I put forward an externalist theory of social understanding. On this view, psychological sense making takes place in environments that contain both agent and interpreter. The spatial structure of such environments is social, in the sense that its occupants locate its objects by an exercise in triangulation relative to each of their standpoints. This triangulation is achieved in intersubjective interaction and gives rise to a triadic model of the social mind. This model can then be used to make sense of (...) others’ observed actions. Its possession plays a vital role in the development of the capacity for false belief reasoning. The view offers an integrated account of the development of social cognition from primary intersubjectivity to level-2 perspective taking. It incorporates insights from interactionism and mindreading theories of social cognition and thus offers a way out of the stalemate between defenders of the two views. Because psychological sense making is perspectival, the frame problem does not arise for social reasoners: the perspective they bring to bear on the action that is to be interpreted constrains the information they can select to make sense of what others do. (shrink)

I put forward an externalist theory of social understanding. On this view, psychological sense making takes place in environments that contain both agent and interpreter. The spatial structure of such environments is social, in the sense that its occupants locate its objects by an exercise in triangulation relative to each of their standpoints. This triangulation is achieved in intersubjective interaction and gives rise to a triadic model of the social mind. This model can then be used to make sense of (...) others’ observed actions. Its possession plays a vital role in the development of the capacity for false belief reasoning. The view offers an integrated account of the development of social cognition from primary intersubjectivity to level-2 perspective taking. It incorporates insights from interactionism and mindreading theories of social cognition and thus offers a way out of the stalemate between defenders of the two views. Because psychological sense making is perspectival, the frame problem does not arise for social reasoners: the perspective they bring to bear on the action that is to be interpreted constrains the information they can select to make sense of what others do. (shrink)

Enactivists often defend the following two claims: Successful interactions are not driven and explained by the interactors’ ability to mindread. And the mechanisms enabling 2nd personal social cognition and those enabling 3rd personal social cognition are distinct. In this paper, I argue that both of these claims are false. With regard to I argue that enactivists fail to provide a plausible alternative to traditional accounts of social cognition in interaction. I examine and reject Hanne De Jaegher’s view according to which (...) interaction is “constitutive” for social interaction. Furthermore, I critically discuss Shaun Gallagher’s and Daniel Hutto’s views according to which social interactions are exclusively driven by low level cognitive mechanisms such as “gaze following” and “emotion detection”. Concerning, I rely on data from so called “spontaneous response” false belief tasks to show that interactive and observational paradigms require the same “social-cognitive” interpretation. (shrink)

In their most recent book, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content (MIT 2017), Dan Hutto and Eric Myin claim to give a complete and gapless naturalistic account of cognition, but it comes with a kink. The kink being that content-involving cognition has special properties found nowhere else in nature, making it the case that minds capable of contentful thought differ in kind, in this key respect, from more basic minds. Contra Hutto and Myin, I argue that content-involving practices are themselves (...) simply a further extension of action and do not therefore warrant being called ‘different in kind’ or ‘kinky’. With the help of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John V. Canfield, I show that Enactivism meets the challenge of explaining higher-level cognition; and, contra continuity sceptics, offer ‘a philosophically cogent and empirically respectable account’ of how human minds can emerge from nonhuman minds. (shrink)

In their most recent book, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content (MIT 2017), Dan Hutto and Eric Myin claim to give a complete and gapless naturalistic account of cognition, but it comes with a kink. The kink being that content-involving cognition has special properties found nowhere else in nature, making it the case that minds capable of contentful thought differ in kind, in this key respect, from more basic minds. Contra Hutto and Myin, I argue that content-involving practices are themselves (...) simply a further extension of action and do not therefore warrant being called ‘different in kind’ or ‘kinky’. With the help of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John V. Canfield, I show that Enactivism meets the challenge of explaining higher-level cognition; and, contra continuity sceptics, offer ‘a philosophically cogent and empirically respectable account’ of how human minds can emerge from nonhuman minds. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is make a contribution to the ongoing search for an adequate concept of the a priori element in scientific knowledge. The point of departure is C.I. Lewis’s account of a pragmatic a priori put forward in his "Mind and the World Order" (1929). Recently, Hasok Chang in "Contingent Transcendental Arguments for Metaphysical Principles" (2008) reconsidered Lewis’s pragmatic a priori and proposed to conceive it as the basic ingredient of the dynamics of an embodied scientific reason. (...) The present paper intends to further elaborate Chang’s account by relating it with some conceptual tools from cognitive semantics and certain ideas that first emerged in the context of the category-theoretical foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of approaches to social cognition research have emerged that highlight the importance of embodied interaction for social cognition (Reddy, How infants know minds, 2008; Gallagher, J Conscious Stud 8:83–108, 2001; Fuchs and Jaegher, Phenom Cogn Sci 8:465–486, 2009; Hutto, in Seemans (ed.) Joint attention: new developments in psychology, philosophy of mind and social neuroscience, 2012). Proponents of such ‘interactionist’ approaches emphasize the importance of embodied responses that are engaged in online social interaction, and which, according (...) to interactionists, present an alternative to mindreading as a source of social understanding. We agree that it is important to take embodied interaction seriously, but do not agree that this presents a fundamental challenge to mainstream mindreading approaches. Drawing upon an analogy between embodied interaction and the exercise of expert skills, we advocate a hierarchical view which claims that embodied social responses generally operate in close conjunction with higher-level cognitive processes that play a coordinative role, and which are often sensitive to mental states. Thus, investigation of embodied responses should inform rather than conflict with research on mindreading. (shrink)

Ever since the heyday of British Emergentism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , discussions of emergence have been a fairly constant source of titillation as well as controversy and confusion. Different authors have used the terms “emergence” and “emergentism” to characterize a myriad related but distinct conceptions, spanning fields as various as physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, robotics and philosophy.

The conceptual foundations, features, and scope of the notion of rationality are increasingly being affected by developments in embodied cognitive science. This article starts from the idea of embodied rationality, and aims to develop a frame in which a debate with the classical, possibly bounded, notion of rationality-as-consistency can take place. To this end, I develop a game theoretic description of a real time interaction setup in which participants' behaviors can be used to compare the enactive approach, which underlies embodied (...) rationality, with game theoretic approaches to human interaction. The Perceptual Crossing Paradigm is a minimal interaction interface where two participants each control an avatar on a shared virtual line, and are tasked with cooperatively finding each other among distractor objects. It is well known that the best performance on this task is obtained when both participants let their movements coordinate with the objects they encounter, which they do without any prior knowledge of efficient interaction strategies in the system. A game theoretic model of this paradigm shows that this task can be described as an Assurance game, which allows for comparing game theoretical approaches and the enactive approach on two main fronts. First, accounting for the ability of participants to interactively solve the Assurance game; second, accounting for the evolution of choice landscapes resulting from evolving normative realms in the task. Similarly to the series of paradoxes which have fueled debates in economics in the past century, this analysis aims to serve as an interpretation testbed which can fuel the current debate on rationality. (shrink)

A phenomenological insight in the debate on empathy is that it is possible to directly perceive other people’s emotions in their expressive bodily behaviour. Contrary to what is suggested by many phenomenologists, namely that this perceptual skill is immediately available if one has vision, this paper argues that the perceptual skill for empathy is acquired. Such a skill requires that we have undergone certain emotional experiences ourselves and that we have had the experience of seeing the world differently, which is (...) a form of pretence. By investigating how we retain knowledge of what is real while pretending, that is, how we anchor the experience of pretence in something that is not pretended, the paper argues that we split our experiential perspective into a double perspective, which differs from the cognitive act of understanding what a perspective is. With this notion in hand, we can return to the debate on empathy. It is argued that in order to have the capacity for direct empathic perception, one must have undergone experiences involving a double perspective. (shrink)

Human interactions are often improvised rather than scripted, which suggests that efficient coordination can emerge even when collective plans are largely underspecified. One possibility is that such forms of coordination primarily rely on mutual influences between interactive partners, and on perception–action couplings such as entrainment or mimicry. Yet some forms of improvised joint actions appear difficult to explain solely by appealing to these emergent mechanisms. Here, we focus on collective free improvisation, a form of highly unplanned creative practice where both (...) agents' subjective reports and the complexity of their interactions suggest that shared intentions may sometimes emerge to support coordination during the course of the improvisation, even in the absence of verbal communication. In four experiments, we show that shared intentions spontaneously emerge during collective musical improvisations, and that they foster coordination on multiple levels, over and beyond the mere influence of shared information. We also show that musicians deploy communicative strategies to manifest and propagate their intentions within the group, and that this predicts better coordination. Overall, our results suggest that improvised and scripted joint actions are more continuous with one another than it first seems, and that they differ merely in the extent to which they rely on emergent or planned coordination mechanisms. (shrink)

We argue that progress in our scientific understanding of the `social mind' is hampered by a number of unfounded assumptions. We single out the widely shared assumption that social behavior depends solely on the capacities of an individual agent. In contrast, both developmental and phenomenological studies suggest that the personal-level capacity for detached `social cognition' (conceived as a process of theorizing about and/or simulating another mind) is a secondary achievement that is dependent on more immediate processes of embodied social interaction. (...) We draw on the enactive approach to cognitive science to further clarify this strong notion of `social interaction' in theoretical terms. In addition, we indicate how this interaction theory (IT) could eventually be formalized with the help of a dynamical systems perspective on the interaction process, especially by making use of evolutionary robotics modeling. We conclude that bringing together the methods and insights of developmental, phenomenological, enactive and dynamical approaches to social interaction can provide a promising framework for future research. Keywords: theory of mind; cognitive science; phenomenology; embodied cognition; dynamical systems theory; enactive approach; social cognition; interaction theory; evolutionary robotics. (shrink)

On many occasions, irony is used to communicate emotions, to criticise or to tease other people. Irony comprehension consists in identifying an utterance as ironical and detecting its implied meaning. Existing research has investigated irony comprehension as a pragma-linguistic phenomenon, which has led to several theoretical accounts and interesting empirical results. However, given that irony comprehension is situated in a social context and has the purpose to communicate the mental states of the speaker/writer indirectly, it is reasonable to assume that (...) social cognition and emotional processes play an important role. Until very recently, this has been largely overlooked by research in the field. Furthermore, an overarching framework that can integrate theoretical insights and empirical data on the component processes of irony comprehension is still lacking. The purpose of this paper is to help close this gap. The positive proposal is that the predictive processing framework provides the theoretical resources and conceptual tools to describe relevant aspects of irony comprehension. According to predictive processing, perception, action, cognition, and emotion can be described as a continuous attempt to minimise prediction error. Irony comprehension, I will show, can be depicted as a special case of prediction error minimisation. The neuro-functional mechanism postulated by predictive processing is apt to account for the realisation of the pragma-linguistic, social, and emotional processes that jointly give rise to irony comprehension. The emerging perspective can elucidate why and how people comprehend ironical utterances. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to give an assessment of prediction error minimization as a unifying theoretical framework for the study of social cognition. We show how this framework can be used to synthesize and systematically relate existing data from social cognition research, and explain how it introduces new constraints for further research. We discuss PEM in relation to other theoretical frameworks of social cognition, and identify the main challenges that this approach to social cognition will need to (...) address. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to introduce an approach for understanding social cognition that we call the normative approach to social cognition. Such an approach, which results from a systematization of previous arguments and ideas from authors such as Ryle, Dewey, or Wittgenstein, is an alternative to the classic model and the direct social perception model. In section 2, we evaluate the virtues and flaws of these two models. In section 3, we introduce the normative approach, according to (...) which human, socio-cognitive competences rely on a myriad of social norms and routines that mediate our social interactions in such a way that we can make sense of each other without taking into consideration their mental states. In sections 4 and 5, we find some common premises shared by the two prior models and offer some arguments against them. In section 6, we advance some possible arguments against our approach and offer some responses against them. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to introduce an approach for understanding social cognition that we call the normative approach to social cognition. Such an approach, which results from a systematization of previous arguments and ideas from authors such as Ryle, Dewey, or Wittgenstein, is an alternative to the classic model and the direct social perception model. In section 2, we evaluate the virtues and flaws of these two models. In section 3, we introduce the normative approach, according to (...) which human, socio-cognitive competences rely on a myriad of social norms and routines that mediate our social interactions in such a way that we can make sense of each other without taking into consideration their mental states. In sections 4 and 5, we find some common premises shared by the two prior models and offer some arguments against them. In section 6, we advance some possible arguments against our approach and offer some responses against them. (shrink)

The theory of mind (ToM) framework has been criticised by emerging alternative accounts. Each alternative begins with the accusation that ToM's validity as a research paradigm rests on the assumption of the ‘unobservability’ of other minds. We argue that the critics' discussion of the unobservability assumption (UA) targets a straw man. We discuss metaphysical, phenomenological, epistemological, and psychological readings of UA and demonstrate that it is not the case that ToM assumes the metaphysical, phenomenological, or epistemological claims. However, ToM supports (...) the psychological UA as a claim about cognitive processes responsible for mindreading. The latter can be interpreted as a claim that (a) neither the other's ‘mindedness’ in general nor the other's particular mental states are observable (i.e. apprehended perceptually); (b) particular mental states are unobservable, whereas some aspects indicative of ‘mindedness’ are observable; (c) some mental states are unobservable but some are also observable. Whereas the critics tend to attribute (a) to ToM, most ToM accounts actually take positions (b) or (c). We conclude that the allegations against ToM for positing UA are seriously misdirected. We further bring out an important stipulation of any account of observability of mental states: mental states are not observable in the same way as the sensory properties of physical objects. (shrink)

Traditional theory of mind (ToM) accounts for social cognition have been at the basis of most studies in the social cognitive neurosciences. However, in recent years, the need to go beyond traditional ToM accounts for understanding real life social interactions has become all the more pressing. At the same time it remains unclear whether alternative accounts, such as interactionism, can yield a sufficient description and explanation of social interactions. We argue that instead of considering ToM and interactionism as mutually exclusive (...) opponents, they should be integrated into a more comprehensive account of social cognition. We draw on dual process models of social cognition that contrast two different types of social cognitive processing. The first type (labeled Type 1) refers to process es that are fast, efficient, stimulus-driven, and relatively inflexible. The second type (labeled Type 2) refers to processes that are relatively slow, cognitively laborious, flexible, and may involve conscious control. We argue that while interactionism captures aspects of social cognition mostly related to Type 1 processes, ToM is more focused on those based on Type 2 processes. We suggest that real life social interactions are rarely based on either Type 1 or Type 2 processes alone. On the contrary, we propose that in most cases both types of processes are simultaneously involved and that social behavior may be sustained by the interplay between these two types of processes. Finally, we discuss how the new integrative framework can guide experimental research on social interaction. (shrink)

We make character trait attributions to predict and explain others’ behaviour. How should we understand character trait attribution in context across the domains of philosophy, folk psychology, developmental psychology, and evolutionary psychology? For example, how does trait attribution relate to our ability to attribute mental states to others, to ‘mindread’? This thesis uses philosophical methods and empirical data to argue for character trait attribution as a practice dependent upon our ability to mindread, which develops as a product of natural selection (...) acting on culture instead of genes. This analysis carves out trait attribution’s distinct place within an emerging complex and mature scholarship on pluralistic social cognition. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that there is a reciprocal dependency relationship between social cognition and social ontology. It is argued that, on the one hand, the existence conditions of socially meaningful objects and of social groups are about subjects’ social cognitive processes and interactive patterns and, on the other hand, social cognitive processes and interactive patterns are modulated by socially meaningful objects and social groups. I proceed from a historically informed distinction between social ontologies – between (...) what might be called constructivist and emergentist theories of social reality. I then distinguish three theories of social cognition, theory-theory, simulation theory, and interaction theory, and argue that the first distinction and the latter map onto each other. Finally I argue that the reciprocal dependency between social ontology and social cognition can be justifiably though of as causal in Di Paolo et. al.’s (2010) sense of “downward” or “circular” causation. It is concluded that the dependency between social ontology and social cognition pertain to both a methodological and a phenomenal level. First, research on social ontology depends on research on social cognition; and, secondly, social phenomena, involving socially meaningful objects and groups, influence social cognitive processes and interaction, which in turn influence social phenomena. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that there is a reciprocal dependency relationship between social cognition and social ontology. It is argued that, on the one hand, the existence conditions of socially meaningful objects and of social groups are about subjects’ social cognitive processes and interactive patterns and, on the other hand, social cognitive processes and interactive patterns are modulated by socially meaningful objects and social groups. I proceed from a historically informed distinction between social ontologies – between (...) what might be called constructivist and emergentist theories of social reality. I then distinguish three theories of social cognition, theory-theory, simulation theory, and interaction theory, and argue that the first distinction and the latter map onto each other. Finally I argue that the reciprocal dependency between social ontology and social cognition can be justifiably though of as causal in Di Paolo et. al.’s sense of “downward” or “circular” causation. It is concluded that the dependency between social ontology and social cognition pertain to both a methodological and a phenomenal level. First, research on social ontology depends on research on social cognition; and, secondly, social phenomena, involving socially meaningful objects and groups, influence social cognitive processes and interaction, which in turn influence social phenomena. (shrink)