Individualism is an entrenched and implicit assumption of a good number of mind and society studies. The role of the individual in guiding reflection about the nature of social cognition is traditionally presented under the view that interpersonal understanding can be achieved by passive, individual agents who process the relevant information about other agents “from the inside,” by simply observing them in action. It is the great merit of Schilbach et al.'s target article to have paved the way for a significant alternative to observational theories of social cognition based on modes of cognition other than the individual. Yet a central constituent of this alternative, the procedural dimension to social understanding, is construed along argumentative lines that raise several concerns. One line in particular, which is related to the way in which mental states are shared in relational dynamics, relies on assumptions that might well turn out to be at odds with some aspects of the authors' proposal.
The target article discusses the concept of shared mental states mainly in the context of the empirical literature on joint attention, which in turn draws on philosophical work about collective intentionality (Tomasello Reference Tomasello2009; Gallotti Reference Gallotti2012). On one possible reading, a state of shared intentionality can be described as one in which individual agents think and act in the first person-plural (“we”), meaning in an irreducibly collective mode of cognition called the “we-mode” (Gallotti & Frith Reference Gallotti and Frith2013). Hence, joint attention is, in the words of the target article, the experience of “attending to something together with someone and being aware that ‘we both’ are attending” (sect. 3.1.2, para. 2). This sense of “we-ness” evidently echoes the sort of directedness towards each other's mind (“you-and-me”) that captures the gist of the second-person perspective. But the commonality is not merely conceptual. Both approaches direct philosophical and scientific attention to the sort of meeting of minds that is claimed to be characteristic of awareness of other minds. So the target article goes further in suggesting that the commonality is of substance and purpose: cognizing in the first-person plural (we) can be subsumed under the second-person label (you).
It is certainly the case that acting together produces a form of mental “attunement” that could not be attained if one's action was conceived of in abstraction, or in isolation, from that of others. But the point is to specify the exact aspect of real-time interaction that individuates the relevant meeting of minds, and this is where the authors' suggestion should be resisted on motivational and conceptual grounds. With regard to the motive, we-mode theorists traditionally postulate first-person plural representations (“we-representations”) to gain a better understanding of phenomena of sociality that could only be partially explained by representations which specify features of actions solely from the perspective of the first-person thinking and experiencing subject “I”. For example, research in group behavior shows that team-reasoners have a broader grasp of the action scene, which therefore narrows the range of possible interpretations of each player's behavior, than a purely distributive, that is, individualistic, account of strategic interaction would achieve (Bacharach Reference Bacharach2006). This is because individuals understand the action scene from a shared point of view, namely one that maps their own and the others' action planning onto a group perspective (Tsai et al. Reference Tsai, Sebanz and Knoblich2011). Of course, people acting as a group see things differently from people acting as single agents. But the point of the we-mode is not that ongoing interaction plays a constitutive role for social knowing; it is that individuals are capable of thinking of themselves and the others as plural rather than single subjects of thought and agency. This move makes an important step forward from individualistic approaches to social cognition, but it certainly is not anti-individualistic enough to meet the standards of the second-person approach. Neither is it constrained by the anti-mechanistic spirit of the target article, because we-mode theorists aim to develop a causal-psychological account of the cognitive processes involved in group-thinking. It is this constraint that raises further conceptual doubts about the similarity of the you- and the we-mode approach.
In analyses of shared intentionality, the concept of we-ness has considerable explanatory power. The concept offers a vivid grasp of what it means to mutually understand each other and interact, precisely in terms of the individual agents' perceiving themselves as a “we” doing things together. The current challenge for research in shared intentionality is to look down at low-level parts of the architecture of the brain that might instantiate the kind of functions identified as processes of we-thinking. Some of these processes are likely to be implicit: Although the experience of we-ness can rise to the level of consciousness, it need not do so (Frith Reference Frith2012a). That is, people do not have to be in the mental state of attending to themselves as members of the same group for mutual understanding and interaction to occur. If this characterization of the we-mode turned out to be robust enough, then this would be, at least partly, consistent with the claim of second-person theorists that no discrete form of psychological awareness needs to be internally generated and introspected upon as a prerequisite of social cognition. However, if no mechanism whatsoever is postulated for the idea that knowledge of other minds consists in directly perceiving your mind towards me, then something important seems to be left out of the picture. What is the exact process whereby experience of reciprocity alone secures full understanding of minds? Furthermore, if one succeeded in answering this question without reference to individual mechanisms, what would the advantage of this explanatory effort be after all? These are important questions for critically engaging the two literatures on the we- and the you-mode. They are especially important for generating the appropriate operationalization of the relevant theoretical constructs which will be so crucial for future experimental studies.
Individualism is an entrenched and implicit assumption of a good number of mind and society studies. The role of the individual in guiding reflection about the nature of social cognition is traditionally presented under the view that interpersonal understanding can be achieved by passive, individual agents who process the relevant information about other agents “from the inside,” by simply observing them in action. It is the great merit of Schilbach et al.'s target article to have paved the way for a significant alternative to observational theories of social cognition based on modes of cognition other than the individual. Yet a central constituent of this alternative, the procedural dimension to social understanding, is construed along argumentative lines that raise several concerns. One line in particular, which is related to the way in which mental states are shared in relational dynamics, relies on assumptions that might well turn out to be at odds with some aspects of the authors' proposal.
The target article discusses the concept of shared mental states mainly in the context of the empirical literature on joint attention, which in turn draws on philosophical work about collective intentionality (Tomasello Reference Tomasello2009; Gallotti Reference Gallotti2012). On one possible reading, a state of shared intentionality can be described as one in which individual agents think and act in the first person-plural (“we”), meaning in an irreducibly collective mode of cognition called the “we-mode” (Gallotti & Frith Reference Gallotti and Frith2013). Hence, joint attention is, in the words of the target article, the experience of “attending to something together with someone and being aware that ‘we both’ are attending” (sect. 3.1.2, para. 2). This sense of “we-ness” evidently echoes the sort of directedness towards each other's mind (“you-and-me”) that captures the gist of the second-person perspective. But the commonality is not merely conceptual. Both approaches direct philosophical and scientific attention to the sort of meeting of minds that is claimed to be characteristic of awareness of other minds. So the target article goes further in suggesting that the commonality is of substance and purpose: cognizing in the first-person plural (we) can be subsumed under the second-person label (you).
It is certainly the case that acting together produces a form of mental “attunement” that could not be attained if one's action was conceived of in abstraction, or in isolation, from that of others. But the point is to specify the exact aspect of real-time interaction that individuates the relevant meeting of minds, and this is where the authors' suggestion should be resisted on motivational and conceptual grounds. With regard to the motive, we-mode theorists traditionally postulate first-person plural representations (“we-representations”) to gain a better understanding of phenomena of sociality that could only be partially explained by representations which specify features of actions solely from the perspective of the first-person thinking and experiencing subject “I”. For example, research in group behavior shows that team-reasoners have a broader grasp of the action scene, which therefore narrows the range of possible interpretations of each player's behavior, than a purely distributive, that is, individualistic, account of strategic interaction would achieve (Bacharach Reference Bacharach2006). This is because individuals understand the action scene from a shared point of view, namely one that maps their own and the others' action planning onto a group perspective (Tsai et al. Reference Tsai, Sebanz and Knoblich2011). Of course, people acting as a group see things differently from people acting as single agents. But the point of the we-mode is not that ongoing interaction plays a constitutive role for social knowing; it is that individuals are capable of thinking of themselves and the others as plural rather than single subjects of thought and agency. This move makes an important step forward from individualistic approaches to social cognition, but it certainly is not anti-individualistic enough to meet the standards of the second-person approach. Neither is it constrained by the anti-mechanistic spirit of the target article, because we-mode theorists aim to develop a causal-psychological account of the cognitive processes involved in group-thinking. It is this constraint that raises further conceptual doubts about the similarity of the you- and the we-mode approach.
In analyses of shared intentionality, the concept of we-ness has considerable explanatory power. The concept offers a vivid grasp of what it means to mutually understand each other and interact, precisely in terms of the individual agents' perceiving themselves as a “we” doing things together. The current challenge for research in shared intentionality is to look down at low-level parts of the architecture of the brain that might instantiate the kind of functions identified as processes of we-thinking. Some of these processes are likely to be implicit: Although the experience of we-ness can rise to the level of consciousness, it need not do so (Frith Reference Frith2012a). That is, people do not have to be in the mental state of attending to themselves as members of the same group for mutual understanding and interaction to occur. If this characterization of the we-mode turned out to be robust enough, then this would be, at least partly, consistent with the claim of second-person theorists that no discrete form of psychological awareness needs to be internally generated and introspected upon as a prerequisite of social cognition. However, if no mechanism whatsoever is postulated for the idea that knowledge of other minds consists in directly perceiving your mind towards me, then something important seems to be left out of the picture. What is the exact process whereby experience of reciprocity alone secures full understanding of minds? Furthermore, if one succeeded in answering this question without reference to individual mechanisms, what would the advantage of this explanatory effort be after all? These are important questions for critically engaging the two literatures on the we- and the you-mode. They are especially important for generating the appropriate operationalization of the relevant theoretical constructs which will be so crucial for future experimental studies.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Chris Frith and John Michael for their generous comments.