Discussions of high-level mindreading typically focus on ‘‘whole’’ proposi-tional attitudes, that is, attitude-content pairs. This section is devoted to contents only. I explore the way(s) that mindreaders construct contents for others’ intentional states. Do they theorize or simulate? I defend a hybrid
treatment, but one that emphasizes simulation as the default procedure. Our fundamental, default procedure is to project our own basic concepts and combinatorial principles onto others.17
There could be cognizers whose interpersonal imputation of content pro-ceeds purely by theorizing. For example, there might be a race of super-theorizers whose own conceptual repertoire they consider proprietary. They approach the conceptual repertoire of others ‘‘from a distance,’’ prepared to impute radically different conceptual characteristics to others, even ele-mentary concepts and principles of conceptual combination. A similar pos-sibility is a field anthropologist who scrupulously keeps her own ontology out of the picture when approaching an alien culture’s ontology. She doesn’t assume that their ontology matches her own.
Is all this really possible? To make a coherent case for it, we may have to endow our supertheorizers with a philosophicoscientific theory of mental content. The theory would specify what content is in general and under what circumstances a creature has a mental state with identifiable content. Using this theory, the supertheorizers would specify satisfaction conditions for the possession of thought contents, even contents they themselves don’t (even can’t) possess. The theory might say that if a creature has cognitive faculties F and G and uses them in certain ways, it will have a thought content ‘‘y,’’ a content they themselves cannot instantiate because they lack faculties F or G.18 Although such supertheorizers are logically possible, we are not like them.
We do not approach mindreading targets in so theorizing a spirit. Our default procedure is to mindread in a fundamentally biased, egocentric fashion. We project our own conceptual, combinatorial, and even ontological dispositions onto others, at least our basic conceptual, combinatorial, and ontological dispositions. This is not our universal practice, but it is our default practice.
I do not hold that humans make no use of theorizing in content ascription.
On the contrary, they use a fair amount of theorizing (in a liberal sense of that term). Our fundamental or default practices, however, are of a projective, or simulative, character. Absent special circumstances, we presume our own mental contents to be suitable in kind to match those of our targets.19 Of course, we don’t succeed in matching a target’s propositional representations unless we combine the right concepts in the right ways. The matching task is never trivial. But our default procedure is to try, at least, to capture a target’s (propositional) content by attributing elements of our own thought contents. A radical theorizer wouldn’t even attempt this.
These ideas can be amplified with the help of an example from Dan Sperber (1997). A person sometimes experiences the need for a concept unavailable in her own mental lexicon. For example, a thinker may encounter an expression in a public language, the intended meaning of which remains obscure. Young Lisa hears her science teacher say:
(7.1) There are millions of suns in the universe.
Until that moment, Lisa understood sun as a proper name referring to a single object. She does not know what sun might mean as a common noun. She guesses that suns are things like the sun, but also that the teacher means something more specific than this, which she doesn’t fully comprehend. Thus, we might ascribe to Lisa the following belief:
(7.2) My teacher thinks that there are millions of ‘‘suns’’ in the universe, whatever the teacher means by ‘‘sun.’’
In thinking (7.2) Lisa metarepresents the teacher’s belief. But because she doesn’t possess the exact concept the teacher expresses with the word sun, and knows this, she cannot metarepresent his belief by replicating its content. She can still metarepresent the content by using a quotational device to supplement her mental lexicon. In Lisa’s thought, sun metarepresents the yet-to-be de-veloped concept with a mental placeholder. She needs this placeholder be-cause she doesn’t (yet) have the conceptual means of expressing the teacher’s concept in her own repertoire. She can think about the teacher’s concept, and hence about his entire thought content, without being able to think with that concept. Thus, metarepresentation can be accomplished in two different ways:
either by replicating a target’s thought content or by referring to it with a definite description (‘‘the concept my teacher expresses with the word sun’’).
The latter is a theorizing way of metarepresenting the content.20
As this example illustrates, we sometimes, perhaps often, use a theorizing method to metarepresent a target’s intentional contents. But we don’t always use such a method, nor is it our default. Our default procedure is attempted replication or simulation. (Recall that our characterization of ST in chapter 2 does not require successful replication, even in ‘‘relevant respects,’’ only attempted simulation.)
Sperber’s example is of a piece with concepts generally known as ‘‘def-erential concepts,’’ a notion made prominent by discussions of Hilary Putnam (1975) and Tyler Burge (1979, 1982), in which people use terms that rely on the linguistic expertise of others. Users of these terms need not think of themselves as possessing the same concepts as the experts. They may un-derstand the terms, at least in part, by way of definite descriptions of the kind just illustrated. If the concepts they associate with these terms are then used to metarepresent another person’s thought content, this is a theorizing form of metarepresentation. The simulation-of-content thesis I am advancing here does not extend to deferential concepts. The simulation thesis I wish to advance only applies to nondeferential concepts, especially basic concepts and basic modes of conceptual combination.
To illustrate the role of simulation in content attribution, consider basic ontological concepts, for example, the concept of a material ‘‘object.’’
Contemporary psychologists have propounded theories of object repre-sentation. According to the dominant theory, due primarily to Elizabeth Spelke, the concept of a whole object is the concept of a connected and bounded region of matter that maintains its connectedness and boundaries when in motion, and which is ‘‘maximal’’ in the sense that it is not a proper part of another self-connected object (Spelke, 1990, 1994; Soja, Carey, and Spelke, 1991; Casati, 2003). Whole objects so characterized are not the only things the human mind recognizes as ‘‘things’’ or ‘‘entities,’’ but people have a strong representational bias or preference for whole objects. They ‘‘prefer’’
to represent the world in terms of such items, as evidenced in children’s early word learning (Bloom, 2000, chapter 4). Very young children have a bias toward interpreting new words they hear as whole-object names, such as names for rabbits rather than rabbit ears. They also learn words that do not name solid, whole objects, for example, substance names (water), part names (ear), verbs (run), and adjectives ( yellow). But there seems to be a whole-object bias, which isn’t limited to word learning. In parsing the physical objects in a visual scene, a preference is shown for Spelke-objects. If asked to count the number of ‘‘objects’’ in a (fairly empty) room, people would not be stupefied, because counting by Spelke-object criteria makes it manageable. It wouldn’t be manageable if one were equally disposed to count by any ran-dom criterion, including one that admits as objects arbitrary parts of Spelke-objects, or mereological sums of Spelke-objects. People are not so disposed, however. They have a natural bias toward whole objects.
Because all people have the same conceptual biases, they substantially share the same basic, intuitive ontology. In principle, creatures with the same basic ontology could use a theorizing method to ascribe contents to others, but, I submit, we are not like that. Our default tendency, when assigning contents to others, is to prefer whole-object concepts, just as whole-object concepts are preferred in our own thinking. In other words, our ontological prefer-ences are projected onto others.21Moreover, they are initially projected not only onto people but also onto animals or anything else we mindread. So projection isn’t the product of a special theory that other people resemble us in their basic ontological categories. Rather, our mentalizing propensity includes a default propensity to project our preferred categories onto any target.
Theory-theorists might respond by claiming that our basic ontology is subserved by a tacit theory that belongs to our cognitive system. The theory might consist in a set of principles, including the following:
P1: Prefer a parsing of the world into whole objects rather than arbitrary parts of whole objects or arbitrary mereological sums of whole objects.
Mereological sums are entities composed of any random constituents, in-cluding spatiotemporally disconnected constituents like a chair and a bowl.
Another principle of such a tacit ontological theory of ontology might be:
P2: Prefer a parsing of the world into ‘‘good’’ parts rather than ‘‘bad’’ parts of whole objects.
‘‘Good’’ parts of a body include an ear, a leg, or a head; a ‘‘bad’’ part would be a leg-plus-adjacent-third-of-the-torso. Precise criteria for part goodness would be included in a full articulation of the tacit theory.
Grant, for the sake of argument, that each person’s cognitive system in-cludes such tacit principles. This implies nothing about how to treat other people’s ontological predispositions. What would be relevant to folk psy-chology, or mentalizing, would be a tacit theory about the ontological pre-ferences of people in general, not merely principles for doing one’s own ontologizing. Here is a sample law that might belong to such a theory:
L: In their material-object ontologizing, people in general prefer whole objects (Spelke-objects) both to arbitrary mereological sums and to arbi-trary parts of whole objects.
Do people possess such a law? Well, how might they have come to possess it?
Phylogeny and ontogeny are the obvious possibilities, which we consider in reverse order.
If such a law were learned in ontogeny, how would it be learned? How would one learn that others have a whole-object preference unless one were already disposed to believe this, or to project one’s own ontological pref-erences? This is very close to Quine’s (1960) famous ‘‘gavagai’’ problem.
What behavioral evidence, he asked, would show an unbiased interpreter (a field linguist) that a speaker’s word gavagai means rabbit rather than, say, undetached rabbit part? Would the speaker’s behavior, verbal or nonverbal, resolve the issue? Quine despaired of the possibility that science could de-termine a speaker’s meaning (or intention) and concluded that there is no fact of the matter to be determined. Others have resisted this conclusion, dis-missing it as a consequence of Quine’s excessive behaviorism. But it remains doubtful that we could learn the contents of a speaker’s utterances, or infer the specific contents of their mental states, without bootstrapping from own content preferences (as ST proposes).22
Perhaps the folk-psychological law is hardwired rather than learned. Did evolution deposit such a folk-psychological law in our brains? The suggestion would be that evolution deposited two types of laws or principles in our brains, one to guide our own thinking in a whole-object-biased way and another to interpret other people’s thinking as having the same whole-object
bias. Is this a plausible ‘‘strategy’’ or ‘‘path’’ for evolution to have followed?
Clearly, a more economical strategy was available. Once evolution had en-dowed our own thought patterns with a whole-object bias, why bother to program our brains with a second set of identical principles for mindreading the whole-object bias in others? Why not program our brains to project our own thought patterns onto others? This would yield the same result far more parsimoniously. That this is what evolution did is the simulationist hypothesis—a vastly more plausible hypothesis.
It is noteworthy that Quine himself was a simulationist about folk attri-bution of intentional states. He appealed to simulation—‘‘empathy’’ was his term—to explain how we ascribe contents both in indirect quotation and in mentalistic idioms. Here is a passage from Word and Object (1960) that illustrates his approach:
In indirect quotation we project ourselves into what, from his remarks and other indications, we imagine the speaker’s state of mind to have been, and then we say what, in our language, is natural and relevant for us in the state thus feigned.. . . Correspondingly for the other propositional attitudes, for all of them can be thought of as involving something like quotation of one’s own imagined verbal response to an imagined situation.. . . We project ourselves even into what from his behavior we imagine a mouse’s state of mind to have been, and dra-matize it as a belief, wish, or striving, verbalized as seems relevant and natural to us in the state thus feigned. (1960: 219)
Of course, Quine was also a persistent critic of content attribution, of the
‘‘intentional idiom’’ in general. His criticism, however, seems to have been predicated on ST (though not under that label). He contrasted the ‘‘essentially dramatic idiom’’ of propositional-attitude talk with the ‘‘scientific spirit’’ of behaviorist psychology (1960: 219), preferring the latter for both science and ontology. His simulationism led him to conclude that intentional ascription is a folk enterprise in a pejorative sense, not a proper exercise of scientific psy-chology. Quine’s disciples and interpreters typically portray him as a charity-rationality theorist, highlighting his remarks about charity in radical translation.
But the textual evidence indicates that his leanings were more simulationist.23 Quine exegesis aside, ample considerations support simulation as people’s naı¨ve approach to content metarepresentation, though this leaves room for a nonnegligible strand of theorizing as well, as explained previously.