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Models and Processes

Origins of Mind : 04

s.butterfill & [email protected]

challenge
Explain the emergence in development
of mindreading.

A-tasks

Children fail

because they rely on a model of minds and actions that does not incorporate beliefs

Children fail A-tasks because they rely on a model of minds and actions that does not incorporate beliefs.

non-A-tasks

Children pass

by relying on a model of minds and actions that does incorporate beliefs

Children pass non-A-tasks by relying on a model of minds and actions that does incorporate beliefs.

dogma

the

of mindreading

The dogma of mindreading (momentary version): any individual has at most one model of minds and actions at any one point in time.
There is also a developmental version of the dogma: the developmental dogma is that there is either just one model or else a family of models where one of the models, the best and most sophisticated model, contains all of the states that are contained in any of the models.

a clue ...

‘chimpanzees understand … intentions … perception and knowledge’

(Call & Tomasello, 2008, p. 191)

‘chimpanzees probably do not understand others in terms of a fully human-like belief–desire psychology’

Call & Tomasello (2008, 191)

After claiming that ‘chimpanzees understand … intentions … perception and knowledge,’ Call & Tomasello (2008) qualify their claim by adding that ‘chimpanzees probably do not understand others in terms of a fully human-like belief–desire psychology’ (p. 191).
This is true. The emergence in human development of the most sophisticated abilities to represent mental states probably depends on rich social interactions involving conversation about the mental \citep{Slaughter:1996fv, peterson:2003_opening, moeller:2006_relations}, on linguistic abilities (Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007; Kovács, 2009), (Moeller & Schick (2006, p. 760): ‘Our results provide support for the concept that access to conversations about the mind is important for deaf children’s ToM development, in that there was a significant relationship between maternal talk about mental states and deaf children’s performance on verbal ToM tasks.’) and on capacities to attend to, hold in mind and inhibit things \citep{benson:2013_individual, devine:2014_relations}. These are all scarce or absent in chimpanzees and other nonhumans. So it seems unlikely that the ways humans at their most reflective represent mental states will match the ways nonhumans represent mental states. Reflecting on how adult humans talk about mental states is no way to understand how others represent them. But then what could enable us to understand how nonhuman animals represent mental states?
Think about what might anchor our understanding of knowledge? There seem to me to be two options.
(1) epistemology, which is not at all about how anyone thinks of knowledge (you know this because epistemologists don’t draw on research on how ordinary people ordinarily think about knowledge).
(2) theorising about adult humans’ mindreading abilities
Aside ... we don’t know much about adults humans’ mindreading abilities

‘the core theoretical problem in ... animal mindreading is that ... the conception of mindreading that dominates the field ... is too underspecified to allow effective communication among researchers’

‘the core theoretical problem in contemporary research on animal mindreading is that ... the conception of mindreading that dominates the field ... is too underspecified to allow effective communication among researchers, and reliable identification of evolutionary precursors of human mindreading through observation and experiment.’
(Heyes, 2015, p. 321)

Heyes (2015, 321)

What does Heyes mean?
How can we more fully specify mindreading?
To more fully specify mindreading we need a theory that specifies both the models and the processes involved in mindreading.

1. models

2. processes

A model is a way the world could logically be, or a set of ways the world could logically be. Some models can conveniently be specified by theories, others by equations. (Note that a model isn’t a theory, nor is it a set of equations.)