Social cognitive abilities in infancy: Is mindreading the best explanation?

Fenici, Marco

doi:10.1080/09515089.2013.865096

Cited by 17 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 120 publications

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“…The catch is that when MMing this is only ever done incidentally, no direct propositional attitude attributions are made. This is possible as long as tracking capacities need not depend on directly specifying what is being tracked as such: something can be reliably tracked by targeting properties or features that are co-extensive with whatever is tracked (for an extended discussion in relation to the infant data see Fenici 2013Fenici , 2014. This proposal marches in step with Butterfill and Apperly's (2013) observation that it is perfectly possible to keep track of someone's propositional attitudes without having a concept of a propositional attitude, just as it is possible to track toxicity, say, by noxious smell while lacking any concept of toxins per se (Butterfill and Apperly 2013, p. 607, see also Hutto 2008, Chap.…”

Section: Minding Minds Without Reading Themmentioning

confidence: 99%

Basic social cognition without mindreading: minding minds without attributing contents

Hutto

2015

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This paper argues that mind-reading hypotheses (MRHs), of any kind, are not needed to best describe or best explain basic acts of social cognition. It considers the two most popular MRHs: one-ToM and two-ToM theories. These MRHs face competition in the form of complementary behaviour reading hypotheses (CBRHs). Following Buckner (Mind Lang 29:566-589, 2014), it is argued that the best strategy for putting CBRHs out of play is to appeal to theoretical considerations about the psychosemantics of basic acts of social cognition. In particular, need-based accounts that satisfy a teleological criterion have the ability to put CBRHs out of play. Yet, against this backdrop, a new competitor for MRHs is revealed: mind minding hypothesis (MMHs). MMHs are capable of explaining all the known facts about basic forms of social cognition and they also satisfy the teleological criterion. In conclusion, some objections concerning the theoretical tenability of MMHs are addressed and prospects for further research are canvassed.

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Section: Minding Minds Without Reading Themmentioning

confidence: 99%

Basic social cognition without mindreading: minding minds without attributing contents

Hutto

2015

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“…It might be argue that the argument presupposes that autistic subjects and three‐year‐olds similarly succeed in FBTs. At present, however, nothing disconfirms the hypothesis since we lack a clear description of what cognitive achievements undergird the capacity to pass FBTs even in normally developing children (see Fenici, , pp. 399–400, for longer discussion).…”

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confidence: 87%

“…The problem admits of no easy solution. Precisely this concern has promoted recent discussions asking whether mindreading or belief attribution capacities are to be taken as the best cognitive explanans beyond either infants' performance in spontaneous‐response FBTs (Butterfill and Apperly, ; Fenici, ; Hutto et al ., ) or children's performance in elicited‐response FBTs (Hutto, , pp. 25–26; Perner, ).…”

Section: How Can Experience Ever Induce Success In Fbt? a Socio‐constmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the one hand, it remains to be demonstrated that infants' looking behaviour in spontaneous‐response tasks actually indicates a capacity to attribute mental states rather than some sensitivity to perceptual features of the scene that are co‐extensive with the actor's false belief (see Hutto, Herschbach and Southgate, for an overview of the alternatives). More significantly, even if pre‐verbal children were able to implicitly attribute beliefs to others, this capacity remains importantly different from the understanding of mental concepts that is manifested by their older peers passing FBT (Apperly and Butterfill, ; de Bruin and Newen, ; Fenici, ; Rakoczy, ). That children succeed in FBT only after age four thus is a significant empirical result that demonstrates an important developmental milestone in their understanding of others' minds, which still awaits an explanation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

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What is the Role of Experience in Children's Success in the False Belief Test: Maturation, Facilitation, Attunement or Induction?

Fenici

2017

Mind & Language

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According to a widely shared view, experience plays only a limited role in children's acquisition of the capacity to pass the false belief test: at most, it facilitates or attunes the development of mindreading abilities from infancy to early childhood. Against the facilitation—and also the maturation—hypothesis, I report empirical data attesting that children and even adults never come to understand false beliefs when deprived of proper social and linguistic interaction. In contrast to the attunement hypothesis, I argue that alleged mindreading abilities in infancy differ significantly from those required to pass the false belief test at age four. I conclude that children's success in the false belief test reflects the acquisition of a novel psychological competence, and argue that social experience in the form of conversation about mental states teaches children to exploit belief reports to predict intelligent behaviour, and induces their acquisition of a capacity to recognize and track others' beliefs across contexts.

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“…However, we claim that these abilities are allowed by cognitive capacities that differ significantly from the embodied and situated understanding of social interaction that even infants already manifest (see Fenici 2015, Sect. 4, 2017a, for extended discussion).…”

Section: Social Cognition In Infancy Without Mindreadingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The biocultural emergence of mindreading: integrating cognitive archaeology and human development

Fenici

Garofoli

2017

J Cult Cogn Sci

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According to the thesis of natural mindreading (NMRT), mindreading-i.e., the capacity to attribute mental states to predict and explain behavior-is an intrinsic component of the human biological endowment, thus being innately specified by natural selection within particular neurocognitive structures. In this article, we challenge the NMRT as a phylogenetic and ontogenetic account of the development of the socio-cognitive capacities of our species. In detail, we argue that basic capacities of social cognition (e.g., the traces of early systems of bodily ornamentation within the archeological record, and infants' selective attention at others' beliefs in spontaneous-response false belief tasks) do not involve meta-representational mindreading but are better explained by appealing to situated embodied capacities acquired in social interaction. While we acknowledge that more flexible capacities of social cognition (e.g., those implied by the use of political emblems in industrialized societies, or by 4-year-olds' success in elicitedresponse false belief tasks) involve genuine mindreading, we argue that this ability is elicited and scaffolded by linguistic communication. We conclude that mindreading has emerged as the outcome of a highly derivative long-term constructivist process of biocultural becoming that led to a relatively recent restructuring of the human mind in multiple worldly locations at different times. In particular, we conjecture that humans gradually converged on establishing linguistic practices allowing the understanding of others' actions in terms of mental reasons. These practices were bequeathed to further generations, and continue nowadays to scaffold the acquisition of mindreading in early childhood.

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Social cognitive abilities in infancy: Is mindreading the best explanation?

Cited by 17 publications

References 120 publications

Basic social cognition without mindreading: minding minds without attributing contents

Basic social cognition without mindreading: minding minds without attributing contents

What is the Role of Experience in Children's Success in the False Belief Test: Maturation, Facilitation, Attunement or Induction?

The biocultural emergence of mindreading: integrating cognitive archaeology and human development

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