Interpretation is arguably the most
pervasive of all human mental activities. We act as interpreters when we
observe what other people do and infer from their behaviour their state of
mind, their intentions, their mood or their desires. We also engage in
interpretation when we attempt to predict their future actions on the basis of their
surroundings and their past experiences. Interpretation broadly construed is
the ascription of mental states such as beliefs and desires to systems whose
behaviour we want to describe, explain or predict.

Although we constantly interpret the people
around us, and often other animals, not much has been written about the
principles underlying interpretation and its origins. With his previous book, Interpreting
Minds, Bogdan attempted to draw our attention to interpretation, which is
an indispensable tool in all the different aspects of social interaction and
communication. With his latest book, Minding Minds, Bogdan aims at extending
his original project and accounting for our capacities of self-reflection. He
argues convincingly that the awareness of our own mental states, that is at the
basis of explicit processes of deliberation and self-evaluation, derives from
our need to interpret others. Given its central topic, Bogdan’s book should be
on the reading list of philosophers of mind and evolutionary psychologists, and
anyone who is interested in the development of thought as a distinctively human
achievement.

The greatest merit of his project is its
interdisciplinary approach. Bogdan critically evaluates evidence from different
fields, such as developmental psychology and cognitive ethology, and then uses
the evidence in support of his explanatory hypotheses. The constant reference
to the most recent results in the psychological literature and the author’s
attempt to integrate them in a unified and coherent picture of human
evolutionary history are to be praised. The reader is actively involved in an
exciting search for clues throughout the argumentative parts of the book.

The reader be warned, though. Bogdan has a
very original style, which is most of the time pleasant and accessible, but includes
the introduction of a highly idiosyncratic terminology. It is not easy to
recognise the need for a very technical language when the phenomena Bogdan is
interested in have been named long ago in the psychological and philosophical
literature. For instance, Bogdan does not talk about self-reflection or second-order
thought but of metamentation, and this is just one example of his
fertile imagination in inventing new words.

The main thesis is that we would not be
self-reflective beings unless we were interpreters of ourselves and others. This
is a most plausible conclusion and it is worth reading the book to find how
many good reasons we have to believe that it is true.

© 2004 Lisa Bortolotti

Lisa Bortolotti studied philosophy in Bologna (Italy), London
and Oxford (UK) before obtaining her PhD from the Australian National University in Canberra. Her main interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy
of psychology, rationality, mental illness, animal cognition and animal
welfare.

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology