Fantasyland
I’m still pondering this link between Theory of Mind and – and a lot of things: imagination, social cognition, lying, pretending. And via those things it links to even more things – empathy, story-telling, literature and art, religion, politics, manipulation, coalitions – really pretty much everything that has to do with humans as conscious intentional reflective social beings. It all starts with this ability to realize that Other Minds are other minds.
This all raises a number of thoughts or questions. A reader (who has a post on a related subject on his own blog) mentioned this article by Pascal Boyer.
Social interaction requires the operation of complex mental systems: to represent not just other people’s beliefs and their intentions, but also the extent to which they can be trusted, the extent to which they find us trustworthy, how social exchange works, how to detect cheaters, how to build alliances, and so on…Now interaction with supernatural agents, through sacrifice, ritual, prayer, etc., is framed by those systems. Although the agents are said to be very special, the way people think about interaction with them is directly mapped from their interaction with actual people.
Boyer doesn’t use the term but he’s talking about Theory of Mind there. Very interesting notion. ‘What’s she thinking? What are they thinking? What are you thinking that I’m thinking about what you’re thinking?’ And all that applied also to supernatural beings – so there is no body language, no gestures, no facial expressions, no rocks flung or sticks brandished, no conversation, no shouts or swearing or name-calling. Nothing to go on, one would think – except maybe the weather and the odd earthquake.
One thing that interests me about the subject is that it means (surely) that some (maybe all?) basic virtues are really cognitive first. Maybe that seems self-evident? But I don’t think so – I think we think of virtue as rooted in love. That love comes first and creates sympathy. But if I understand all this correctly, surely it’s perfectly possible to ‘love’ others without understanding that they have their own minds, and therefore that they’re not feeling or thinking what we are. Surely we can’t even begin to have virtues like empathy, compassion, responsibility, generosity, kindness, fairness, until we understand that others have thoughts and feelings different from our own. This basic ability that other animals apart from chimps apparently don’t have (though Frans de Waal for one would disagree with that) is absolutely required for empathy to even exist. Theory of Mind is the same thing as empathy. And it’s not so much a virtue or an emotion as a mental ability.
Another thing that interests me is the way ToM connects with imagination, fantasy, pretending. Empathy is not the only thing that ToM makes possible; lying is another. Children learn that other people can have false beliefs, so the next step is to create them. Autistic children never do either, nor do they pretend.
They will not play with dolls, pretending they are people (when they know that they are not really alive); they will not pick up a telephone and hold a conversation with an imaginary person at the other end of the line; they never pretend to be asleep in order to play a joke on someone else. In short they live in a world that is absolutely real as it stands: they cannot conceive of the situation being other than exactly how it is. And that in turn means that they cannot lie. [Robin Dunbar: The Trouble With Science]
I suppose one reason that interests me so much is that I was a really dedicated pretender when I was a child. It was like a career, a calling. I never knew any other children as deeply into pretending as I was – and I always thought they were eccentric for not being. It seemed to me the only way to play. How do you play? You go outside (or the attic or the basement if it’s raining) and you pretend to be someone else – Jo March, Mary Lennox, Davy Crockett, whoever – for hours and hours. That’s how. What else would you do? I kindly taught friends to play the same way – but I don’t suppose they kept it up anywhere else. But why not? Why not? That’s what I never understood. It’s so much fun. You get to live in another century, in another place, doing unfamiliar things, living in a different story. I used to think children who don’t pretend must be slightly stunted, mentally. (Of course, I’m only two feet tall, so I shouldn’t talk.) I’m not sure I still think that, and yet I do think the ability to fantasize, to imagine things as other than they are, is one that ought to be fostered. At least as much as the ability to play soccer.
Many people claim to feel empathy with animals. This is why such a disproportionate, in my opinion, amount of attention is given to animals in distress compared to humans in distress. I am not entirely certain that projecting such an anthropomorphising mind on to an animal is not, in itself, cruelty.
But since animals don’t have ToM they don’t actually realize when people project anthropomorphic empathy onto them, so the cruelty is minimized. That’s a relief!
I did read the Boyer article when it was first posted. Obviously, it’s not my cup of tea. I also don’t like the phrase “theory of mind”, which strikes me as an artifact of academic verbiage. (Do animals have a “theory of mind”? Of course not. Theories are elaborate conceptual constructions and animals don’t produce theories. Then there is Wittgenstein’s adage about the fly-bottle, how it’s the first innocent, unnoticed step that gets one into conceptual trouble. If one starts by inquiring into a minimal “theory of mind”, one might just end up producing a theory of mind.)
But as to the question of other minds, aside from the minimal, privative consideration that there must be a sufficient level of mental complexity and capacity for the problem to arise, there are three distinct issues: 1) the recognition, understanding or “knowledge” *that* there are other minds, 2) knowledge of other minds, and 3) understanding other minds in one’s dealings with them. With respect to 3, though there is a significant positional difference between one’s understanding of one’s own states and intentions and one’s (attributive) understanding of the states and intentions of others, the language, in which that understanding occurs, though syntactically shifted, is basically the same. (If one finds that an other is so different from oneself that one can not understand that other, then one must find the language to do so, extend one’s interpretations, or else rescind recognition. PI:” If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him.”) With respect to 1, such an understanding or recognition amounts to an acknowldgement of the separateness of other minds from one’s own and thus of one’s own separateness. This is more of an existential, rather than a cognitive, matter; that is to say, its constraints and effects will take place, one way or another, regardless of whether one recognizes them or not. But the recognition of such separation is inherently traumatic. Equally it requires a process of differentiation in establishing a sense of self, from which others are distinguished, which is itself enforced by the “mastery” of language and the role of deictic expressions, such as personal pronouns, in particular. But as for 2, one simply does not have a knowledge of other minds: that is why they are other, i.e. irreducible to one’s own cognitive identifications. Though one may be highly familiar with an other person, one does not “know” that person, but rather one must relate to that person, as an other. Thus, to take the case of “true” love, loving another person for their own sake, it occurs when one realizes that one does not “know” that person, that one must simply let that person be. To be sure, one’s own needs and desires are also at issue, so such matters are always conflicted. But being able to separate out one’s own needs and identifications from those of others is the hallmark of differentiation. Similarly, traditional theories that attempt to found “intersubjectivity” or knowledge of other minds on “empathy”, the capacity to understand what an other is feeling, which, in contrast to sympathy, does not imply approval or identification, have it backwards. Such empathy itself derives from interaction and relatedness with others, who do not correspond to one’s identifications, but may well be complementary, antithetical, disjunctive or otherwise deviant from them. The realm of interaction and relatedness is extensive and cuts deep to the bone, and, as the place where the communicative function of language is transacted, gathers and conditions our knowledge of the world and each other. But because of all this and the pains and difficulties it involves, it breeds a temptation, as a defense and compensation, to convert all these matters into cognitive terms and attempt to master them as such. But such an effort to overelaborate cognitive concepts into an overarching conception of the world is precisely metaphysics.
John, yes, I know all that, in the 1, 2, 3. I wrote an essay about Other Minds (called, thrillingly enough, Other Minds) for TPM Online about a year ago. It’s not that I’ve never thought about other minds before. It’s more that the implications of the narrower idea of Theory of Mind (sorry you don’t like the term, but I don’t have an alternative handy) haven’t really grabbed my attention before.
And I’m quite familiar with that way of thinking about empathy, too, of course. It’s impeccably conventional. So conventional as not to be worth saying, really. The point of my post was that ToM seems to imply that there’s another way of thinking about it. It’s not a “defense and compensation” or a temptation, it’s what the whole idea seems to suggest. I take it as interesting and rather idea-stimulating. Your comment seems to me to be just a wordy restatement of the conventional wisdom, which may well be perfectly accurate but is simply not interesting.
In short – I thought it would be interesting to think about the subject in a new way, so to have a torrent of the old way poured out is rather point-missing. You needn’t worry, no one is likely to replace the conventional version with my suggestion; but I still think it’s interesting.
P.S. Paragraphs. Paragraphs. Paragraphs.
Just got back from vacation and read the links. Thanks for finding them–much food for thought.
That was an indirect answer to the question you raised, as to whether “virtues” were not in the first place basically cognitive. The answer is no. Similarly, if you were at all implying that emotions were cognitive in nature, the answer is no. There may be secondarily cognitive components to such phenomena, but they are not “constituted” cognitively. The belief that cognition is the distinctive mark of the human and that rationality is to be identified with cognition is precisely the inherited metaphysical prejudice, going back to the slight Latinate mistranslation of Aristotle, as asserting that man is the rational animal. So the overextention of knowledge beyond the limits of its actual achievements and the attempt to cognitivize the non-cognitive are both residual continuations of metaphysical thinking and very much the “conventional” view. I was implying that I thought the Boyer article was such a piece of schlock metaphysics. (And I am distrustful of functionalist accounts of cognition, which are basically a sophisticated form of instrumentalism; to put it bluntly, such accounts violate the semantics of “truth”.)
In place of “ToM”, one could simply speak of a conception, category, or discrimination of “mind”. But the boundaries of its application are by no means clear-cut. (This is one part of the explanation of the question raised earlier as to how slavery could have been rationalized: it has to do with the boundaries for the application of the concept “person”.)
My conjecture about emotions, by the way, is that they are referent to interactions and relational balances. They would have acquired biological functionality and evolved to the extent that animals developed sociality, that is, to the degree that the adaption of the organism to a discrete social group mediated its adaption to its environment.
The answer is no. Oh. Well that clears that up then. Thank you so much, JH; that’s what makes you such a fascinating contributor to all our discussions.
Welcome, W.
JH,
“In place of “ToM”, one could simply speak of a conception, category, or discrimination of “mind”.”
Yes, one could, but then one would be saying something a little different. I rather think that’s why people chose to call it what they did. Not that I think all jargon is useful, but sometimes it can be.
“But the boundaries of its application are by no means clear-cut.”
1) Did anyone say they were? 2) Do you know anything about the subject, or are you just opining off the top of your head?