Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility

Abstract

This paper is divided into two parts. In Section 1, I explore and defend a “regulative view” of folk-psychology as against the “standard view” (encompassing both theory-theory and simulation theory, as well as hybrid variations). On the regulative view, folk-psychology is conceptualized in fundamentally interpersonal terms as a “mind-making” practice through which we come to form and regulate our minds in accordance with a rich array of socially shared and socially maintained sense-making norms. It is not, as the standard view maintains, simply an epistemic capacity for coming to know about the mental states and dispositions already there. Importantly, the regulative view can meet and beat the standard at its own epistemic game. But it also does more. In Section 2, I show how the regulative view makes progress on two other problems that remain puzzling on the standard view: (1) the problem of “first-person authority” – accounting for the special features of self-knowledge; and (2) the problem of “reactive responsiveness” – accounting for our deep concern with calling one another to account for normatively untoward behaviour, both generally and in the moral domain.

Keywords:

• folk-psychology
• norms
• self-knowledge
• first-person authority
• self-regulation
• reactive attitudes
• responsibility
• social practice
• know-how
• capacities

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at conferences at the University College Dublin (June 2014), the Radboud University Nijmegen (June 2014) and University College London (July 2015), and I am grateful to the audience feedback I received in all these venues. Special thanks are owed to Dorit Bar-On and Philip Pettit for helpful comments on earlier written drafts. I adapt the term “mind-making practices” from a suggestion once made to me by Karen Jones (she actually proposed “people-making practices”, but “mind-making” seemed more appropriate in this context).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number DP140102468].

Notes on contributor

Victoria McGeer is a Research Fellow in the University Center for Human Values and lecturer in Philosophy at Princeton University. She is also a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Her main research interests are in philosophy of mind, social cognition, and moral psychology.

Notes

1. The term “psycho-practice” or “normal psychological knowing” was my own attempt to rebrand this capacity in a way that represents my particular theoretical take on the problem (McGeer 2001). In this paper, I revisit my earlier proposal, but without the terminological innovation. Many of these other terms likewise reflect particular theorists’ views of what the capacity amounts to: compare, for instance, “theory of mind” with “mind-simulating”. It is hard to find a theoretically neutral term for referring to the capacity in question – perhaps “mentalizing” comes closest to the mark.

2. These two approaches have been exhaustively discussed in the literature, generating a number of variations in each view. Prominent defenders on the “theory-theory” side (though not always under that name) include: Sellars (1997), Lewis (1972), Dennett (1969, 1987), Fodor (1968, 1987), Churchland (1979), Carruthers (1996), Premack and Woodruff (1978), Wellman (1990), Meltzoff and Gopnik (1993), Gopnik and Wellman (1995), Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997), Gopnik, Meltzoff, and Kuhl (1999), Gopnik, Capps, and Meltzoff (2000), Wimmer and Perner (1983), Perner et al. (1989, 1991), and Saxe (2005). Prominent defenders of the simulation theory include: Currie (1996, 2008), Goldman (1989, 1992, 2006), Gordon (1986, 1992), Heal (1994, 1998), Harris (1992); Gallese and Goldman (1998), and Gallese (2006, 2007). Hybrid theories have also been proposed, with exponents including: Heal (2003), Currie and Ravenscroft (2003), Mitchell (2005), Stich and Nichols (1992, 1995), Nichols and Stich (1998, 2003), Perner and Kühberger (2005). For some comprehensive discussions, see Carruthers and Smith (1996) and Davies and Stone (1995a, 1995b).

3. Some critics of the standard view dispute even this, especially in the context of human social interactions – for example, Zawidzki (2008). I certainly agree there has been an overemphasis on explanation and prediction amongst advocates of the standard view, as I will shortly discuss; but I do not think that the phenomenon itself should be underestimated or denied. But see too Morton (1996) for a nuanced discussion of the difference between prediction and expectation in relation to folk-psychology.

4. This finding has been replicated for typically developing human beings using a wide range of similarly impoverished stimuli and movements (for overviews, see Kassin 1981; Scholl and Tremoulet 2000). By contrast, Klin (2000) has used this paradigm to reveal a pronounced absence of spontaneous mentalizing in high-functioning individuals with autism – those who otherwise show some capacity for mental state attribution insofar as they are able to “pass” first-order and even second-order “false belief” tasks. I discuss some implications of this in McGeer (2009).

5. Many of these are inspired by thinking more deeply about how the mind is embodied and/or socially constituted and embedded. See, for instance: De Jaegher (2009), De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and Gallagher (2010), Gallagher (2001, 2005, 2008a, 2008b), Gallagher and Hutto (2008), Gallagher and Zahavi (2007), Hutto (2004, 2007, 2008, 2009), Hutto and Ratcliffe (2007), Kiverstein (2011), Morton (1980, 1996, 2003, 2007), Ratcliffe (2007), Ratcliffe and Gallagher (2008), Thompson (2001), Zahavi (2001), and Zawidzki (2008, 2013).

6. In synoptically characterizing the difference between these approaches, I particularly stress the notion of a “primary” capacity. The regulative view does not preclude our notable capacities for “explanation and prediction”, as will be seen below. By contrast, the epistemic view does not in any way recognize the mind-shaping role of folk-psychology, a notable defect in my view.

7. I call this the problem of “reactive responsiveness” to resonate with P.F. Strawson's account of our “reactive attitudes” (attitudes like resentment, indignation, gratitude, forgiveness) and the critical role they play in giving a philosophically adequate account of moral responsibility (Strawson 1974).

8. With beginners, corrigibility will naturally manifest itself in demanding conformity to the more basic rules and strategies of stress. But even relative experts may continue to improve as they engage with other skilled players; and here “corrigibility” manifests itself as the disposition/capacity to adjust one's strategic options as one learns from others’ tricks and tendencies. Note that if chess were not continually challenging in this way, it would be a much less engaging kind of game (cf. checkers).

9. On the regulative view, it comes as no surprise that various socio-political considerations are relevant to human cognition so far as they influence how the norms of folk-psychology limit or extend the agential possibilities of the individuals so regulated. But the relevance of these considerations is not so readily explained on the standard view, which I take to be a strike against it. For one recently studied example of how folk-psychological norms can and do bear on our cognitive possibilities, see Leslie et al. (2015). For further discussion of the more general point, see Zawidzki (2008, 2013); see too Cash (2010).

10. The simulation view is somewhat hampered by the fact that we purportedly use our own cognitive system to model what other creatures would believe and desire in their situation; hence, for simulationists, explanatory/predictive success is presumably limited by the degree of similarity between model and target cognitive systems. Simulationists finesse this problem by allowing we can make adjustments for differences in cognitive systems, but theory-theorists suggest that such “adjustments” must surely be theory-driven – hence, the simulationist view will collapse, to some extent, into its theory-theory rival. Alternatively, simulationists might simply bite the bullet and suggest that there is enough similarity in cognitive systems to allow for successful, though limited, explanation/prediction outside the human domain. I take something like this approach myself.

11. There is continuing debate about whether such creatures are really endowed with the mental states in question simply in virtue of being representable as such. I take no stand on this issue here. My point is simply this: so far as such creatures are considered to be genuine “psychological agents” by whatever criteria we favour (e.g. sentience, appropriate “wetware”, cognitive complexity … ), they are not candidates for shaping their own mental states by way of normatively guided self-regulation so far as they lack any understanding of themselves (or others) as “minded”.

12. Interestingly, this gap in mutual understanding has not gone unnoticed by people with autism. For instance, one 28-year-old high-functioning individual reports finding it incredible that, “someone who has much better inherent communication abilities than I do but who has not even taken a close look at my perspective to notice the enormity of the chasm between us tells me that my failure to understand is because I lack empathy” (Cesaroni and Garber 1991, p. 311). Similarly, another individual with autism, Therese Joliffe, writes: “If only people could experience what autism is like just for a few minutes, they might then know how to help!” (Jolliffe, Lansdown, and Robinson 1992).

13. This is difficult to explain on standard view because it is assumed that individuals with autism are merely impaired in their meta-representational capacities (however these are characterized); they are not assumed to function atypically at the first-order level of mental state operation. Hence, so far as we have a capacity to detect these underlying states, we (neurotypicals) should be able to explain and/or predict their behaviour.

14. This does not mean that understanding is completely precluded, of course. But it does mean that extraordinary interpretive measures will have to be taken to begin to understand such alien ways of being.

15. – or with other human beings who do not have the cognitive wherewithal to engage in such regulative practices (but, of course, this will typically not be a black and white matter).

16. For instance, it is considered rude or aggressive to make sustained eye contact with others in Japan, especially if they have higher social status. Quick saccades to and from the eye are normatively more appropriate for conveying respect. Of course, to those from Western cultures such “shifty-eyed” behaviour will seem suspicious or odd, causing folk-psychological alarm bells to ring – is this person dishonest, mad, pathologically shy, physically impaired? With the right sort of cues, they might even suppose the person is simply from an alien culture, but this may presuppose too much by way of empathy, background knowledge, or interpretive sophistication to be likely for average folk-psychologists.

17. For instance, simulation theorists and theory-theorists have quite different views about how we arrive at first-person knowledge of our own mental states, with many theory-theorists denying that knowledge of our own minds is peculiarly unlike our knowledge of other people's. This in turn leads at least some theory-theorists to deny any special ground for attributing first-person authority to self-ascriptions (for discussion, see: Carruthers 1996, 2011; Carruthers and Smith 1996; Goldman 2005; Gopnik 1993; Gordon 1992).

18. This is surely puzzling on the standard view, as it seems to presuppose a kind of authoritative self-knowledge that in no way depends on the entire apparatus of higher order belief formation. For how else can agents choose words that accurately represent their own states of mind (in this case, their second-order beliefs about their first-order states) without (in some sense) knowing what they believe about their first-order states? The fact that such “reports” are not normally challenged (or taken to be challengeable) qua expressions of (genuine) second-order beliefs shows that first-person knowledge of such beliefs exhibits the same putative authority as first-person knowledge of the first-order states such beliefs are purportedly about.

19. For views that are generally congenial to the ideas expressed here, see McGeer (1996, 2004, 2005, 2008), Bar-On (2000, 2004), and Moran (1997, 2001). This is not to say that there is complete agreement amongst these authors; indeed, there are important differences. But I brush over these in order to highlight what I take to be a critical common thread.

20. The term “neo-expressivism” comes from Bar-On (2004). Importantly, she argues that it is crucial to understand how semantic descriptions of states of minds can both express and report the states of mind we are in. Hence, she distinguishes her “neo-expressivism” from a more simple-minded expressivism that denies the reporting function of semantically informative expressive acts (see too Bar-On and Long 2001). The term “constitutivist” is often applied to Moran's view, which has a more non-naturalistic/reflectivist flavour that Bar-On would accept (see her contribution to this volume in 2015). Though McGeer is certainly unhappy with the non-naturalistic aspects of Moran's view, she nevertheless defends a (naturalistically inspired) constitutivist line (see, in particular, McGeer 2008, for a comparative discussion of her view and Moran's).

21. For a more detailed critical discussion of this hypothesis in keeping with the regulative view of folk-psychology developed here, see McGeer (2004, 2005).

22. For simplicity's sake, I stick to beliefs and desires, though of course this claim can easily be extended to other propositional attitudes and affective states.

23. Such “striving”, as I call it, may be relatively unselfconscious and effortless; or it may be quite self-conscious and effortful. For instance, under certain circumstances, I may judge that “p” is what is to be desired (what it is appropriate to desire) and thereby ascribe that desire to myself; but thanks to weakness of will, I may find it hard to resist certain contrary impulses without conscious and effortful self-regulation. Some may be tempted to say that, under these conditions, I do not really desire p; but then it is hard to explain why I make such effortful attempts to regulate my conative impulses in the ways that I do. For much more detailed elaboration and defence of this view, see McGeer and Pettit (2002) and McGeer (2008).

24. This may partly explain why we sometimes have trouble categorizing what counts as a moral infraction – an infraction of a moral norm – as against an infraction of some putatively non-moral (sometimes called merely “conventional”) norm – for example, dressing in a “modest” or “respectful” way in various settings, or on various occasions. For further discussion of the moral/conventional distinction and its possible cultural variability, see Turiel (1983), Turiel, Killen, and Helwig (1987), Nucci (1986), Shweder et al. (1997), Nucci and Turiel (2000), Sripada and Stich (2006), Southwood (2011), Kelly and Stich (2012), and Fraser (2012).

25. For further defence and clarification of this reading of Strawson, see McGeer (2012, 2014).