Re: TOM & Folk Psychology
- From: "John Hasenkam" <johnh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 8 May 2008 01:11:15 +1000
Read minds? I wonder if we over estimate our ability in that regard. There
are obvious exceptions: some couples seem to read each others' minds, at
some point that has got to become distressing. The popularised notion that
autistics lack a theory of mind has always surprised me because I'm not sure
any of us can have a theory of mind. Do we really try and understand other
peoples' behavior by reference to some theory of mind? I suspect our
predictions about the behavior of others is more based on our direct
knowledge of their past behavior and current influences rather than
resorting to some theory of mind. Perhaps that is why a person's background
is so important to us, those hints are what we need to make some educated
guesses about what a stranger may do but these are guesses founded on often
sterotypical assumptions about people rather than any theoretical structure.
I do "theorise" about human behavior but when dealing with individuals I
respond to them rather than trying to understand them through some
theoretical framework. That could be a mistake on my part but I think most
of the time we are simply responding to people, not theorising about them.
John.
"J.A. Legris" <jalegris@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:d83edb0f-6dd6-4570-892c-273e22813dd9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From a review by Erik Myin :
Science 2 May 2008:
Vol. 320. no. 5876, p. 615
Folk Psychological Narratives
The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons
by Daniel D. Hutto
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008. 367 pp. $38, £24.95. ISBN
9780262083676.
....
"Hutto, a philosopher of psychology and professor at the University of
Hertfordshire, rejects the idea that our stance toward each other is
genuinely "theoretical." Mutual understanding, he contends, typically
is obtained through "second-person encounters," face-to-face
situations in which people ask about and provide reasons for why they
acted as they did. ...
mastering folk psychology (which he considers as the art of providing
and asking for reasons) is a late achievement. Its final acquisition
is realized through encounters, in conversations or in the context of
stories, with narratives about people who act for reasons, "folk
psychological narratives." The book describes the various steps along
the gradual development (through a series of transformations of
simpler capacities) of both the capacity to act for a reason and the
capacity to understand acting for a reason.
.... "Hutto insists on the importance of a public language as the means
of providing both the necessary content and form for the kind of
complex thinking that having and understanding reasons require.
Language-less cognitive abilities exist, fostered by abilities of
recreative imagination (reenacting previous perceptual experiences),
but they fall far short of the complexity required to read minds in
terms of beliefs and desires. As Hutto says in a characteristic
formulation, "This is devastatingly bad news for those inclined to
believe in the existence of nativist mindreading mechanisms of any
sophistication."
.... "Hutto estimates that the discursive practices that were
themselves only preconditions for folk psychology arrived on the scene
"long after the last possible date for universal anatomical change in
early humans." This timing offers an empirical reason for rejecting
innate mindreading in explanations of deception in hominids, social
learning of tool production, social coordination, and the emergence of
symbolic language."
.
- References:
- TOM & Folk Psychology
- From: J.A. Legris
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