As I’m trawling the literature for work related to our own in-process work on action coordinatio across species, I am becoming aware of some interesting convergences in current approaches to social cognition:
- Shifting the focus away from inferring mental states towards bringing informational and relational knowledge to the surface. As in Deschrijver & Palmer 2020, who propose to reframe social cognition as not so much about mental representations as about relational knowledge.
- Similarly, a move towards knowledge (as opposed to representations of beliefs) in accounts of how we understand other minds. As in Phillips et al. (2020) in BBS, who argue that even if nonhuman primates may not attribute beliefs, they may attribute knowledge.
- And likewise, a demystification of the notion of theory of mind by way of simplifying what may be involved in cases that appear (to us) to involve mental state attribution. As in Nanay 2020, who introduces the notion of “vicarious representation”.
I am drawing these examples from disparate literatures, but they seem to me to point in similar directions. In particular, all of them are moves towards simplifying theoretical apparatus. They bring to mind Braitenberg’s law of uphill analysis and downhill invention: what looks to us as highly complex behaviour may originate in much simpler processes that we at first thought would assume.
These developments fit well with current work on human interaction and are bound to provide fertile ground for interdisciplinary consilience (or at least rapprochement).
References cited
Deschrijver, Eliane, and Colin Palmer. 2020. ‘Reframing Social Cognition: Relational versus Representational Mentalizing’. Psychological Bulletin 146 (11). US: American Psychological Association: 941–69. doi:10.1037/bul0000302.
Nanay, Bence. 2020. ‘Vicarious Representation: A New Theory of Social Cognition’. Cognition 205 (December): 104451. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104451.
Phillips, Jonathan, Wesley Buckwalter, Fiery Cushman, Ori Friedman, Alia Martin, John Turri, Laurie Santos, and Joshua Knobe. 2021. ‘Knowledge before Belief’. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44 (January): e140. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20000618.
Note. This post originated as a Twitter thread (sept 22, 2020) when Twitter still was a thing.