他心问题的社会认知神经科学研究进路

作为当代心智哲学九大问题之一的他心问题,肇始于Descartes主义对心身关系的认识。问的是:我们能否知道以及怎么知道他人有心,亦即有思想、经验和情感等?对于他心问题的解决方案,20世纪90年代以来,随着现当代科学技术(尤其是神经生物学、认知神经科学和大脑测试技术等)的深入发展,哲学家与心理学家的知识联姻和交叉合作研究,提供了关于他心问题的若干重要成果和实证资料。他心问题不再成为"理论的死角"。当代社会认知神经科学的出现(social cognitive neuroscience,SCN,2000),在科学方法论上更加关注对社会性心智现象的神经机制考量,一系列研究成果都为揭示他心问题提供了科学旁证。这不仅说明了认识他心的可能性,而且表明了通向认识他心方式的多样性,物理学的方法并不是与他心相隔绝。本文尝试从社会认知神经科学的最新研究进展:镜像神经元系统,他知与自知、他心知觉和再认的社会标记、他心社会判断和归因入手来论证他心问题的可释性,为他心问题的论证提供一条多学科交叉研究的新进路。     

Hume on the Problem of Other Minds

Hume is not often cited as a philosopher who posited a solution to the Problem of Other Minds. He instead seems to assume the belief in other minds in his moral philosophy without justification. However, Hume needs to explain how we experience and respond to others’ affections, and hence generate moral sentiments, given how central the latter are to his moral theory. Two recent interpretations of Hume’s solution to the Problem are the Wittgensteinian Interpretation, and the Simulation Theory Interpretation. Both focus on the concept of sympathy as a solution to the Problem, claiming that, for Hume, sympathy produces the belief in other minds. This paper critically examines these two interpretations and offers an alternative called ‘the Analogical Argument Interpretation’, which reconstructs Hume’s version of an analogical argument carried out not by our rational faculty of mind but by custom and imagination. On this interpretation, Hume does not think that sympathy generates the belief in other minds, but rather, sympathy presupposes that belief.     

How Children and Adults Represent God's Mind

For centuries, humans have contemplated the minds of gods. Research on religious cognition is spread across sub‐disciplines, making it difficult to gain a complete understanding of how people reason about gods' minds. We integrate approaches from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and neuroscience to illuminate the origins of religious cognition. First, we show that although adults explicitly discriminate supernatural minds from human minds, their implicit responses reveal far less discrimination. Next, we demonstrate that children's religious cognition often matches adults' implicit responses, revealing anthropomorphic notions of God's mind. Together, data from children and adults suggest the intuitive nature of perceiving God's mind as human‐like. We then propose three complementary explanations for why anthropomorphism persists in adulthood, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be (a) an instance of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic; (b) a reflection of early testimony; and/or (c) an evolutionary byproduct.     

The Problem of Other Minds

This paper reimagines the traditional problem of other minds. On a Cartesian view, the problem involves humans’ inability to perceive other persons’ minds. Similarly, Gilbert Ryle claims that we cannot directly access another’s mind. The paper’s rethinking of the problem of other minds moves beyond these questions of perceptibility and accessibility. It asks whether there are certain groups of people whose minds are systematically misinterpreted, or even denied mentality. It argues that there are. This claim builds off recent work in philosophy and social psychology on epistemic injustice and the role of social categories in mental state attribution. The paper proposes the Problem of the Other’s Mind: the phenomenon of a (relatively) socially privileged person’s inability or lack of desire to understand the mind of a (relatively) socially underprivileged person.     

Knowing without knowing: implicit cognition and the minds of infants and animals / Saber sin saber: la cognición implícita y las mentes de niños pequeños y animales

The main aim of this paper is to highlight the need to address the conceptual problem of ‘implicit knowledge’ or ‘implicit cognition’ — a notion especially important in the study of the nonverbal minds of animals and infants. We review some uses of the term ‘implicit’ in psychology and allied disciplines, and conclude that conceptual clarification of this notion is not only lacking, but largely avoided and reduced to a methodological problem. We propose that this elusive notion is central in the study not only of animal and infant minds, but also the human adult mind. Some promising approaches in developmental and evolutionary psychology towards innovative conceptualization of implicit knowledge remain conceptually underdeveloped and in need of reconsideration and re-elaboration. We conclude by suggesting that the challenge of implicit cognition and nonverbal minds will only be solved through a concerted interdisciplinary approach between psychology and other disciplines.     

Getting over "the problem of other minds": communication in context

Theories of communication often assume that communication has a single, essential form or telos, the culmination of a one-track developmental process where precursors eventually give rise to the real thing. At one time, this essence of communication was identified with linguistic competence, whereas now it is largely defined in terms of "Theory of Mind." But the fundamental problem with "Theory of Mind" is the very problem it pretends to solve: "the problem of other minds."That problem, as formulated, is insoluble, even with the aid of theory or innate modules. In this article, we reject the superficial depth psychology of "Theory of Mind" in favour of a breadth psychology based on context.     

Wishful Thinking and the Unconscious: A Reply to Gouws

Abstract

This paper argues against the view that the Freudian unconscious can be understood as an extension of ordinary belief-desire psychology. The paper argues that Freud’s picture of the mind challenges the paradigm of folk psychology, as it is understood by much contemporary philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. The dynamic unconscious postulated by psychoanalysis operates according to rules and principles that are distinct in kind from those rules that organise rational and conscious thought. Psychoanalysis offers us a radical reconception of our ordinary way of thinking about our own minds.     

Intersubjectivity in Wittgenstein and Freud: Other Minds and the Foundations of Psychiatry

Intersubjectivity, the cooperation of two or more minds, is basic to human behavior, yet eludes the grasp of psychiatry. This paper traces the dilemma to the “problem of other minds” assumed with the epistemologies of modern science. It presents the solution of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, known for his treatment of other minds in terms of “human agreement in language.” Unlike recent studies of “Wittgenstein's psychology,” this one reviews the Philosophical Investigations' “private language argument,” the crux of his mature views on mind. It reads that argument as recording his shift from the modern egocentric paradigm of mind to an intersubjective one. The paper contrasts the merits of Wittgenstein's reduction of subject and object to grammar with the problems of Freud's metapsychological reduction. It shows how Wittgenstein's intersubjective method avoids the excesses of behaviorism and phenomenology, offering a specifically human way to adapt mechanistic and interpretive means to the communicative ends of psychiatry.     

The folk psychology of souls

The present article examines how people's belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal behavior represented as being causally related to one's afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is "like" to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people's interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive "system" dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment.     

Theory of Mind in Infants and Young Children: A Review

Theory of mind, or mindreading, refers to our uniquely human capacity to infer what is in other people's minds. Recent research suggests that “implicit” elements of this ability can be seen as early as the second year of life, in infants’ spontaneous helping, communicative, and eye‐gaze behaviours. More “explicit” verbally mediated mindreading skills emerge in the preschool period, and these are positively linked to social competence. Research with typically developing children as well as those with autism spectrum disorders suggests that exposure to conversation about mental states promotes theory of mind development.     

Reading other people's mind: Insights from neuropsychology

When trying to make sense of other people's behaviour we usually invoke their mental states, such as their intentions, beliefs or emotions. This mind reading ability has been traditionally investigated in developmental psychology and comparative psychology but is now receiving increasing attention from the cognitive neurosciences. I will show the important role that neuropsychology plays in unravelling the cognitive and neural basis of our mind reading abilities. I will illustrate this by showing how cases of adults with acquired brain lesions can help us tease apart the different mechanisms that underlie mind reading abilities and can help us understand the nature of these mechanisms, especially their relation to language and executive function.     

What’s the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Matter</Emphasis> with cognition? A ‘Vygotskian’ perspective on material engagement theory

The cross-disciplinary framework of Material Engagement Theory (MET) has emerged as a novel research program that flexibly spans archeology, anthropology, philosophy, and cognitive science. True to its slogan to ‘take material culture seriously’, “MET wants to change our understanding of what minds are and what they are made of by changing what we know about what things are and what they do for the mind” (Malafouris 2013, 141). By tracing out more clearly the conceptual contours of ‘material engagement,’ and firming up its ontological commitments, the main goal of this article is to help refine Malafouris’ fertile approach. In particular, we argue for a rapprochement between MET and the tradition of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, based on the ‘Vygotskian’ hypothesis of scaffolded and/or distributed cognition.     

Beyond intuition and instinct blindness: toward an evolutionarily rigorous cognitive science

Cognitive psychology has an opportunity to turn itself into a theoretically rigorous discipline in which a powerful set of theories organize observations and suggest focused new hypotheses. This cannot happen, however, as long as intuition and folk psychology continue to set our research agenda. This is because intuition systematically blinds us to the full universe of problems our minds spontaneously solve, restricting our attention instead to a minute class of unrepresentative “high-level” problems. In contrast, evolutionarily rigorous theories of adaptive function are the logical foundation on which to build cognitive theories, because the architecture of the human mind acquired its functional organization through the evolutionary process. Theories of adaptive function specify what problems our cognitive mechanisms were designed by evolution to solve, thereby supplying critical information about what their design features are likely to be. This information can free cognitive scientists from the blinders of intuition and folk psychology, allowing them to construct experiments capable of detecting complex mechanisms they otherwise would not have thought to test for. The choice is not between no-nonsense empiricism and evolutionary theory; it is between folk theory and evolutionary theory.     

It's the thought that counts: specific brain regions for one component of theory of mind

Evidence from developmental psychology suggests that representing the contents of other people's thoughts and beliefs depends on a component of reasoning about other minds (theory of mind) that is distinct from the earlier-developing mental-state concepts for goals, perceptions, and feelings. To provide converging evidence, the current study investigated the substrate of the late-developing process in adult brains. Three regions--the right and left temporo-parietal junction and the posterior cingulate--responded selectively when subjects read about a protagonist's thoughts, but not when they read about other subjective, internal states or other socially relevant information about a person. By contrast, the medial prefrontal cortex responded equivalently in all of these story conditions, a result consistent with a broader role for medial prefrontal cortex in general social cognition. These data support the hypothesis that the early- and late-developing components of theory of mind rely on separate psychological and neural mechanisms, and that these mechanisms remain distinct into adulthood.     

“认知科学”与“第二代认知科学”刍议

以计算隐喻为核心假设的传统认知心理学以及联结主义心理学均不能克服离身心智（disembodied mind）的根本缺陷,当代认知心理学正面临着新的范型转换。以具身性和情境性为重要特征的第二代认知科学将日受重视,并促使认知神经科学进入新的发展阶段。作者认为在身心关系上应该坚持生理只是心理的必要条件,而非充分条件的立场,克服生理还原论的危险;应该重新审视基于二元论的生理机制这种说法;心理学传统中的科学主义和人文主义有可能在第二代认知科学强调认知情境性的基础上达成某种融合;第一代认知科学对意识的研究是不成功的,因为对知觉、注意、记忆、思维等心理过程的研究不能代替意识的研究,同时还应避免以意识内容的研究取代心理学研究的倾向。第二代认知科学中的动力系统理论关于变量（因素）之间的偶合（coupling）关系完全不同于变差分析中的变量之间的交互作用关系”,其动力系统模式可能更有助于破解意识的产生（涌现）之谜,并引发心理学研究的方法论的变革新潮。第二代认知科学的兴起将启发人们对身心关系、生理还原论、意识研究在心理学中的地位、人工智能对心智完全模拟的可能性等重大问题重新思考     

Understanding the Immediacy of Other Minds

In this paper we address the epistemological debate between emerging perceptual accounts (PA) of knowing other minds and traditional theory of mind (ToM) approaches to the problem of other minds. We argue that the current formulations of the debate are conceptually misleading and empirically unfounded. Rather, the real contribution of PA is to point out a certain ‘immediacy’ that characterizes episodes of mindreading. We claim that while the intuition of immediacy should be preserved for explaining the nature and function of some cognitive processes of mindreading, the notion of immediacy should apply for describing a particular epistemic attitude and not a particular type of epistemic access. We draw on Wittgenstein's discussions of one's relation to other minds to elaborate our claims and to move the epistemological discussions beyond stalling debates between ToM and PA.     

Mind,Soul and Spirit: Conceptions of Immaterial Identity in Different Cultures

The cognitive science of religion has recently focused attention on whether concepts of mind, soul, and spirit derive from the same or different intuitive foundations of immaterial identity. The present research is the first to look at intuitions about these three concepts simultaneously in different cultures. Methodologically, hypothetical transplants or transfers of minds or brains have been commonly used to examine the development of inferences about the continuity of mental identity despite bodily displacement. The present research extends the transfer paradigm to compare inferences about transfers of “soul” and “spirit” as well as the “mind.” American, Brazilian, and Indonesian undergraduate participants were presented with a series of scenarios in which a character's soul, mind, or spirit is transferred to another character's body. Participants made judgments about the consequences of such transfers on behaviors selected to potentially differentiate underlying intuitive categories. Results indicate that intuitions of soul, spirit, and mind do appear to draw from different but overlapping intuitions, which are recruited in different ways depending on religion and country. For American and Indonesian participants, the mind transfer was judged more often to result in a displacement of cognitive attributes compared to bodily, social, and moral attributes. Across the three countries, the transfer of spirit led more frequently to judgments about displacement of passion than of ability; religiosity was associated with giving more weight to the transfer of the soul, thus resulting in a greater displacement of all types of attributes. The results emphasize the importance of considering how different intuitive foundations, such as essentialism, intuitive psychology, and vitalism, might be recruited by culture to highlight different aspects of immaterial identity.     

自闭症儿童是心灵盲吗?——Gallagher的互动理论述评

在自闭症研究领域占主导地位的心灵盲理论是建立在心灵主义假设和普遍性假设基础上的。这两个假设将他人的心理视为封闭的、隐藏在行为后面的,且我们主要使用读心的方式理解他人。互动理论拒绝这两个基本假设,并整合来自发展心理学和现象学的研究证据将人类社会互动的形式划分为三个层次:原初交互主体性、次级交互主体性与叙事能力。在个体发生学层面上三者前后相继,在成熟个体的社会互动层面上,三者互为补益,但基于感觉-运动的直觉式社会互动是理解他人心理的主要方式。自闭症儿童在原初与次级交互主体性上存在障碍。目前,互动理论既面临诸多挑战,也具有较大的发展与完善空间。     

心理学解释的层次与衔接问题

心理学解释(psychological explanation)及其相关问题的探讨,是当代心理学哲学的一个重要论域,也是心理学方法论的核心理论问题。对心理现象的本质、特征及其作用机制的探讨,历来是哲学家与科学家孜孜以求的共同事业。在从不同视角、基点、逻辑理路对心灵及其与大脑的关系进行探析的过程当中,形成了不同的研究范式、概念框架和解释原则。我们既可以从较高的、个人的解释层次