No abstract

Contemporary research on mindreading or theory of mind has resulted in three major findings: (1) There is a difference in the age of passing of the elicited-response false belief task and its spontaneous-response version; 15-month-olds pass the latter while the former is passed only by 4-year-olds (in the West). (2) Linguistic and social factors influence the development of the ability to mindread in many ways. (3) There are cultures with folk psychologies significantly different from the Western one, and children from such cultures tend to show different timetables of mindreading development. The traditional accounts of the data are nativism, rational constructivism, and two-systems theory. In this paper, we offer criticism of these traditional cognitivist accounts and explore an alternative, action-based framework. We argue that even though they all seem to explain the above empirical data, there are other, theoretical reasons why their explanations are untenable. Specifically, we discuss the problem of foundationalism and the related problem of innateness. Finally, we explore an alternative, action-based framework that avoids these theoretical limitations and offer an interpretation of the empirical data from that perspective.

The present study addressed two related problems: The status of the concept of the soul in folk psychological conceptualizations across cultures, and the nature of mind-body dualism within Chinese folk psychology. We compared folk intuitions about three concepts – mind, body, and soul – among adults from China (N=257) and Poland (N=225). The questionnaire study comprised of questions about the functional and ontological nature of the three entities. The results show that the mind and soul are conceptualized differently in the two countries: The Chinese appear to think of the soul similarly to how they view the mind (importantly, they still seem to see it as separate from the body), while Poles differentiate it both in ontological and functional respects. The study provides important insights into cross-cultural differences in conceptualizing the soul as well as into the nature of Chinese mind-body dualism.

There are serious theoretical problems with the free-energy principle model, which are shown in the current article. We discuss the proposed model's inability to account for culturally emergent normativities, and point out the foundational issues that we claim this inability stems from.