Mindreading
Mindreading is the practice of ascribing mental states, such as beliefs, desires, emotions, and perceptions, to others and to oneself. It is an essential and automatic component of our everyday life.
Consider watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. At the end of the movie, L.B. Jeffries, played by James Stewart, hides in the dark in his apartment. We understand this behavior because we know that he believes that the killer is coming to his apartment and because he does not want to be killed. Stewart’s behavior is meaningful because we have ascribed some specific mental states to the character he is playing.Philosophers of psychology have been involved in an interdisciplinary attempt to characterize the psychological mechanisms underlying mindreading (an attempt that also involves developmental psychologists, psychopathologists, neuropsychologists, and animal psychologists). Two main accounts have been developed: the theory theory and the simulation theory. I consider them in turn.[128]
Although proponents of the theory theory, such as philosophers Peter Carruthers, Fodor, Shaun Nichols, and Steve Stich, and psychologists Simon Baron Cohen, Alison Gopnik, Alan Leslie, and Joseph Perner, disagree on various points, they concur that people have a large and complex body of knowledge about mental states, the relations between mental states, the relations between mental states and stimuli, and the relation between mental states and behaviors (Wellman 1990, Perner 1991, Baron-Cohen 1995, Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997). For instance, we might know that if an individual sees that p, she typically believes that p. We might also know that for an individual to see an object, she has to stand in some physical relation to this object (e.g., her face has to be turned toward this object, her eyes have to be directed toward this object, etc.).
People use this body of knowledge when they ascribe beliefs and desires to others: “The central idea shared by all versions of the ‘theory-theory’ is that the processes underlying the production of most predictions, intentional descriptions, and intentional explanations of people’s behavior exploit an internally represented body of information (or perhaps mis-information) about psychological processes and the ways in which they give rise to behavior” (Stich and Nichols 1995, 87-8). Note that we need not be aware that we possess and use this body of knowledge: it might be subdoxastic, exactly as our linguistic knowledge is supposed to be.Simulation theorists, such as philosophers Alvin Goldman, Robert Gordon, and Jane Heal, and neuropsychologists Jean Decety and Vittorio Gallese, doubt that we have an extensive body of knowledge about mental states and that mindreading involves using this body of knowledge. They contend that ascribing mental states to someone else consists in simulating her mind, or, to put it metaphorically, putting oneself in her shoes (Gordon 1986, Heal 1986, Goldman 1989, 1992, Meltzoff and Decety 2003). Gallese and Goldman write: “ST [simulation theory] arose partly from doubts about whether folk psychologizers really represent, even tacitly, the sorts of causal/explanatory laws that TT [theory theory] typically posits. ST suggests that attributors use their own mental mechanisms to calculate and predict the mental processes of others” (1998, 496).
In spite of a few disagreements about the nature of simulation, simulation theorists agree that simulating involves mimicking the mental life of the individuals to whom we want to ascribe mental states. Mindreading involves having similar states and similar thought processes to the individuals to whom mental states are ascribed. For Goldman, for instance, simulation typically involves three steps. One first pretends to have some mental states. Thus, while playing chess, if one attempts to predict one’s partner’s next move, one pretends to have the mental states one’s partner might have (e.g., her desire to win the game and her knowledge of chess).
Second, these pretend states are used as inputs to one’s own reasoning and decision processes. Once one has pretended to have some mental states, one reasons as if these mental states were one’s own. Thereby, one mimics the chain of thoughts others might have. For instance, to predict the next move of one’s chess partner, one decides what move to make, pretending to have the mental states one’s chess partner might have. Finally, one ascribes a mental state to others. For instance, instead of acting on one’s decision about what move to make, this decision is “taken off-line” and used to predict what one's partner will do.Philosophers have spent much energy clarifying these two approaches and contrasting various versions of both approaches. Rather than looking at these details, I will now sketch some of the main arguments developed on behalf of each approach.
Stich and Nichols (1992) have developed an influential argument for the theory theory. They note that specific biases influence the processes involved in reasoning and in decision making. They focus particularly on a phenomenon called “the endowment effect” (Thaler 1980): people are only willing to sell an object that they possess for more money than they paid when they acquired it. For instance, people might be willing to pay $10 to acquire the poster of a movie, but be unwilling to sell it for less than $15. Now, consider a situation where we have to predict what price someone is going to ask for selling an object and what price she would be willing to pay for acquiring this object. Suppose, as Goldman would have it, that we use our own decision processes to make these predictions. Then, because our own decision processes are biased, we should predict that others will fall prey to the endowment effect. The theory theory is not committed to this prediction because it might not be part of our (maybe implicit) theory of mind that people's decision processes are so biased. Thus, Stich and Nichols write: “If there is some quirk in the human decision making system, something quite unknown to most people that leads the system to behave in an unexpected way under certain circumstances, the accuracy of predictions based on simulations should not be adversely affected” (1992, 263).
Stich and Nichols note that people are very poor at predicting that they themselves and others would be victims of the endowment effect.Goldman and other proponents of simulation theories have replied that systematic errors in mindreading are in fact consistent with simulation theory (see, e.g., Goldman 2006; for discussion, see Stich and Nichols 1995). Simulation is accurate only when the pretend states (e.g., in a chess game, pretending to have one's partner's knowledge of chess and her desire to win the game) are accurate. If the pretend states differ in a systematic manner from the states that the target of the simulation actually has, simulation will lead to systematic mistakes. In reply, a theory theorist might concede that simulation theory predicts systematic mistakes, while questioning whether it predicts the very mistakes highlighted by Stich and Nichols.
I now focus on some arguments for the simulation theory. In the 1990s, neuropsychologists Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese, and colleagues discovered some neurons in the ventral premotor cortex of macaques (area F5) that not only fire when the macaques are doing an action (as was expected), but that also fire when the macaques observe another macaque or the human experimenter do the same action (Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, and Rizzolatti 1996). These neurons have been dubbed “mirror neurons” (for recent reviews, see Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004, Gallese 2007). Evidence suggests that humans also have mirror neurons. Remember that according to simulation theorists, mindreaders mimic others: they have the same (or similar) mental states and they go through the same (or similar) chains of thoughts. Gallese and Goldman have proposed that the existence of mirror neurons supports simulation theory, because they are activated both when one decides to act and when one understands others' actions: “MN activity seems to be nature's way of getting the observer into the same ‘mental shoes' as the target - exactly what the conjectured simulation heuristic aims to do” (1998, 498).
Goldman has also argued that neuropsychological findings show that the recognition and ascription of emotions, such as fear, disgust, or anger, involves a simulation process (Goldman and Sripada 2005, Goldman 2006). Roughly, when another person expresses an emotion facially and beha- viorally, we are supposed to experience the emotion that this person is experiencing. We then ascribe to her the emotion that we are experiencing (see Goldman and Sripada 2005 for a careful discussion of several models of this process). Seeing John make a disgust face (brows narrowed, upper lip raised, lip corners drawn down and back, and nose drawn up and wrinkled) causes disgust in me. Because I recognize that I feel disgust, I ascribe disgust to John. Goldman and Sripada have convincingly argued that the hypothesis that emotion ascription involves a simulation process accounts for the finding that following lesions in the brain areas involved with specific emotions, patients who are unable to experience these emotions are also impaired in recognizing them.
Recent philosophical contributions to the understanding of mindreading have partly moved beyond the original debate between the simulation theory and the theory theory. Researchers are now developing various hybrid accounts of the mechanisms underlying mindreading - that is, accounts that include both simulation- and theory-based psychological processes (Nichols and Stich 2003, Goldman 2006).
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