Since Descartes, the problem of other
minds has been a classic discussion in the tradition of Western philosophy.
It consists of different questions related to whether and how to justify what
is going on in the mind of other people. Until the second half of the 19^th
century, that is, until scientific psychology became a discipline fairly
autonomous from philosophy, philosophers used to answer these questions, as
well as all of the other questions relative to the mind, without taking much
into consideration the findings of empirical sciences.

Nowadays things are changed and
the book edited by Malle and Hodges confirms the change. Other Minds
takes a survey of many problems relative to the capacity, that is typically
human, of understanding the individuals of our (and similar) species as endowed
with a mind. The book mainly proceeds with an empirical approach. Yet problems
are articulated in the discussion of a number of questions: What does mindreading
exactly mean? Does mindreading correspond to a specific cognitive device
or to a general psychological capacity? Can we identify a neural correlate of mindreading?
Does the faculty of interpreting other minds bear on related mental phenomena,
such as consciousness and self-awareness? The solutions that the volume offers
for these questions are based on the impressive inventory of empirical data
collected by experimental psychologists.

The subject matters taken into
consideration by the essays of the book seem to disappear from the agenda of
theoretical psychology in the second postwar period. Maybe one of the reasons
of the indifference about these issues is the collateral spread and success of
the new paradigm for cognitive psychology: that is, methodological solipsism
that started to define the items of the agenda focusing on cognitive processes
which are limited to the individual dimension. Only at the end of the 1970’s
have psychologists started again to analyze the question of other minds from a
cognitive point of view. At that time, the debate about the theoretical nature
of naïve psychology, that is, the psychology of common sense that explains
behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, and similar intentional attitudes, came
to the attention of cognitivists. The theoretical framework of cognitive
sciences was popular and theorists used it in order to explain the capacity of
a person to ascribe, understand, and predict mental states and actions of other
people. They considered this capacity as the result of the application of rules
and/or principles that constitute the body of knowledge of which any adult and
normal human being is or should be naturally endowed. In other words, according
to this view, that is known as ‘"theory" theory’ of mind, an
individual is able to interpret the mind of other people thanks to his theory
of mind. The theory of mind that a person makes up on the
intentional attitudes of other people can be conceived in two ways. It can be
considered a real theory, that is or can be explicitly articulated (e.g. as a
scientific theory). Alternatively, it can be identified with a core of
knowledge that is implicit, modular, and innate (such as Chomsky’s grammar).
After a decade, some scholars of the mind suggested a different hypothesis.
Without appealing to a theory, implicit or explicit, they proposed that the key
cognitive process employed by someone in order to interpret the mind of others
is a form of simulative procedure. This is based on the capacity of a person to
identify himself, both emotionally and cognitively, with other people in order
to re-enact the psychological etiology of their behavior (such a more recent
approach is known as ‘theory of mental simulation’).

The comparison between "theory"
theory of mind and theory of mental simulation, relative to the
capacity of mindreading, has led the discussion. The debate has mainly focused
on theoretical disputes that have almost adopted only the metapsychological
competence of toddlers and subjects with autism as test-bed. Other Minds,
inspired by this debate, extends the discussion of the problem  relating mindreading
to other perspectives, especially within social psychology, a field that has not
yet been covered. Thus, Other Minds fills some important gaps in the
state-of-the-art of    mindreading studies.

The book edited by Malle and
Hodges gathers 21 essays that are the refined versions of the talks given by a
heterogeneous team of scholars at the conference on other minds, held in
September 2003 at the University of Oregon. Most of the authors are
psychologists (mainly developmental psychologists and especially social
psychologists), but they were in company of neuroscientists, linguists, and a
few philosophers. The editors have provided the volume with a precise and
concise introduction, and it is subdivided into five thematic sections. The
first four sections each contain four essays; the last one, instead, contains
five. Some of the texts seem out of place (especially essay 4 in the first
section and essay 21 in the last section), giving the reader the impression
that the section’s organizations has followed more editorial demands rather
than thematic resemblances. However, if some of the essays do not fit the
sections in which they are included, they all fit the general subject matter of
other minds.

As I cannot thoroughly comment
on each essay for reasons of space, I will take a short survey of them,
organizing my commentaries in five thematic groups that correspond to the five
sections in which the volume is subdivided. I will also point out the texts
that are more interesting, insofar they are particularly clear and/or original.

1. The first section, titled "Questions about the
   Phenomenon", is focused on the description of the processes that
   seems to be involved with mindreading, and on the difficult individuation
   of these processes. Several investigations about cognitive development
   have proven that mindreading is a capacity that gradually develops. It is
   worth wondering about the possibility to correlate this capacity to other
   factors that occur in order to determine cognitive development, such as
   the executive function (cf. essay 1): Otherwise, mindreading could be the
   result of a number of cognitive elements that develop simultaneously, such
   as the faculty of perceiving intentional behavior or talking about
   intentional attitudes (cf. essay 2). However, the capacity of interpreting
   other minds is not easily characterized by its component elements such as
   perspective taking. For example the meaning of "perspective
   taking" is not clear because, as B. Malle claims, "… since
   most empirical interest in perspective taking has tended to be tactical
   […] surprisingly little attention has been devoted to understanding
   perspective taking in its own right" (cf. p. 53, essay 3). Another
   controversial aspect is the very nature of mindreading, that many cognitivists
   conceive as conceptual. Essay 4, that Daniel Hutto carefully
   defends, argues against this idea and its implicit conception of the
   propositional feature of concepts, as well as against the theoretical
   nature of mindreading that relies on this idea. Prof. Hutto holds that in
   order to conceptually understand other minds, concepts such as
   "beliefs" and "desires" have to be employed. These
   concepts acquire their meaning on a holistic base; therefore, they cannot
   have propositional and discrete nature, like cognitivists sustain. In
   fact, such an hypothesis is incompatible with the possibility that children
   can learn concepts like "beliefs" and "desires"
   through a developmental approach, as indeed they do. Consequently, the
   capacity of mindreading also cannot have theoretical nature.
2. Determining the psychological mechanisms that make us
   acquire the ability of mindreading is a difficult task. However, there is
   no doubt that such a capacity has cognitive, behavioral, and
   neurophysiological correlations. The second section of the book,
   "Reading Behavior, Reading Minds", addresses these connections.
   It scrutinizes the observable facts that correspond to mindreading from
   various points of view. The most interesting perspective, maybe because we
   know very little about it, is the one that aims at finding the neural
   correlates of the cognitive activities that concur to the interpretation
   of other minds. Of course there is no way of identifying precise
   neurophysiological patterns that correspond to such a general capacity. At
   most we could establish a correlation between some of the aspects of mindreading
   and some neurophysiological schemas. Yet in this case, there is no strict
   correspondence. Essay 5, by Diego Fernandez-Duque and Jodie A. Baird,
   highlights these difficulties. The two authors try to test the faculty of
   following the gaze of the others when it is matched with social stimuli.
   Unfortunately there is an underlying problem: there are no precise
   standards according to which we can interpret a certain stimulus as social
   or non social. This matter is relative to a certain context. For such a
   reason Fernandez-Duque and Baird conclude that the brain is not subdivided
   into modules specialize in the computation of social stimuli. It seems
   more plausible to think of several sub-systems in the brain that implement
   a number of non-specialized elementary computations. Thus, the social
   inputs that stimulate these sub-systems can be relative to very different
   situations too. At the behavioral level, analyzing the social dynamics
   that occur among several subjects is easier, also in very complicated
   conditions such as cooperative situations (cf. essay 6), the formation of
   judgments relative to personal traits (cf. essay 7), and the evaluation of
   other people’s goals (cf. essay 8).
3. The third section, "Reading One’s Own Mind, Reading
   Other Minds", contains a number of reflections relative to the
   potential for an individual to interpret other’s minds. Unsurprisingly,
   the cognitive toolbox that we employ for reading other people’s minds
   seems to be the same that we use for reading our own mind. Shockingly, it
   happens that the brain areas specialized to process information relative
   to our own psychological states are exactly the same that we use
   for processing information relative to the psychological states of other
   people. Jean Decety (cf. essay 9), on the basis of his neurophysiological
   research, claims that this is the case for empathy, that he considers a
   psychological capacity. This capacity produces second order
   representations of other’s psychological perspectives by using as a
   default model the same psychological perspective that a person adopts to
   represent himself. However, if Decety’s hypothesis is right, then it has
   to deal with the following: how can one person adopt his own cognitive
   perspective in order to understand the cognitive perspective of other
   people without getting confused? Decety’s answer leads to another
   hypothesis that postulates the necessity that a person is aware of being
   empathetic. This kind of self-awareness monitors the different neural
   subsystems that implement empathy. Therefore, the mechanisms that realize
   empathic knowledge of others can be the same which effectuates knowledge
   of ourselves, but they are employed according to different modalities. At
   the behavioral level, an individual subject applies inferential mechanisms
   that are activated by different stimuli; these could be relative to the
   situations in which a person is perceived (cf. essay 10). However, the
   "self" is not to be considered only as the starting point of the
   inferential procedures that inform us about others. Rather, we should
   think of the "self" as identical with a cognitive performance
   that re-enacts the experiences which are ascribed to others through a
   simulation process (cf. essay 11). This process seems to be so important
   that some identify it with a mechanism that precedes and sub-serves
   self-awareness (cf. essay 12).
4. The practice of understanding other minds starts up an
   impressive mass of cognitive devices of any kind. There are many mental
   and behavioral schemas that are basic for this practice. One of the basic
   components is linguistic interpretation. Section four, "Language and
   Other Minds", takes under scrutiny some (to tell the truth, a few and
   superficial) linguistic aspects of mindreading. Essay 13 analyzes the
   communicative and informative function of language; they are both
   considered essential for the development of mindreading. In essay 14 M.
   Barker and T. Givòn interpret an experiment that should reveal the act of mindreading
   in daily conversations. According to the thesis of the two authors, a
   listener employs mindreading in order to generate a mental model of the
   speaker by means of perspective taking. The essay seems to explore the
   psychological counterpart of the Speech Act Theory. This attempt is very
   interesting, even though the methodological procedure adopted in the
   experiment is not very convincing. Therefore, the interpretation of the
   results of the experiment cannot be very convincing either. In general the
   experiments in which only verbal reports are tested, are always ambiguous.
   Unfortunately, the same degree of ambiguity underlies the interpretation
   of the empirical data described in essay 15. Essay 15 evaluates the
   conceptual misunderstandings that different people form when they assign
   different meanings to the same words (and yet communication is somewhat
   successful). The same vague reason reveals how much the judgment about the
   character of a human being depends on the misleading interpretation of
   personal traits in essay 16. These, in fact, are always formulated in
   terms of mental concepts that are often not clear-cut. To be honest, this
   section could be useful for experimental social psychologists, but is not
   very significant from a theoretical point-of-view because of the general
   obscurity of the reported data. However, by joining with the results of
   the concrete work of social psychologists, one can understand the
   difficulty to explain complex behaviors that are influenced by many and  
   various elements.
5. Mindreading is a powerful cognitive tool, and likely is
   one of the secrets of the success of the human race. Yet, like all of the
   other human capacities, it is limited. To rely on it without caution can
   have serious consequences. The fifth section, "Limits of Mindreading",
   collects some investigations about the difficulty of this capacity’s application.
   Essay 17 denounces the excess of egocentrism, that is, the insistence on
   weighing psychological modalities of others in comparison with one’s own
   psychological modalities. According to the authors of essay 17, this is a
   fallacy of humans from birth to maturity. They empirically test the
   misleading egocentric bias in relation to the inaccuracies with which a
   listener interprets the utterances of speaker. Essay 18 considers the
   negative impact of taking the emotional perspective of others in predicting
   their behavior: e.g., if you answer the question: How would a hiker feel
   after spending 4 days, lost and without food, in an Alaskan desert area?
   After stepping into the shoes of the hiker, likely your evaluation is
   unbalanced and not very lucid. Essay 19 evaluates the predictions that
   certain experimental subjects formulate on the basis of the empathic model
   of re-enactment of tricky situations, such as new motherhood, alcoholism,
   and parental divorce. In any case, the predictions produce an incoherent
   body of data. In essay 20 the aptitude for a member of a couple to
   interpret the emotions of his partner results in dual judgment. On one
   hand, accuracy in empathic interpretation can be fruitful for a better
   understanding of the partners. On the other hand, it seems that the better
   understanding of the psychological dimension of the partner can seriously
   endanger the relationship between the members of the couple. In general,
   essays 17-20 test the effects of empathic mindreading on the psychology of
   interpersonal relations. Likely, these essays are more interesting for
   social psychologists rather than for scholars who have an interest in the
   theoretical import of the capacity of mindreading. In the last and 21^st
   essay of the 5^th section which concludes the book, Robyn
   Langdon retakes an important theoretical reflection. Prof. Langdon
   compares autism and schizophrenia in relation with mindreading. In fact,
   subjects with autism and schizophrenia, although different in
   symptomatological, epidemiological, and diagnostic points-of-view, both
   possess deficits in mindreading. Yet the impairment of mindreading in
   autistic people differs from the one in schizophrenics. Langdon, relying
   on a her own experiment of visual perspective taking in schizophrenics,
   does not explain the deficits of mindreading in schizophrenics and
   autistics on the basis of a common etiology (like Chris Frith does in his
   1992 book "The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia – book that
   Langdon curiously enough neglects). According to Langdon, schizophrenics
   lack    a world-centered frame of reference, by means of which non
   schizophrenic people can position themselves as subjects endowed with a
   cognitive perspective among other intentional subjects. This incapacity is
   caused by a handicap in simulating (here though Langdon by
   "simulation" means somewhat an idiosyncratic, little clear, and
   rather misleading concept) the subjective experience of others. Likely
   such a handicap is domain-specific. Unfortunately, Langdon does not
   clarify whether her explanation of the mindreading impairment in
   schizophrenics can be also useful to explain mindblindness in subjects
   with autism. The natural conclusion to draw is that mindreading is a
   general capacity, very intricate, and its complexity is revealed by
   unfortunate malfunctions. These malfunctions differ and have varying
   etiologies, as in the case of autism and schizophrenia.

All of the essays in the book
edited by Malle and Hodges are properly written, and offer a broad and
interdisciplinary survey of the themes that can be discussed in relation to the
problem of other minds. If this was, originally, a philosophical problem, Other
Minds clearly proves that psychological sciences can work to find a
solution for it. The way in which psychology deals with the problem is
thought-provoking, and is maybe more stimulating than the way in which
philosophers have treated it in the past. However, among those that I have
quickly reviewed, the essays most interesting for me are the ones which are
theoretically relevant, or at least raise theoretical doubts. These are essays
4 and 21 focusing on theoretical and conceptual foundations of the capacity of mindreading.
Maybe the fact that I preferred the most theoretical essays is not only a
matter of personal taste, but it could also be notable. It might further
suggest that the more concrete answers proposed by scientific psychology
adopting an empirical methodology raise several theoretical questions.
Psychologists also have to recognize the need of theory, even about very
pragmatic issues. Otherwise they might fall under the Wittgensteinian curse of
the Philosophical Investigations (2^nd part, section XIV)
against psychology, whose experimental methods are doomed to an inescapable
conceptual confusion. After reading the volume edited by Malle and Hodges, and
the jungle of concepts (sometimes obscure) that are contained in it, anyone who
has read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations will remember that
dismissive passage. Likely, in order to exorcise Wittgenstein’s curse against
psychology and, therefore, against this book, we should consider it as a good
collection of the results of empirical psychological investigations. Yet many
other remarks, both theoretical and methodological, have to be made about its
content.

© 2006 Giacomo Romano

Giacomo Romano, PhD, Philosophy
Department, University of Siena (Italy)

Categories: Psychology, Philosophical