ornaments necessarily constrain full-blown mindreading abilities but, unlike the models reviewed within the main text, they see these abilities as mediated by the emergence of a meta-language (Henshilwood and Dubreuil 2009, 2011; d'Errico et al. 2005). Although we agree with this metaphysical commitment, we contend that no form of mindreading, including a language-based one, applies to the production of early body adornment in the South African Middle Stone Age.
Although Iliopoulos (2016) further notices that these indices can scaffold the emergence of symbols, thus instantiating a gradual transformation, the two semiotic categories stand as distinct, and separated by a different logic of sign construction.
Nevertheless, critics may contend that the crafting and sharing of other kinds of non-explicitly symbolic artifacts different from bodily ornaments (e.g., hafted spears) indirectly reintroduces symbolism, and accordingly mindreading, within the cognitive repertoire of ancient hominins (see Zilhão 2007). For instance, it has been argued that imagistic thinking and the enchainment of sensorimotor routines within a long-term plan required for hafting necessarily imply the understanding of intentionality (Barham 2010, 2013; Cole 2017, pp. 177–178). However, if our analysis of the case of situated ornaments is correct, mindreading and other capacities of re-enacted simulation are likely de-coupled (see Hutto 2015 for a seminal approach). Moreover, it would be implausible to qualify the situated ornaments as an exceptional case of bodily situated capacities while reintroducing a mentalistic interpretation for other artifacts appearing in the same archaeological contexts. On these grounds, we believe it is prima facie possible to extend our embodied and situated account of bodily ornaments even to other artifacts like composite/hafted spears, and thereby conclude for the absence of mentalistic artifacts within the Early and Middle Stone Age (ESA–MSA).
This hypothesis has never been presented in the literature in the current form, although it is consistent with some accounts in evolutionary cognitive archaeology according to which the modern human mind is bestowed with a set of symbolic abilities that evolved during the Middle Pleistocene but left no material traces within the archaeological record. Instead, these representational abilities were triggered many millennia later by the occurrence of the proper socio-demographic and environmental conditions (e.g., Kuhn and Stiner 2007a, b). The concept of triggering also resonates with some aspects of a neo-Darwinian evolutionary psychology (e.g., Buss 2012) according to which cognitive modules, hard-wired within the brain, and provided with a series of pre-specified functions and representational contents, are activated by the proper environmental stimuli (see Ingold 2007; Nash 2014 for critique).
Yet, as noticed by Iliopoulos (2016, p. 116), in contrast to the mainstream dictum in cognitive archaeology (e.g., Gaudzinski and Jöris 2015; Mussi 2015), secondary icons such as the female figurines are not symbolic artifacts, for they show a similarity ground between signs and objects, and not an arbitrary and conventional one, such as in the case of symbolism. Thus, these artifacts would still constitute material scaffolds for the construction of fully symbolic meanings.
Meta-analyses (Wellman et al.2001) showed that children perform similarly in this and similar tasks like the unexpected content FBT (Gopnik and Astington 1988; Hogrefe et al.; Perner1986; Perner et al. 1987), and the unexpected identity FBT (Gopnik and Astington 1988). Accordingly, we will not mention these similar experimental settings in what follows.
For instance, in the seminal study, Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) familiarized 15-month-olds with seeing an actor hiding a toy in a green box (location A) and then retrieving it. Infants then received a single trial in which a belief was induced in the actor about the location of the toy. In the true-belief condition, both infants and the actor saw the toy moving to a yellow box (location B). This was also the start of the false-belief condition; however, a screen was then raised in front of the actor, and only infants saw the toy cdiscontinuity of socio-cognitiveoming back to the green box (A). In the test trial, infants saw the actor reaching for the toy at one of the two locations. Importantly, infants were found to look longer—which was assumed to indicate surprise—when the actor reached for the toy against the belief that it would be rational to attribute to her, that is, when she either reached for it in the false-belief trials or did not reach for it in the true-belief trials.
Although these two families of proposals look different, we believe there is no clear-cut distinction in their empirical predictions. On the one hand, both views put more emphasis on rejecting the fully-mentalistic analysis of infants’ socio-cognitive capacities from early-competence accounts rather than on differentiating themselves from other non-mentalistic proposals. (As an evidence of this, Ruffman (2014) merely mentions minimal accounts, and only Apperly and Butterfill (2009, pp. 961–962) but no Butterfill and Apperly (2013) discusses briefly behavior-reading approaches.) On the other hand, it looks to us that the difference between minimal and behavior-reading accounts does not depend much on what (non-mentalist) cognitive mechanisms are claimed to underlie infants’ socio-cognitive capacities but rather on how these mechanisms are described—i.e., whether they merely involve the processing of proximal (behavior) or also distal (action) stimuli. If so, minimal and behavior-reading accounts differ more from the profile of the philosophical theory of representational content they endorse than from their empirical predictions (see Buckner 2014; Hutto 2017). This explains why the same non-mentalist account of infants’ socio-cognitive capacities that we assume here (Fenici 2014) has been discussed in relation to sometimes behavior-reading (Fenici and Zawidzki 2016) and sometimes minimal views (Fenici and Carpendale submitted).
The argument presupposes that autistic subjects and 3-year-olds similarly succeed in ER-FBTs. At present, however, nothing disconfirms the hypothesis since it still controversial about what cognitive achievements undergird the success in ER-FBTs even in normally developing children (also see Fenici 2015, pp. 399–400).
In the attempt to defend early-competence accounts from the argument presented in this section, some have recently argued that succeeding in ER-FBTs requires additional pragmatic competences that are acquired independently from infants’ alleged mindreading capacities. For instance, according to Helming et al. (2016), younger children reason that the experimenter cannot be really asking for some information that she already knows, and assume instead that she is testing their ability to tell where the mistaken agent should look for the object. Similarly, Westra (2017; Westra and Carruthers 2017) argue that younger children fail ER-FBTs because they are unlikely to judge the experimenter’s communicative intention, i.e., her desire to have “the child to show that she knows that Sally believes that the marble is in its old location.” If any of these proposals were correct, the attested discontinuity in the development of socio-cognitive abilities between infancy and early childhood would not rule out the hypothesis that children’s success in ER-FBTs—as well as infants’ performance in SR-FBTs—depends on innate (meta-representational) mindreading capacities. In addressing the objection, however, we note that these proposals rely on the highly controversial assumption of a Gricean analysis of verbal communication—an assumption that is undermined by the fact that infants as well as ASD subjects, who are usually assumed to be impaired in understanding other people’s mental states, can understand communicative speech and gestures (also see Breheny 2006; Shieber 2009; Zawidzki 2013 for critical discussion). Moreover, the experimenter’s question in ER-FBTs is very simple and direct, and we do not find very convicing why younger children should be prompted toward such complex interpretations of it. In fact, caregivers often engage their children in conversation for the very sake of it, and ask questions they already know the answer to. We believe that children are quite used to this practice, and we do not think that the ER-FBT scenario should alert them to look for complex interpretations of the questions when it is clear to them that they are simply required to make a behavioral prediction.
We define this maturational dual-system as hypothetic because Apperly and Butterfill, the champions of dual-systems of social cognition, do not seem to openly endorse it. Nevertheless, we believe it is compatible with their view.
In DBT, children are shown a cardboard character, Bill, and a depiction of two locations, a classroom and a playground. They are then told that Bill is looking for his bag, which might be either in the classroom or on the playground, and asked where they think that the bag is likely to be. Whatever children choose, they are told that Bill has the opposite belief and are asked, “Where will Bill look for the bag?” Importantly, children are told explicitly about Bill’s belief, and do not have to infer it from the situation. Still, correct answering apparently requires inferring Bill’s action from his attributed belief—that is, understanding the role of belief reports in belief-use contexts.
In KAT, a child is shown a closed drawer and asked: “What do you think is inside?” Whatever answer she gives, she is shown that the drawer contains a plastic toy dog. Once the drawer is closed, a toy figure of a girl is produced, and the child is told: “Polly has never ever seen inside this drawer. So, does Polly know what is in the drawer?” Importantly, the task requires the child neither to reason about false beliefs nor to infer from Polly’s ignorance what she will do next. Still, correct answering apparently requires the child to master belief reports in belief-formation contexts.
See Schmandt-Besserat (1997) for an example about the development of abstract writing systems graphically encoding words in the spoken language from more concrete and situated systems for numerical encoding quantities with small object tokens and graphical marks.
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Acknowledgements
Duilio Garofoli is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. We wish to thank Jay Garfield and two anonymous reviewers for useful discussion and comments on previous versions of this article. The artifacts appearing within Figs. 1 and 2 have been digitally redrawn from open access original pictures or from materials published under CC-BY-SA-3.0 license on Wikimedia Commons. We thank donsmaps.com for visual references. Art by Duilio Garofoli.
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Fenici, M., Garofoli, D. The biocultural emergence of mindreading: integrating cognitive archaeology and human development. J Cult Cogn Sci 1, 89–117 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-017-0008-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-017-0008-0