Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner relate the evolution of social cognition – the understanding of others' minds – to the evolution of culture. Tomasello et al. conceive of the accumulation of culture as the product of cultural learning, a kind of learning dependent upon recognizing others' intentionality. They distinguish three levels of this recognition: of intention (what isxtrying to do), of beliefs (what doesxthink aboutp), and of beliefs about beliefs (what doesxthinkythinks aboutp). They then tie these levels to three discrete forms (...) of cultural learning – imitative, instructed, and collaborative – which children become capable of when they are 9 months, 4 years, and 6 years old respectively, at least in Western culture where relevant data are available. (shrink)

Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner deserve congratulations for their well-reasoned ideas on the development of cultural learning. Their arguments are generally convincing, perhaps because their distinctions and developmental relations among types of cultural learning and agency mirror concepts of my own.

Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner make the very interesting and valid point that the transmission of culture must depend on understanding others' minds. Culture is shared among a people and is passed on to progeny. The sharing of culture implies that the purpose of (and therefore the meaning behind) any given cultural element (behavioral tradition, word, or artifact) is understood. Because meaning or purpose emanates from minds, something about others' minds must be understood in order to truly learn some element of (...) a culture. It thus makes sense that cultural learning should depend on social-cognitive skills. But what exactly is cultural learning?There are two rival interpretations of the term cultural learning. In the first, one would define a given type of cultural learning by the type of social-cognitive skill it entails. For example, imitative learning would be defined as any learning of a cultural element in which another's goals or intentions are taken into account. This definition of cultural learning, however, would force Tomasello et al.'s argument into a circle: Imitative learning relies on this social-cognitive skill because imitative learning is defined as learning that relies on this social-cognitive skill. Such a circular definition does not do their argument justice. (shrink)

The data reviewed in Barresi & Moore's treatment of social understanding is recast in terms of a model of social intelligence that was advanced some time ago (Gallup 1982). When it comes to their analysis of the behavior of other individuals, most primates (and humans younger than 18 months of age) appear to function as radical behaviorists, whereas chimpanzees and older infants show evidence of becoming primitive cognitive psychologists.

The psychology of emotions illuminates the questions of intentional capacities raised by Barresi & Moore (B&M). Complex emotions require the development of a sense of self and are based on social comparisons between mainly imagined objects. The fourth level in B&M's framework requires something like a constructive agent rather than a mental agent.

This target article presents a theory of human cultural learning. Cultural learning is identified with those instances of social learning in which intersubjectivity or perspective-taking plays a vital role, both in the original learning process and in the resulting cognitive product. Cultural learning manifests itself in three forms during human ontogeny: imitative learning, instructed learning, and collaborative learning – in that order. Evidence is provided that this progression arises from the developmental ordering of the underlying social-cognitive concepts and processes involved. (...) Imitative learning relies on a concept of intentional agent and involves simple perspective-taking. Instructed learning relies on a concept of mental agent and involves alternating/coordinated perspective-taking (intersubjectivity). Collaborative learning relies on a concept of reflective agent and involves integrated perspective-taking (reflective intersubjectivity). A comparison of normal children, autistic children and wild and enculturated chimpanzees provides further evidence for these correlations between social cognition and cultural learning. Cultural learning is a uniquely human form of social learning that allows for a fidelity of transmission of behaviors and information among conspecifics not possible in other forms of social learning, thereby providing the psychological basis for cultural evolution. (shrink)

Barresi & Moore's account predicts that infants deprived of visual input will be delayed in achieving social understanding, a hypothesis that receives some support from studies of language use. by blind children. It is proposed that recently developed false belief and appearance/reality tasks be used to explore this issue further. Three possibly distracting conceptual issues are also discussed.

Barresi & Moore do not consider information about intentional relations available within emotional engagement with others and do not see that others are perceived in the second as well as the third person. Recognising second person information forces recognition of similarities and connections not otherwise available. A developmental framework built on the assumption of the complete separateness of self and other is inevitably flawed.

Alvin Goldman (1993) presents three arguments against the psychological plausibility of representational functionalism (RF) as a theory of how subjects self-ascribe mental predicates. Goldman appears to construe RF as an account of attitude type self-ascription. His “combinatorial explosion” argument, however, proves devastating only to an implausible construal of RF as an account of attitude content self-ascription.

Barresi & Moore's “intentional schema” will not do the work of “theory of mind.” Their model will account neither for fundamental facts of social competence, such as the social attributions of the 10-month-old infant, nor the possibility that, though having a theory of mind, the chimpanzee's theory is “weaker” than the human's.

Barresi & Moore assume an equivalence between ontogenetic and evolutionaiy transformations of social understanding. The mechanisms of evolution allow for novel structures to arise, both through terminal addition and through the onset of novel pathways at time points that precede the end points of ancestral pathways. Terminal addition may not be the appropriate model for the evolution of human object-directed imitation, intermodal equivalence, or joint attention.

Although Barresi & Moore could have grounded their framework more explicitly in existing models, they offer a provocative testbed for the assumptions of symbolic interactionism and further thinking about self-regulation, especially in autistics.

Barresi & Moore provide an impressive account of how the coordination of first and third person information about the self and other could produce an account of intentional relations. They are less explicit as to how the child comes to understand the basic epistemic relation between experience and knowledge, that is, how informational access causes belief. We suggest one route.

The intentionality schema is an abstraction that relates phylogenetic and ontogenetic sequences of social understanding, but it also obscures the differences between humans and other primates. In particular, it ignores human social developmental and communicative history and the important roles that language plays in human understanding of others' intentional states.

The intentional schema may not be sufficiently characterized to make questions about its role in individual and species development intelligible. The idea of metarepresentation may perhaps give it enough content. The importance of metarepresentation itself, however, can be called into question.

The “intentional schema” seems identical to or dependent upon kinesthetic–visual matching, both of which account for similar empirical findings. The intentional schema, however, fails to account for variability in children's understanding of false belief and differences in children's understanding of self and other in pretense.

Barresi & Moore provide a welcome focus on children's abilities to integrate first and third person information about intentional relations but they pay insufficient attention to the origins of children's understanding of the nature of subjective orientations vis-à-vis a shared world and the potential significance of such understanding as a source (rather than an outcome) of domain-general information-processing capacities.

Immediate imitation is likely to be a major, direct input to Barresi & Moore's level 2 competence, but deferred imitation is unlikely to play a key role in the transition to level 3, because (1) the attribution of first person knowledge is neither a necessary cause nor an obvious consequence of deferred imitation, and (2) deferred imitation does not correlate phylogenetically with capacities that more plausibly either yield or reflect a concept of intentional agency.

Although their thesis is generally sound, Barresi & Moore give insufficient attention to the need for a methodology, whether simulation based or theory-based, for choosing among alternative possible matches of first person and third person information. This choice must be sensitive to contextual information, including past behavior. Moreover, apart from simulation or theory, first person information would not help predict future behavior.

Second person intentional relations, involving intentional activities directed at the perceptor, are qualitatively different from first and third person relations. They generate a peculiar, bidirectional kind of intentionality, especially in the realm of visual perception. Systems specialized in dealing with this have been selected by evolution. These systems can be considered to be the evolutionary precursors to the human theory of mind.

My target article did not attribute a pervasive ontological significance to phenomenology, so it escapes Bogdan's “epistemological illusion.” Pust correctly pinpoints an ambiguity between content-inclusive and content-exclusive forms of folk functionalism. Contrary to Fodor, however, only the former is plausible, and hence my third argument against functionalism remains a threat. Van Brakel's charity approach to first-person authority cannot deal with authority vis-a-vis sensations, and it has some extremely odd consequences.

Barresi & Moore's account has at least two implications for moral psychology. First, it appears to provide support for cognitive theories of moral competence. Second, their claim that the development of social understanding depends upondomain-generalchanges in cognitive ability appears to oppose the idea that moral competence is under-pinned by a moral module.

Barresi & Moore fail to provide a satisfactory account for the development of social understanding because of (1) their ambiguous characterization of the relationship between the intentional schema and shared intentional activities, (2) their underestimation of the representational capacities of infants, and (3) their overreliance on the simulationist assumption that understanding others is tantamount to sharing their experience.

The difference between first and third person information may be thought of as a difference in either informationalcontentor informationalmodality. Each option faces some problems. I try to sort out some of these issues and raise a question about the explanatory force of the notion of a schema.