The target article seeks to illuminate the processes which enable and drive the acquisition of culture. Looking to clarify the big picture the target article ambitiously offers an account of how we catch implicit cultural norms – our ingrained habits and shared ways of doing things – from one another.
At the top level, the article defends the important but not-so-novel cognitive niche story, according to which the patterned practices that shape our expectations of one another are shaped by individuals responding to what they find salient in the landscape of affordances available to them (Hutto & Kirchhoff Reference Hutto and Kirchhoff2015). Moreover, the salient features of those local environments are themselves shape over the course of repeated of interactions – and they continue to cognitively shape the organisms that interact with them. And so on, and on. Thus, as the authors note, a major implication of their thinking through other minds, TTOM, thesis is that more traditional, individualistic approaches to the origins and basis of human cognition and reasoning are on the wrong track – or at least such approaches are inadequate if they adopt an individualist starting point. All of these ideas are promising, and worth examining in more detail. The article valuably highlights new research and empirical findings that can be used to support these aspects of the TTOM account they seek to defend.
Yet, the article has a much bolder aspiration. It looks to knit together a number of existing proposals – about cultural affordances, patterned practices, niche construction – by casting explanatory light on the mechanism or process by which we think through other minds. Calling on the theoretical resources of predictive processing and Bayesian brain theories of cognition, the solution on offer in the paper is to look to the free-energy principle, FEP, as the explanatory unifier.
The bare bones of the FEP proposal are credible enough. Certainly, the article succeeds in showing how its account of “regimes of attention” that are interactively shaped by a history of interactions with others which loops into a common local environment is compatible with the FEP. Even so, despite these modelling advantages FEP might not provide any deep insight into the nature of the actual processes that account for how shared practices are shaped by shared environments and vice versa.
TTOM invites philosophical challenge in that it sets out its positive story by appeal to individualist, cognitivist assumptions the cast the human social cognitive predicament as being fundamentally epistemic in character. When augmented by appeal to FEP the TTOM explanation is shot through with references to the idea that human brains encode information and the idea that individual brains are fundamentally inference engines – that brains deal their seclusion problem by advancing and improving best guesses about the causal structure of the world beyond. The cognitivist trappings of TTOM are utterly transparent, for example, in the claim that “the process of TTOM consists in inferring the priors or expectations that guide the beliefs of another agent or group of agents” (sect. 3.6, para 5).
Like its theory of mind predecessors, TTOM seeks to explain the basis of our social cognition by appeal to cognitive machinery that makes contentful inferences. Such accounts look promising if we accept the dominant characterization of social cognition – the standard mindreading story – which holds that attributing contentful mental states is what explains our capacity to understand and successfully interact with others.
The Bayesian brain framework assumes that – at its core – cognition is always and everywhere about making inferences concerning the hidden causes of sensory phenomena. The brain's inferences are taken to be subpersonal – implicit and unconscious – and abductive in character, unlike inferential operations of the sort found in deductive proofs. Yet, for all that, the brain's inferences are still presumably contentful and aim to accurately represent the true causal structure of reality.
In adopting this much of the predictive processing framework, the TTOM proposal appears to buy into the assumption that we are, fundamentally, at a spectatorial distance from others. Under the sway of this familiar assumption, philosophers are wont to claim that individuals have no direct access to other people's minds; that mental states are the, out-of-sight, hidden causes that drive behaviour; that in trying to understand what drives another's behaviour we need to posit hypothetical entities in our efforts to accurately get at hidden causes, and so on and on.
The spectatorial assumption is bound up with the idea that primary point and pervasive purpose of everyday social cognition is to bridge an assumed epistemic gap that allegedly exists between us and others. It assumes that what drives our engagements with others is the brain's efforts to accurately infer the mental states – whether these are taken to be beliefs or expectations – that move them; to get at the hidden causes of their behaviour.
The spectatorial assumption is often adopted by default and without question. Nevertheless, many philosophers have argued that close inspection to our practices of everyday social cognition cast doubt on the idea that we are always at a fundamental epistemic remove from others (Hutto Reference Hutto2004; Reference Hutto2008; McGeer Reference McGeer, Hutto and Ratcliffe2007).
Everyday social cognition, on these analyses, is a matter of directly interacting and engaging with the attitudes and emotions of others and understanding their projects and commitments, trusting or not trusting the accounts others give of why they do what they do. If this is correct, neither we nor or brains are always and everywhere attempting to discover the underlying causes of another's behaviour. To accept is to recognize that we do not “interact with one another as scientist to object, as observer to observed” (McGeer Reference McGeer, Hutto and Ratcliffe2007, p. 146). It remains to be seen whether TTOM can adjust or relinquish the cognitivist and individualist commitments of its proposed FEP explanation in a way that is compatible with such analyses of social cognition.
Samuel P. L. Veissière
[Opens in a new window]Samuel P. L. Veissière
,
The target article seeks to illuminate the processes which enable and drive the acquisition of culture. Looking to clarify the big picture the target article ambitiously offers an account of how we catch implicit cultural norms – our ingrained habits and shared ways of doing things – from one another.
At the top level, the article defends the important but not-so-novel cognitive niche story, according to which the patterned practices that shape our expectations of one another are shaped by individuals responding to what they find salient in the landscape of affordances available to them (Hutto & Kirchhoff Reference Hutto and Kirchhoff2015). Moreover, the salient features of those local environments are themselves shape over the course of repeated of interactions – and they continue to cognitively shape the organisms that interact with them. And so on, and on. Thus, as the authors note, a major implication of their thinking through other minds, TTOM, thesis is that more traditional, individualistic approaches to the origins and basis of human cognition and reasoning are on the wrong track – or at least such approaches are inadequate if they adopt an individualist starting point. All of these ideas are promising, and worth examining in more detail. The article valuably highlights new research and empirical findings that can be used to support these aspects of the TTOM account they seek to defend.
Yet, the article has a much bolder aspiration. It looks to knit together a number of existing proposals – about cultural affordances, patterned practices, niche construction – by casting explanatory light on the mechanism or process by which we think through other minds. Calling on the theoretical resources of predictive processing and Bayesian brain theories of cognition, the solution on offer in the paper is to look to the free-energy principle, FEP, as the explanatory unifier.
The bare bones of the FEP proposal are credible enough. Certainly, the article succeeds in showing how its account of “regimes of attention” that are interactively shaped by a history of interactions with others which loops into a common local environment is compatible with the FEP. Even so, despite these modelling advantages FEP might not provide any deep insight into the nature of the actual processes that account for how shared practices are shaped by shared environments and vice versa.
TTOM invites philosophical challenge in that it sets out its positive story by appeal to individualist, cognitivist assumptions the cast the human social cognitive predicament as being fundamentally epistemic in character. When augmented by appeal to FEP the TTOM explanation is shot through with references to the idea that human brains encode information and the idea that individual brains are fundamentally inference engines – that brains deal their seclusion problem by advancing and improving best guesses about the causal structure of the world beyond. The cognitivist trappings of TTOM are utterly transparent, for example, in the claim that “the process of TTOM consists in inferring the priors or expectations that guide the beliefs of another agent or group of agents” (sect. 3.6, para 5).
Like its theory of mind predecessors, TTOM seeks to explain the basis of our social cognition by appeal to cognitive machinery that makes contentful inferences. Such accounts look promising if we accept the dominant characterization of social cognition – the standard mindreading story – which holds that attributing contentful mental states is what explains our capacity to understand and successfully interact with others.
The Bayesian brain framework assumes that – at its core – cognition is always and everywhere about making inferences concerning the hidden causes of sensory phenomena. The brain's inferences are taken to be subpersonal – implicit and unconscious – and abductive in character, unlike inferential operations of the sort found in deductive proofs. Yet, for all that, the brain's inferences are still presumably contentful and aim to accurately represent the true causal structure of reality.
In adopting this much of the predictive processing framework, the TTOM proposal appears to buy into the assumption that we are, fundamentally, at a spectatorial distance from others. Under the sway of this familiar assumption, philosophers are wont to claim that individuals have no direct access to other people's minds; that mental states are the, out-of-sight, hidden causes that drive behaviour; that in trying to understand what drives another's behaviour we need to posit hypothetical entities in our efforts to accurately get at hidden causes, and so on and on.
The spectatorial assumption is bound up with the idea that primary point and pervasive purpose of everyday social cognition is to bridge an assumed epistemic gap that allegedly exists between us and others. It assumes that what drives our engagements with others is the brain's efforts to accurately infer the mental states – whether these are taken to be beliefs or expectations – that move them; to get at the hidden causes of their behaviour.
The spectatorial assumption is often adopted by default and without question. Nevertheless, many philosophers have argued that close inspection to our practices of everyday social cognition cast doubt on the idea that we are always at a fundamental epistemic remove from others (Hutto Reference Hutto2004; Reference Hutto2008; McGeer Reference McGeer, Hutto and Ratcliffe2007).
Everyday social cognition, on these analyses, is a matter of directly interacting and engaging with the attitudes and emotions of others and understanding their projects and commitments, trusting or not trusting the accounts others give of why they do what they do. If this is correct, neither we nor or brains are always and everywhere attempting to discover the underlying causes of another's behaviour. To accept is to recognize that we do not “interact with one another as scientist to object, as observer to observed” (McGeer Reference McGeer, Hutto and Ratcliffe2007, p. 146). It remains to be seen whether TTOM can adjust or relinquish the cognitivist and individualist commitments of its proposed FEP explanation in a way that is compatible with such analyses of social cognition.