Abstract
Enactivists often defend the following two claims: (a.) Successful interactions are not driven and explained by the interactors’ ability to mindread (i.e. the ability to attribute beliefs and desires to other agents). And (b.) 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 (a.) 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 (b.), 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.
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Notes
1 This method allows to obtain eye tracking data from “participants inside the MR scanner to make a virtual character’s gaze behavior responsive to the participant’s gaze in real time” (Schilbach 2014).
2 Redcay et al. (2013, 435) lends further support to the idea that self-directed gaze in interactions and self-directed gaze from a video replay is associated with distinct neural activity.
3 In this experiment, neurotypical subjects and subjects with high-functioning autism had to produce spatially congruent and incongruent motor responses in response to either a gaze shift of social stimuli or a shift of an object stimulus.
4 In this looking time experiment, infants are shown to be more surprised when an object unexpectedly changes its identity after an actor had pointed to the object in a communicative context. Furthermore, infants are shown to be more surprised when an object unexpectedly changes its location after an agent had grasped the object in a non-communicative context.
5 In this experiment, 18 month old infants are presented with novel actions (e.g. ringing a doorbell using one’s forehead) after a brief warm-up period involving a sorting game. Shimpi found that imitative learning crucially depends on whether the person interacted with later on was familiar from the warm-up period.
6 According to simulation theory, attribution of mental states to other agents is achieved using one’s own mental states to simulate the mental states of other agents.
7 According to theory theory, the attribution of mental states to other agents is achieved through the application of a ‘theory’.
8 Furthermore, research concerning social cognition in high-functioning autism indicates that there is some difference between social cognition in interactive and observational contexts. Schilbach et al. (2013) hypothesize that it is specifically social cognition in interaction which may be impaired in high-functioning autism.
9 Recent studies concerning the automaticity of mindreading (e.g. Qureshi et al. 2010; Schneider et al. 2014) seem to indicate that others’ mental states may be computed and attributed to others even in situations in which this is not at all necessary. Therefore, the claim that mindreading is necessary for social interaction needs to be distinguished from the claim that mindreading is, in fact, employed.
10 Notably, De Jaegher and Di Paolo (2007) is an exception. They give the following definition of “interaction”:
Social interaction is the regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents, where the regulation is aimed at aspects of the coupling itself so that it constitutes an emergent autonomous organization in the domain of relational dynamics, without destroying in the process the autonomy of the agents involved (though the latter’s scope can be augmented or reduced) (De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 493).
Following an interpretation by Herschbach (2012), “coupling” amounts to the coordinated mutual dependence of the behavior of several subjects. Furthermore, coupling can be said to be “regulated” if “engaging in motivated changes to the constraints or parameters that influence the coupling” (Herschbach 2012). One worry concerning De Jaegher’s definition is that it might not accurately distinguish interaction from mere coordination. Arguably, coordinated action also requires regulated coupling between autonomous agents.
11 Note that other related discussions may well benefit from definitions of these terms. Categorization of the relevant cases is far less obvious when, say, comparing interaction to cooperation. After all, it is not intuitively clear which cases exemplify cooperation and which ones exemplify interaction. It is just that in the present discussion these definitions are not necessary.
12 “[S]ocial cognition”, in this context, is defined as a “[g]eneral term used to describe different forms of cognition, about, or actions in regard to, agents or groups of agents, their intnetions, emotions actions and so on, particulary in terms of their relation other agents and the self” (De Jaegher et al. 2010).
13 If, in a given situation, these low level cognitive tools don’t suffice, according to Hutto, narratives help us become familiar with social situations (e.g. Hutto 2009).
14 According to Hutto, one reason to favor narrative-based accounts over ToMistic accounts is its phenomenological accuracy. We simply don’t go around consciously calculating others’ beliefs and desires all the time. However, it is doubtful that narrative-based models fare better with regard their phenomenological accuracy. As it is, we also don’t go around recalling stories that might fit a particular interactive situation. Understanding others is often entirely effortless. Therefore, any theory about social cognition which gives lots of weight to phenomenological 1st person data will have to refrain from positing any explanatory mechanism. This, however, seems implausible. As John Michael argues, surely, in understanding others, interpretation has to happen somewhere (see Michael 2011, 562).
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Schönherr, J. What’s so Special About Interaction in Social Cognition?. Rev.Phil.Psych. 8, 181–198 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0299-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-016-0299-y