Download Mindreading and Culture

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Mindreading and Culture
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Social Minds
Our minds are adapted for social reasoning.
We have a persistency to anthropomorphize; we
react to objects as they’re intentional agents;….
We don’t have to decide whether to interpret
another person’s movement as action: we do so
automatically.
No inferential reasoning, no analogy reasoning,…
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Interpretative competence is dissociated from other
aspects of human cognition.
This suggest the presence of a module operating
independently of other cognitive faculties.
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The module presence, is reinforced by studies on
autism and schizophrenia.
Autism is characterized by the incapacity to read
other people mind but leaves other cognitive
capacities intact.
This suggests that the interpretative capacity is
dissociated from other cognitive capacities (cf.
argument from aphasia in favor of the language
module).
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Arguments for Modularity
1. Dissociation
Two capacities are dissociated if one can be lost
and the other retained. There is thus informational
and operational autonomy.
E.g.: aphasia proves that linguistic skills can be lost
while other don’t; thus there is a language module.
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The same for our capacity to interpret others: if it
can be dissociated from general intelligence, it
proves the existence of an interpretative module,
i.e. a theory of mind module, ToM.
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High functioning autists seem to prove this.
E.g.: high functioning autistic children fail the falsebelief task, yet they pass the false-photography
task (where a photo is taken from a scene which
get subsequently changed … the autistic children
will say that the picture will be of the previous
scene).
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2. Poverty of the Stimulus
Children become competent reasoners about
mental state even if they cannot see, hear, or feel
them (cf. blind children).
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Poverty of the stimulus
A child may acquire a language even though the
data itself is too poor to determine the language:
the child needs no evidence for much of the
knowledge she brings to the learning situation.
Children acquire language from pidgin.
Roughly, children always make the right
‘hypotheses’ as a function of their genetic
endowment.
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Since the child can fixate on any language in the
face of a poverty of stimulus about each language
and since all languages are equally acquirable,
children all begin with the same universal
linguistic knowledge.
This is the essence of the poverty of stimulus
argument.
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The poverty of the stimulus argument does not
tell us:
1. What information is innate.
2. How the innate information is represented in
the mind/brain.
3. Whether the information is available to a
general learning mechanism or specific to a
dedicated one (i.e. general intelligence or language
module).
These issues are to be decided by the normal
scientific route of the testing and comparison of
hypotheses.
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Simulation Theory (ST) vs. ToM
Either the great apes represent the action of their
conspecifics in intentional terms or they represent
them in terms of bodily motion.
Even without a rudimentary theory of folk
psychology we wouldn’t see other agents as mere
bulk of skin, but as animate, self-moving creatures
with functionally organized behavior.
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Simulation theory
The behavior of others is interpreted and predicted
by using our own decision-making procedure as
model for others.
Advantages: ST fits the phenomenology of agency
insofar as we often understand others by imagining
ourselves in their situation.
If ST is right it also frees us from the burden of
calculation and discovery. ST is a less intelligencehungry account.
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Reply
At most ST presents a supplement to the
representational theory of representation. We often
take into account differences between our thoughts
and the ones of other agents.
E.g.: we can understand/adjust our expectations,
predictions, etc. of agents from other cultures.
ST looks more plausible when seen as part of a
hybrid. It need to be combined with account of the
information agents use to guide their simulations.
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But why need that information be in the form of a
theory?
If our information about others was a mere form of
empirical generalizations from our experience, then
we could not predict the behavior of agents in novel
situations.
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Folk Psychology
Can be seen (Sterelny) as a form of guided learning
instead of a full blooded theory.
As such, it is sensitive to development.
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Would it be similar to Chomsky’s LAD?
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In favor of the view that folk psychology is a full
blooded theory people (Scholl & Leslie) mentions
the:
1. uniform outcomes: all individuals across
cultures manifest (with the exception of
psychological pathologies) a more or less identical
folk psychology.
2. Insensitivity of development to learning
abilities: the development of folk psychology
seems insensitive to differences in general learning
abilities.
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But folk psychology (FP) can be learned.
There are important differences, though, on the
way FP is learned and ordinary learning.
The acquisition is developmentally entrenched.
But most of this developmental buffering is in the
environment rather than the genome.
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3.The process of development is insensitive to
evidence: This campaign against the learning of
FP. If FP is insensitive to evidence it cannot be
learned.
But richer environment (linguistically and socially)
accelerate the development (e.g. children pass the
false-belief test a bit faster).
This difference, though, is only of timing not of
degree.
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Vs. Evolutionary Psychology (Sterelny)
“The idea that the human mind consists of an
ensemble of domain-specific, innately specified,
cognitive mechanisms that are adaptations to
specific ecological and social problems of
Pleistocene foraging is a radical oversimplification of
the pattern of hominid evolution. … It exaggerates
the importance of evolution of specific adaptations
to specific problems, and ignores adaptations to
variability itself.”
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The evolution of some important aspects of hominid
cognition are perceptual and affective mechanisms.
This may explain for instance a particular
preference of waist to hip ratio, and other
phenomenon discussed by evolutionary psychology.
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Humans inherits much more than genes from past
generations.
These information-transmitting inheritances are
human-specific.
Hence we cannot easily apply evolutionary models
built for other species.
Cultural evolution ….
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Cumulative niche constructions
Behavioral innovations can trigger cascades of
further changes that entrench the new behavior
(e.g. lactose tolerance because of a new diet).
The increasing cultural differentiation generated by
cumulative niche construction made the boundaries
between groups less permeable.
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The importance of dual inheritance.
Human inherits both genes and culture from
their parents.
This is an important factor in accelerating changes.
For dual inheritance to work, group selection must
be powerful, for the fidelity of transmission depends
both on individual psychological adaptations
(importance of learning) and developmental
environment.
Hence, culture contributes in shaping nature.
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The Theory of Evolution
The determiner ‘the’ is the problem.
We don’t have a single theory, but a set of complex
views with various degrees of certainty (Christians
fundamentalists exploit that in favoring design …).
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Evidence for evolution
1. Physiological
Evidence of related structures
E.g.: the structure of mammalian forelimbs. The
wing of the bat, the flipper of the whale and the
human arm all share the same bones organized for
different functions.
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2. Fossils
They can be dated and show sequences of
organisms from currently unknown forms to familiar
forms.
3. Biogeography
I.e., the geographical relationships between
organisms of different kinds (e.g. Darwin finches
who have been blown to different places and in the
absence of competitors evolves differently).
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Natural Selection
Evolution by natural selection is Darwin’s great
contribution.
This is understood via the idea of heritable
variations of fitness, i.e. the disposition to produce
surviving offspring.
If organisms differ in fitness some will have more
offspring than others.
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If fitness is heritable, and the features that
ground differences in fitness are pass down from
generation to generation then features conveying
fitness will become more common. We’ll thus have
changes in populations …
Main debate
What exactly it is what natural selection select?
Dawkins claims that are not organisms but genes,
i.e. the prevalence of genes that were most
efficient at reproducing themselves.
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The selfish gene
The organism is a mere vehicle built by genes in
order to project themselves most effectively into
the next generation.
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Group selection
It’s the view that certain features of organisms
favoring conspecifics rather than themselves have
been produced by selection between groups of
organisms.
Unselfish groups survive better than those
composed by merely selfish individuals.
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The selection of genes is insufficient to explain the
complexity of the evolutionary process.
Selection occurs simultaneously at many levels,
including the gene and the individual and possibly
also the group and the species.
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Multi-level selection
It is probably the current orthodoxy among
philosophers of biology.
It rejects the idea that it is possible to separate out
specific set of objects involved in a certain stage of
the evolutionary process.
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An influential version of this perspective is the
developmental system theory.
It provides a powerful criticism of the genecenteredness (genes are not special or unique).
Genes don’t carry information, nor present a plan or
a blueprint.
They only provide reliable predictions about the
state of another organism.
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Other factors must be taken into consideration.
E.g.: The sun help tomatoes getting red. The mere
genetic structure of tomatoes does not make them
to become red.
Lot of factors intervenes in the development of an
organism.
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If the multi-factors view is right, the divorce
between evolution and development cannot be
consumed.
Evolution and development works together.
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Difficulties with evolutionary explanations
1. Adaptations vs. exaptations
The distinction between the views that typically:
(i) traits of organisms evolved because they serve
some function that they can be seen now to
promote, and
(ii) the organism put the traits to a use that is
different from that which explains its selection.
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Expactation isn’t just an anomaly that occasionally
derails.
It is a feature of almost any interesting explanation.
E.g.: the mammalian lung from swim-bladders.
I.e. the mammalian lung developed gradually out of
the organs that ancestral fish used to keep them
afloat.
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To evolve an organ to doing X an organism must
start with an organ or structure that evolved to do
Y
E.g.: the giraffes’ long neck or the peacocks’ tail.
The neck first evolved to support the head ….
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2. Organisms are integrated systems
Hence, changes to one trait will cause correlative
changes to other traits and these will have positive
and negative effects on fitness.
Even the traits that are the primary focus of
attention will have many fitness effects.
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General lesson
Given the problem with the multiple exaptations
and the multiplicity of interconnections we may end
up to being capable to give only some hints or
suggestions.
We may be incapable to provide more than a
fragment of the truth.
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Modesty
We may have a modest but not completely vacuous
conception of evolutionary explanation.
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