Skip to main content

The case for mind perception

Synthese volume 194, pages 787–807 (2017)Cite this article

Abstract

The question of how we actually arrive at our knowledge of others’ mental lives is lively debated, and some philosophers defend the idea that mentality is sometimes accessible to perception. In this paper, a distinction is introduced between “mind awareness” and “mental state awareness,” and it is argued that the former at least sometimes belongs to perceptual, rather than cognitive, processing.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Access options

Buy single article

Instant access to the full article PDF.

USD 39.95

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Notes

  1. There are of course differences between particular TT accounts. One of the differences is that some maintain that the theory is innate (Carruthers 2013, 1996), while others think that it is gradually acquired (Gopnik and Wellman 1994; Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997).

  2. Alternatively, some researchers have argued that the two accounts are not necessarily mutually exclusive and have proposed hybrid accounts that integrate simulation and theory processes (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002; Adolphs 2002; Nichols and Stich 2003).

  3. In a similar fashion, Johnson (2000, p. 22) remarks that “mental states, and the minds that possess them, are necessarily unobservable constructs that must be inferred.”

  4. Such a “perceptual view” is often presented as an alternative to the inferential approaches, although some argue that certain forms of TT and ST might be able to accommodate it (Lavelle 2012; O’Shea 2012; Carruthers 2015).

  5. The original German passage says: “Man kann wirklich sagen: der beseelte Körper hat Schmerzen. Und ob ein Körper beseelt ist, das nimmt man durch die Sinne wahr.”

  6. The focus of the paper is the perceptual awareness of others as being minded human beings, although I acknowledge that it would be helpful to enlighten the relationship between being in a mental state and being minded. For instance, some might want to grasp this issue in light of the determinate/determinable distinction and argue that being minded might just be something like the most determinable mental property had by a certain organism. Being minded could be just being in the most general kind of mental state that is entailed by the possession of any more specific mental state (e.g., beliefs, emotions, intentions, etc.). I thank an anonymous referee for pointing this possibility out to me.

  7. While this is not the focus of this paper, one might wonder whether dreamless sleep and unconsciousness would constitute counterexamples to such a claim. I’m indebted to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.

  8. This form of dehumanization is best exemplified in the context of interethnic antagonism. In extreme cases, animal or organism metaphors for ethnic out-groups are commonplace. Examples include the characterization of Jews in the Holocaust or Tutsis in Rwanda as vermin (Haslam 2006). In less extreme cases, out-group members are perceived as less capable of experiencing complex emotions such as nostalgia and compassion (Leyens et al. 2001; Demoulin et al. 2009).

  9. There are, of course, also important differences. When we perceive a minded human being, we don’t just perceive animacy and attribute behavioral or dispositional aspects that we might attribute to dots on a screen. Perceiving a mind in others enables individuals to regard others as deserving moral consideration (Gray et al. 2007, 2012). Also, the literature on dehumanization confirms that failure to perceive minds in other people may aggravate prejudice and facilitate humiliation and torture (Harris and Fiske 2006, 2011; Haslam and Loughnan 2014; Viki et al. 2013).

  10. Except in cases of abnormal development (Abell 2000; Rutherford et al. 2006), children at early ages interpret simple geometric shapes as intentional agents (Gergely 1995; Csibra 1999; Rochat 1997), and this is robust across individuals and consistent across a wide range of cultures (Morris and Peng 1994; Hashimoto 1966).

  11. Put simply, the phenomenal character of experience E refers to “what it is like to consciously undergo” E.

  12. This question is often formulated as a question about phenomenal or representational content (see Chalmers 2006).

  13. While this is not the place to provide a full defense of this claim, one problem is that such approaches only allow an indirect analysis of the relevant contents, via informational states (see Siegel 2011, pp. 83–87).

  14. Introspection appears to be the most natural method for settling this question, as most would agree that the phenomenal character of experience is accessible to introspection. But while introspection is helpful in getting us closer to answering the question about the contents of perceptual experience, it has specific limitations. It does not reveal with sufficient precision what we want to know about the contents of experience. If we think of introspection as a domain-general faculty, it might reveal what’s “on one’s mind,” for instance, that we’re having an experience of the high-level property “being a mailbox,” but it will fail to discern whether such experience is perceptual (visual) or post-perceptual (cognitive). Also, if introspection alone could reveal whether or not high-level properties can be presented in perceptual experience, then we would expect less disagreement about the correct answer. However, this is clearly not the case in the literature (see Siegel 2011, p. 80).

  15. I take this first premise to be plausible, and I will not seek to provide additional support for it.

  16. I thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out to me.

References

  • Abell, F., et al. (2000). Do triangles play tricks? Attribution of mental states to animated shapes in normal and abnormal development. Cognitive Development, 15, 1–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Adolphs, R. (2002). Recognizing emotion from facial expressions: Psychological and neurological mechanisms. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 1(1), 21–62.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Apperly, I. (2011). Mindreaders: The cognitive basis of theory of mind. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bayne, T., & Montague, M. (Eds.). (2011). Cognitive phenomenology. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, P. (1996). Autism as mind-blindness: An elaboration and partial defence. In P. Carruthers & P. Smith (Eds.), Theories of theories of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, P. (2009). How we know our own minds: The relationship between mindreading and metacognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32, 121–138.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, P. (2013). Mindreading in infancy. Mind and Language, 28(2), 141–172.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carruthers, P. (2015). Perceiving mental states. Consciousness and Cognition, 36, 498–507.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chalmers, D. (2006). Perception and the fall from Eden. In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Perceptual experience (pp. 49–125). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Collins, J. A., & Olson, I. R. (2014). Knowledge is power: How conceptual knowledge transforms visual cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1–18. doi:10.3758/s13423-013-0564-3.

  • Csibra, G., et al. (1999). Goal attribution without agency cues: The perception of ‘pure reason’ in infancy. Cognition, 72, 237–267.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Currie, G., & Ravenscroft, I. (2002). Recreative minds: Imagination in philosophy and psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Delk, J. L., & Fillenbaum, S. (1965). Differences in perceived color as a function of characteristic color. The American Journal of Psychology, 78(2), 290–293.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Demoulin, S., Cortes, B. P., Viki, T. G., Rodriguez, A. P., Rodriguez, R. T., Paladino, M. P., & Leyens, J. Ph. (2009). The role of in-group identification in infra-humanization. International Journal of Psychology, 44(1), 4–11.

  • Duddington, N. A. (1919). Our knowledge of other minds. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 19, 147–178.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Epley, N., & Waytz, A. (2010). Mind perception. In S. T. Fiske, et al. (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (5th ed., pp. 498–541). New York: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J. (1990a). A reply to Churchland’s perceptual plasticity and theoretical neutrality. In J. Fodor (Ed.), A theory of content and other essays (pp. 253–263). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J. (1990b). Observation reconsidered. In J. Fodor (Ed.), A theory of content and other essays (pp. 231–251). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S. (2008). Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 535–543.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S., & Varga, S. (2014). Social constraints on the direct perception of emotions and intentions. Topoi, 33(1), 185–199.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gao, T., McCarthy, G., & Scholl, B. J. (2010). The wolfpack effect: Perception of animacy irresistibly influences interactive behavior. Psychological Science, 21(12), 1845–1853.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gao, T., Newman, G. E., & Scholl, B. J. (2009). The psychophysics of chasing: A case study in the perception of animacy. Cognitive Psychology, 59(2), 154–179.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gao, T., Scholl, B. J., & McCarthy, G. (2012). Dissociating the detection of intentionality from animacy in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(41), 14276–14280.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gelman, R., Durgin, F., & Kaufman, L. (1995). Distinguishing between animates and inanimates: Not by motion alone. In D. Sperber, D. Premack, & A. J. Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (pp. 150–184). New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gergely, G., et al. (1995). Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age. Cognition, 56, 165–193.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goldman, A. (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Goldman, A. (2013). Joint ventures: Mindreading, mirroring and embodied cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. (1997). Words, thoughts and theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H. M. (1994). The theory theory. In L. Hirschfeld & S. Gelman (Eds.), Domain specificity in cognition and culture (pp. 257–293). New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Gordon, R. (1986). Folk psychology as simulation. Mind and Language, 1, 158–171.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2008). The sting of intentional pain. Psychological Science, 19, 1260–1262.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315, 619.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gray, K., Young, L., & Waytz, A. (2012). Mind perception is the essence of morality. Psychological Inquiry, 23(2), 101–124.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Green, M. (2007). Self-expression. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hackel, L. M., Looser, C. E., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2014). Group membership alters the threshold for mind perception: The role of social identity, collective identification, and intergroup threat. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 15–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hansen, T., Olkkonen, M., Walter, S., & Gegenfurtner, K. R. (2006). Memory modulates color appearance. Nature Neuroscience, 9(11), 1367–1368.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harris, L., & Fiske, S. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science, 17, 847–853.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harris, L., & Fiske, S. (2011). Dehumanized perception: A psychological means to facilitate atrocities, torture, and genocide? Zeitschrift für Psychologie/Journal of Psychology, 219, 175–181.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hashimoto, H. (1966). A phenomenal analysis of social perception. Journal of Child Development, 2, 3–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: An integrative review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 252–264.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haslam, N., & Loughnan, S. (2014). Dehumanization and infrahumanization. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 399–423.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haslam, N., Bain, P., Douge, L., Lee, M., & Bastian, B. (2005). More human than you: Attributing humanness to self and others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 937–950.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haslam, N., Kashima, Y., Loughnan, S., Shi, J., & Suitner, C. (2008). Subhuman, inhuman, and superhuman: Contrasting humans with nonhumans in three cultures. Social Cognition, 26, 248–258.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Heal, J. (1986). Replication and functionalism. In J. Butterfield (Ed.), Language, mind, and logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hugenberg, K., & Sacco, D. (2008). Social categorization and stereotyping: How social categorization biases person perception and face memory. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(2), 1052–1072.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, S. C. (2000). The recognition of mentalistic agents in infancy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 22–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Koldewyn, K., Hanus, P., & Balas, B. (2014). Visual adaptation of the perception of “life”: Animacy is a basic perceptual dimension of faces. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 21(4), 969–975.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Krebs, J. R., & Dawkins, R. (1984). Animal signals: Mind-reading and manipulation? In J. R. Krebs & N. Davies (Eds.), Behavioral ecology: An evolutionary approach (pp. 380–402). Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lavelle, J. S. (2012). Theory-theory and the direct perception of mental states. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 3(2), 213–230.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levin, T. D., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Distortions in the perceived lightness of faces: The role of race categories. The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135(4), 501–512.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leyens, J Ph, Cortes, B., Demoulin, et al. (2003). Emotional prejudice, essentialism, and nationalism: The 2002 Tajfel lecture. European Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 703–717.

  • Leyens, J Ph, Paladino, M. P., Rodriguez, R. T., et al. (2000). The emotional side of prejudice: The attribution of secondary emotions to ingroups and outgroups. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4, 186–197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leyens, J Ph, Rodriguez, A. P., Rodriguez, R. T., et al. (2001). Psychological essentialism and the differential attribution of uniquely human emotions to ingroups and outgroups. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 395–411.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., Sutton, R., & Spencer, B. (2013). Dehumanization and social class: Animality in stereotypes of “white trash,” “chavs,” and “bogans”. Social Psychology, 45(1), 54–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacLin, O. H., & Malpass, R. S. (2001). Racial categorization of faces: The ambiguous race face effect. Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 7, 98–118.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • MacLin, O. H., & Malpass, R. S. (2003). The ambiguous-race face illusion. Perception, 32(2), 249–252.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Macpherson, F. (2012). Cognitive penetration of colour experience: Rethinking the issue in light of an indirect mechanism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84, 24–62.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McNeill, W. (2012). On seeing that someone is angry. European Journal of Philosophy, 20, 575–597.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morewedge, C. K., Preston, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). Timescale bias in the attribution of mind. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(1), 1–11.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morris, M. W., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 949–971.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2003). Mindreading: An integrated account of pretense, self-awareness and understanding other minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Olkkonen, M., Hansen, T., & Gegenfurtner, K. R. (2008). Color appearance of familiar objects: Effects of object shape, texture, and illumination changes. Journal of Vision, 8(5), 1–16.

  • Opfer, J. E. (2002). Identifying living and sentient kinds from dynamic information: The case of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement in conceptual change. Cognition, 86, 97–122.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • O’Shea, J. (2012). The ‘theory theory’ of mind and the aims of sellars’ original myth of Jones. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 11, 175–204.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1999). Is vision continuous with cognition? The case for cognitive impenetrability of visual perception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 341–423.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reddy, V. (2008). How infants know minds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rochat, M., et al. (1997). Young infants’ sensitivity to movement specifying social causality. Cognitive Development, 12, 537–561.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rutherford, M. D. (2013). Evidence for specialized perception of animate motion. In M. D. Rutherford & V. A. Kuhlmeier (Eds.), Social perception: Detection and interpretation of animacy, agency, and intention (pp. 115–138). Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Rutherford, M. D., Pennington, B. F., & Rogers, S. J. (2006). The perception of animacy in young children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36, 983–992.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Santos, N. S., David, N., Bente, G., & Vogeley, K. (2008). Parametric induction of animacy experience. Consciousness and Cognition, 17(2), 425–437.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scholl, B. J., & Gao, T. (2013). Perceiving animacy and intentionality: Visual processing or higher-level judgment? In M. D. Rutherford & V. A. Kuhlmeier (Eds.), Social perception: Detection and interpretation of animacy, agency, and intention. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scholl, B. J., & Tremoulet, P. D. (2000). Perceptual causality and animacy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(8), 299–309.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sellars, W. (1956). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. In H. Feigl & M. Scriven (Eds.), Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science (Vol. I, pp. 253–329). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Siegel, S. (2006). Which properties are represented in perception? In T. S. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Perceptual experience (pp. 481–503). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Siegel, S. (2011). The contents of visual experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, J. (2010). Seeing other people. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(3), 731–748.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stokes, D. (2012). Perceiving and desiring: A new look at the cognitive penetrability of experience. Philosophical Studies, 158(3), 477–492.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stokes, D. (2013). Cognitive penetrability of perception. Philosophy Compass, 8(7), 646–663.

  • Stokes, D. (2015). Towards a consequentialist understanding of cognitive penetration. In A. Raftopoulos & J. Ziembekis (Eds.), Cognitive effects on perception: New philosophical perspectives. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198738916.003.0003.

  • Tremoulet, P. D., & Feldman, J. (2006). The influence of spatial context and the role of intentionality in the interpretation of animacy from motion. Perception and Psychophysics, 68(6), 1047–1058.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vetter, P., & Newen, A. (2014). Varieties of cognitive penetration in visual perception. Consciousness & Cognition, 27, 62–75.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Viki, G., Osgood, D., & Phillips, S. (2013). Dehumanization and self-reported proclivity to torture prisoners of war. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 325–328.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wellman, H. (1992). The child’s theory of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wittgenstein, L. (1981). Zettel (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). In G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright (Eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

  • Witzel, C., Valkova, H., Hansen, T., & Gegenfurtner, K. (2011). Object knowledge modulates color appearance. Perception, 2(1), 13–49.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yao, X., & Sloutsky, V. M. (2010). Selective attention and development of categorization: An eye tracking study. In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the XXXII annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1980–1985). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zahavi, D. (2008). Expression and empathy. In D. Hutto & M. Ratcliffe (Eds.), Folk psychology reassessed (pp. 25–40). New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, 327 Clement Hall, Memphis, TN, 38152, USA

    Somogy Varga

Authors
  1. Somogy Varga
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Somogy Varga.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Varga, S. The case for mind perception. Synthese 194, 787–807 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0994-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0994-8

Keywords

  • Mindreading
  • The contents of perception
  • Animacy