Tadeusz Zawidzki’s magisterial volume hypothesizes that the human species, from the perspectives of its evolution (or phylogeny) and individual development (or ontogeny), can be distinguished by a capacity for social cognition in terms of “mindshaping” as distinct from “mindreading.” Not only does Zawidzki aim to displace the varieties of “mindreading” applied to human beings as the “reigning metaphor” in the cognitive sciences, but he also contends that without “mindshaping” neither “sophisticated” communication nor pervasive co-operation, for instance, would be possible (xi).

From the outset it should be stated that Zawidzki declares that “the project of [his] book concerns phylogenetic priority” and hence “human ontogeny is not directly relevant to [his] argument” especially as “ontogeny need not recapitulate phylogeny” (174). Nonetheless about a third of his seven-chapter volume is actually devoted to ontogenetic implications. Consequently, we shall be referring to ontogenetic perspectives more familiar to readers of Metapsychology. First of all, we shall briefly background some characteristic claims associated with theorizing and simulating approaches to “mindreading” that Zawidzki presumes are widely known to an academic readership. Next, we shall highlight two of the major ways Zawidzki rejects the efficacy of appeals to “mindreading” before pursuing the crucial features of “mindshaping” contained in his monograph which principally attends to “sociological” rather than psychological constraints upon human behavior (81). Thereafter, we shall conclude on a somewhat cautionary note given that Mindshaping may well become de rigueur in future debate and research in the cognitive sciences.

I

The capacity to ascribe psychological or mental processes or states to others in order to explain and predict their actions or behavior has increasingly been subject to an intersection of psychological enquiries drawn from the social and philosophical, developmental and comparative strands. As a result, we find some enquiries adhering, for example, to a notion that we employ a theory of the mental realm broadly analogous to a theory of the physical realm. In variants of this theorizing view, the developing child is construed in terms of someone gradually resolving problems, not unlike a scientist, engaged in increasingly sophisticated sets of hypotheses about other minds as it emerges from its initial, situationally or syncretically bound experience of its world.  Other contrasting yet cognate enquiries postulate that the cognitive development of the child neurologically rests upon a universal if not innate repertoire by which the child apprehends its world in terms of such categories as objects and actions, agents and goals. It is these universal or innate categories that then form the foundation for the child’s maturing conception of its own and others’ psychological processes and states.

The above kinds of approaches have typically been challenged by proposals that interpreting other minds does not consist of any implicit or explicit act of theorising.  Rather, the psychological states and processes of others is represented by mentally emulating them, that is, by generating similar states and processes in one’s self usually by way of the imagination. In order to avoid the problems of explicating how first-person introspection accurately depicts and predicts higher order psychological functions—such as beliefs, desires, and intentions attributable to others—several alternative ways of conceptualizing simulation have been raised. These include, for example, the contention that simulation begins not so much by analogously imagining or pretending to be the other as by non-self-consciously becoming or identifying with the other. Support for simulation also stems from claims that it can only commence once the child can linguistically transform its first-person (“I want…”) into third-person utterances (“Mama wants…”).

For all the brevity of these introductory comments about whether theorizing or simulating best characterizes how we come to ascribe psychological or mental processes or states to others, it will not have escaped readers’ attention that both approaches might be combined under the more general label of “mindreading.” Perhaps, for example, the theorizing approach has greater plausibility in more conceptually advanced cases of appraising the higher psychological functions of others—their beliefs and hopes, their desires and intentions—whereas the simulating approach operates more convincingly with lower or simpler psychological states such as perceivable manifestations of emotions of, say, anger, disgust, or fear in others. Zawidzki, however, will have none of this. In short, “mindreading” in any of its forms proves inadequate in explanations of understanding and interacting with others.

II

Why does the primacy accorded to “mindreading” ultimately collapse for Zawidzki? He foregrounds at least two reasons. Firstly, “mindreading,” whether cast as an act of theorizing or one of simulating, is dogged by the fundamentally holistic nature of our beliefs and desires, hopes and intentions or what is technically termed our “propositional attitudes” (11-12; cf. 15-16, 66-67, 249 n.2):

any finite set of propositional attitudes is compatible with any finite set of observable evidence because a propositional attitude’s relations to stimuli and behavior depend on other background propositional attitudes. In other words…an agent’s beliefs face the tribunal of experience as a whole, not piecemeal, and an agent’s beliefs and desires direct behavior in concert, not individually (66).

Incompatible beliefs can moreover be equally rationalized by the same set of observable actions or behavior (e.g. “Was Larissa blinking or winking?”).

Furthermore, attributing different orders of psychological states or “propositional attitudes” proves immensely difficult in cases where deception or uncertainty intervenes. Consider the following attributions when we attempt to think about what others think, ranging from “Natasha believes that Nemo wants to play hopscotch,” then “Nemo hopes that Natasha believes that Nemo wants to play hopscotch” up to, say, “Nemo suspects that Natasha desires that Nemo hopes that Natasha believes that Nemo wants to play hopscotch.”  Even if we assume that Natasha and Nemo have the capacity to adopt each other’s perspective, such “mindreading” not only “potentially triggers an infinite regress of propositional attitude attributions,” but also signals that the other is attempting to read his or her mind, “not what the other intends to do” (109).

Secondly, for Zawidzki, there is a multitude of instances of social interaction that need not implicate “mindreading” in any guise, although attributing behaviour is present. Infant Larissa, for instance, produces a babbling sound (“/amamamama/”) with no discernible communicative intention. Because the sound resembles “/mama mama/,” her mother begins to respond as if Larissa were calling for mother specifically. Again, returning to our previous example, Natasha at first refuses to allow Nemo to play hopscotch as a result of which he is eventually ostracized with increasing violence and Natasha is seen as aggressive. Were these kinds of examples clearly cases of attributing behaviour, Zawidzki’s next step is not to account for when and how they might become cases of “mindreading.” Rather, seizing upon the way in which expectations are set in train, expectations that become self-fulfilling (cf. 17, 229), the role of “mindshaping” becomes paramount.

III

What is meant by “mindshaping,” a term first coined by Matteo Mameli in his November 2001 paper in Biology & Philosophy? The way Zawidzki responds to this question governs the remainder of his monograph. Whilst overtly aiming to extend Mameli, Zawidzki states that he will be “neutral” about the neurological “mechanism” or “competencies” by which “altering behavioral dispositions is possible” and thus “altering minds” (xiv). His concerns are with the “why,” not the “how,” of human cognition. Hence, he holds to a “largely empirical,” inter-disciplinary account of socio-cognitive capacities, but one which philosophically probes the presuppositions involved (xiv-xv). Zawidzki distinguishes human “mindshaping,” firstly, by the variety of ways the minds of others can be made to match models within families, institutions, or communities; secondly, by such matched models being intrinsically, not merely instrumentally, motivating; thirdly, by its communal distribution through the pedagogic roles of teachers amongst others; and, finally, by the inclusion of fictional and/or idealised models.

          Just as importantly, the character of “mindshaping” arises from Zawidzki’s re-interpretation of Daniel Dennett’s teleological conception of “intentional stance” as “abstract posits…which help track robust patterns of observable behavior,” “not to speculate about the concrete causes responsible for behavior,” but, normatively, “to situate behavior…as a reasonable response relative to goals and available information” (14) (a conception subsequently elaborated and defended at length (142ff., 183ff.)). In other words, is all that would be required of Larissa in her infancy “a sensitivity to certain abstract properties of bouts of behaviour” (15)? Such properties, it seems, are “supplemented” by “behavioral indicators of information access, like gaze direction” in tracking and responding to “goal-directed” actions (15). If so, then do infants possess a “tacit theory…of observable behavior” (15) or a “tacit knowledge of behavioral patterns, sometimes highly abstract ones” (16)?  Or, as Zawidzki subsequently concedes, perhaps infants are “better characterized” as possessing “an unreflective, tacitly encoded ‘craft'” than some “mindreading” hypothesis about “unobservable cognitive states” (16).

Finally, Zawidzki extends the recent evolutionary hypothesis of “niche construction” employed by Mameli (18-21). “Mindshaping” is now linked to processes of adapting to social and communicative niches both within and between generations. Nowhere are niches more pointedly manifested than in human practices exemplified by relevant means-and-ends imitation (36ff.), scaffolded if not systemic pedagogy (42ff.), enforcement of norms (53ff.), and self-regulating narratives (57ff.), all of which make for greater behavioral co-operation, homogeneity, and predictability. Such niches are “the raison d’être of our mindshaping practices” (128).

IV

In the space remaining, let us briefly question Zawidzki’s handling of the first two practices, imitation and pedagogy. Despite previously professing neutrality about neurological mechanisms, on reviewing the empirical findings of recent developmental and comparative psychologists regarding imitation of intended and unintended behavior, Zawidzki has little compunction asserting that mirror neurons constitute a “plausible neurophysiological mechanism underlying…imitative capacities” (39). Since the ‘nineties, the role of mirror neurons, first postulated with macaque monkeys in acts of grasping, holding, and tearing, has rapidly expanded its range of supposed applicability beyond theories of primates’ “understanding” of actions to infants’ capacity for imitation of, if not empathy with, the actions and speech of others. Curiously, Zawidzki overlooks the exacting analysis by Gregory Hickok in the July 2009 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience documenting the degree to which appeals to mirror neurons lack definitional clarity and empirical support. In short, the analogical inference presupposed is highly questionable. That, for example, a macaque and the infant Larissa are similar with respect to certain bodily properties; that the macaque appears to have a further neuronal property; and that, therefore, Larissa probably has that property does not in itself ensure the veracity of the inference or any generalisation derived from it.

Next, during the course of analysing pedagogic practices as something akin to infant-caretaker and apprentice-master interactions, Zawidzki turns to “the Vygotskyan tradition” (47). He then contends that, with “linguistic competence,” this “tradition,” too, “makes possible, rather than presupposes, sophisticated mindreading like propositional attitude attribution” (48). This is revealed both in “such socially distributed pedagogical interactions as ‘zones of proximal development’ in which novices can accomplish tasks that they cannot accomplish alone” as well as in “collaborative problem solving by groups of children without an adult teacher” which “often enable solutions to cognitive tasks” (47).  However, by only referring to the massively truncated 1962 translation of Vygotskii’s Myshlenie i rech’, Zawidzki inadvertently neglects the fact that the developmental zone concerns tasks that are holistically “linked to the entire system of mental functions” within a field of enquiry as distinct from “training” of a craft or a skill which “manifests no meaningfulness and no understanding of structural relations” (1934, pp. 200 & 210). The zone involves the maturing system of children’s and adolescents’ interwoven psychological functions of attention, memory, and volition along with perception and cognition.  The “explicit instruction and other cognitive scaffolds” (48) provided by mediating adults or more competent peers consequently implies their need to attend to ways of identifying, interpreting, and evaluating the emerging cognitive processes of, say, nine year-old Natasha in order to deduce her “conscious awareness and mastery” of propositional knowing, of true justified believing, the “common foundation” for Vygotskii “of all the higher mental functions” (1934, p. 208). Yet criticisms of Zawidzki’s handling of mirror neurons and the developmental zone need not diminish his boldly speculative work.

 

© 2014 R.A. Goodrich

 

R.A. Goodrich is a Melbourne-based associate of the A.R.C. Centre for the History of Emotions and of the European Philosophy & History of Ideas Research Group, co-edits the online refereed arts-practice journal, Double Dialogues, and co-ordinates with Maryrose Hall a longitudinal project investigating behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic development of higher-functioning children within the autistic spectrum and related disorders.