According to the two-systems account of mindreading, our mature perspective-taking abilities are subserved by two distinct mindreading systems: a fast but inflexible, “implicit” system, and a flexible but slow “explicit” one. However, the currently available evidence on adult perspective-taking does not support this account. Specifically, both Level-1 and Level-2 perspective-taking show a combination of efficiency and flexibility that is deeply inconsistent with the two-systems architecture. This inconsistency also turns out to have serious consequences for the two-systems framework as a whole, (...) both as an account of our mature mindreading abilities and of the development of those abilities. What emerges from this critique is a conception of context-sensitive, spontaneous mindreading that may provide insight into how mindreading functions in complex social environments. This in turn offers a bulwark against skepticism about the role of mindreading in everyday social cognition. (shrink)

The orthodox view of social cognition maintains that mentalizing is an important and pervasive element of our ordinary social interactions. The orthodoxy has come under scrutiny from various sources recently. Critics from the phenomenological tradition argue that phenomenological reflection on our social interactions tells against the orthodox view. Proponents of pluralistic folk psychology argue that our ordinary social interactions extend far beyond mentalizing. Both sorts of critics argue that emphasis in social cognition research ought to be on other elements of (...) our social practices. In this paper, I consider social explanations specifically and argue that social explanations are implicated in many of the social practices highlighted by critics of the orthodox view. (shrink)

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, (...) we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind – one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it. (shrink)

Recognized as a simple communicative behavior, referential pointing is cognitively complex because it invites a communicator to consider an addressee's knowledge. Although we know referential pointing is affected by addressees’ physical location, it remains unclear whether and how communicators’ inferences about addressees’ mental representation of the interaction space influence sensorimotor control of referential pointing. The communicative perspective-taking task requires a communicator to point at one out of multiple referents either to instruct an addressee which one should be selected (communicative, COM) (...) or to predict which one the addressee will select (non-communicative, NCOM), based on either which referents can be seen (Level-1 perspective-taking, PT1) or how the referents were perceived (Level-2 perspective-taking, PT2) by the addressee. Communicators took longer to initiate the movements in PT2 than PT1 trials, and they held their pointing fingers for longer at the referent in COM than NCOM trials. The novel findings of this study pertain to trajectory control of the pointing movements. Increasing both communicative and perspective-taking demands led to longer pointing trajectories, with an under-additive interaction between those two experimental factors. This finding suggests that participants generate communicative behaviors that are as informative as required rather than overly exaggerated displays, by integrating communicative and perspective-taking information hierarchically during sensorimotor control. This observation has consequences for models of human communication. It implies that the format of communicative and perspective-taking knowledge needs to be commensurate with the movement dynamics controlled by the sensorimotor system. (shrink)

Inspired by early proposals in philosophy, dominant accounts of language posit a central role for mutual knowledge, either encoded directly in common ground, or approximated through other cognitive mechanisms. Using existing empirical evidence from language and memory, we challenge this tradition, arguing that mutual knowledge captures only a subset of the mental states needed to support communication. In a novel theoretical proposal, we argue for a cognitive architecture that includes separate, distinct representations of the self and other, and a cognitive (...) process that compares these representations continuously during conversation, outputting both similarities and differences in perspective. Our theory accounts for existing data, interfaces with findings from other cognitive domains, and makes novel predictions about the role of perspective in language use. We term this new account the Multiple Perspectives Theory of mental states in communication. (shrink)

In this commentary on “Memory and Common Ground Processes in Language Use,” I draw attention to relevant work on mindreading. The concerns of research on common ground and mindreading have significant overlap, but these literatures have worked in relative isolation of each other. I attempt an assimilation, pointing out shared and distinctive concerns and mutually informative results.

Mindreading capacity has been widely understood as the human ability to gain knowledge about the inner processes and states of others that bring about the behavior of these agents. This paper argues against this epistemic view of mindreading on the basis of different empirical studies in linguistics and social and developmental psychology: we are systematically biased in attributing mental states, and many everyday uses of mental ascription sentences do not reflect an epistemic function in our social interactions. We introduce an (...) alternative view of mental ascriptions, the social cover view, which is consistent with the evidence. The social cover view holds that the main function of mental ascriptions is to cover the social status and reputation of an agent rather than to gain knowledge about her inner processes and states. Finally, we discuss two possible objections to our proposal. (shrink)