Persons, pronouns, and perspectives

Abstract

Folk psychology has emerged as the dominant approach to social cognition within the analytic philosophy of mind. Its basic tenet is conveyed by the allegedly commonsense conviction that understanding other mindful beings consists in the ability to attribute intentional states, notably beliefs and desires, in order to predict and explain their behavior. Folk psychology defendants may differ as to what strategies are employed in the attribution of intentional states. While the proponents of the so-called theory theory of mind argue that the strategies recruited in the understanding of minds consist of detached theoretical procedures, the defendants of the so-called simulation theory of mind point to more engaged, simulational routines, with affective content and practical significance. A recent trend in the discussion suggests that a combination of both theory and simulation may be involved in social cognition, and so rather than oppose them, we should include both the theoretical and practical strategies in a comprehensive story of how humans make sense of minds. This recent rapprochement between theory and simulation theorists is indicative of the fact that, despite their overt differences as to the mechanisms employed in social cognition, they share a deep-seated conviction regarding the character of social cognition. On both accounts, social cognition is a process of mentalizing, i.e., attributing hidden mental states to other people (in order to predict and explain their manifest behavior). Both accounts thus operate with a split between the outer physical datum and the inner mental content. Furthermore, by focusing on prediction and explanation of behavior, both accounts tacitly assume that social life involves an observational stance towards others' publicly available mimicry, gestures, and speech, in view of extracting their mental underpinnings, rather than the stance of direct interpersonal interaction based on reciprocal engagement between social partners. As Hutto (2004) recently argued, received thinking about folk psychology is predicated upon the assumption that our initial stance with regard to others is essentially estranged and that we follow what Bogdan (1997) termed the "spectatorial view of interpretation" by regarding others as remote objects of study rather than as social partners. Consequently, on this understanding sociality privileges a third-person approach towards one's fellow beings, about whom one needs to theorize or whom one needs to model by means of simulational routines, at the exclusion of the second-person approach, where the interaction is a direct source of mutual understanding. © 2007 Springer.