Provided [that children] have some awareness of their own mental states, and of the conditions they face, they can arrive at a set of generalizations about the links between situations, mental states, and actions. For example, they can notice the pain that ensues after a fall, or the way in which visual experience changes with direction of gaze. These regularities allow the child to make predictions about other people, by a process of analogy. (1991: 300)
This view looks like a TT view (although Harris usually defends ST) because it embraces the idea that third-person attribution relies on laws or general-izations. But how are these generalizations learned? Harris’s story assumes that children ‘‘notice’’ their own mental states, which enables them to identify regularities in which those states figure. Then they apply these regularities to others. The ‘‘awareness’’ or ‘‘noticing’’ of which Harris writes ostensibly involves quasi-perceptual monitoring of some features of the mental states.
Although this is an unorthodox form of TT, it plausibly belongs on the chart of possible versions of TT.2
What about the question of mental-state concepts? Arguably, an approach deserves the TT label only if its account of mental-state concepts is of the functionalist- or conceptual-role variety, requiring mental states to be con-ceptualized in terms of a functional-role theory. Not all descriptive content is here considered to be theoretical; descriptivity is not equivalent to theoreti-city. What is special to TT, as regards the contents of mental concepts, is a specific form of descriptive contents, one that highlights causal-functional relatedness to external stimuli, overt behavior, and other internal states. Does TT have to take the canonical line on both third-person attribution and mental-state concepts, or can it take the canonical line only on third-person attribution and still be a form of TT? I am inclined to take the latter position.3 So, there are numerous ways to develop and refine the TT idea. But it is useful to have a single, default way to think of the TT approach. In the rest of the book, I’ll often associate TT with what we may call paradigm TT. This view embodies three theses: (1) Mental-state concepts are conceptualized in terms of causal laws relating mental states to peripheral events (behavior and external stimuli) and other mental states. (2) Both third-person and first-person attribution proceed by way of law-guided inference from observed peripheral events. (3) Putative laws are acquired ‘‘empirically,’’ by means of general-purpose scientizing procedures. When I speak of TT without quali-fication, I shall generally mean paradigm TT.
mindreading literature, especially the philosophical literature. Let me em-phasize, however, that it does not typify all forms of mindreading. In devel-oping ST, we shall encounter types of simulational mindreading with somewhat different features from this example. More general properties of simulational mindreading will be presented in section 2.5.
Suppose agent T makes a decision, depicted diagrammatically in figure 2.1.
Shapes in figure 2.1 represent either mental states or cognitive mechanisms (operations) according to the following key:
Ovals (rounded rectangles): Beliefs Squares: Desires
Double circles: Decisions
Hexagon: Decision-making mechanism Diamond: Factual reasoning mechanism
The contents of mental states are indicated by text or abbreviated text inside the corresponding shapes. Thus, in figure 2.1, agent T is depicted as having a desire for goal g and a belief that action m would be an effective means to achieve g. This desire and belief are fed into T’s decision-making system, which outputs a decision to perform action m.
Now let us suppose that an attributor sets out to predict T’s decision and does so correctly. How could his accurate prediction be arrived at, according to the two rival theories? Figures 2.2–2.4 depict events in an attributor’s head. Figure 2.2 depicts the TT story of how the attributor arrives at his decision prediction, and figures 2.3 and 2.4 depict the ST story. As TT tells it, the story begins with the attributor’s beliefs about the prior mental states of T, namely, a desire for g and a belief that m would be an effective means to g. Notation within each oval conveys the contents of the attributor’s belief. According to TT, another kind of belief plays a pivotal role in mindreading routines: belief in folk-psychological
g
m g
m
Figure 2.1. Decision (by target) to do m. (Adapted from Gallese and Goldman, 1998, with permission from Elsevier.)
laws. In this case, it’s a belief in a decision-making law, which would run roughly as follows: ‘‘Whenever an agent wants a certain outcome (more than any competing outcome) and believes that a certain action is the best means to that outcome, the agent decides to perform that action.’’ The attributor’s belief in this law is depicted in the bottom-left oval of figure 2.2.4
Thus far, we have described the initial states that fuel the attributor’s mindreading process. The next item is a cognitive mechanism into which these states are fed. This is a factual reasoning mechanism, the mechanism regularly employed in TT-style mindreading. TT assumes that arriving at a mental attribution (belief) is just a special case of factual reasoning, analo-gous to reasoning about physical states and occurrences.5The only difference is that reasoning about mental states involves a distinctive subject matter. The factual reasoning mechanism is represented by a diamond. It takes beliefs as inputs and generates further beliefs as outputs. In the present case, the mechanism’s output is a new belief about the target’s decision. This is shown in the oval at the right, with the content ‘‘T will decide to do m.’’ Notice that the output of the factual reasoning process is a belief about a decision, not a decision (genuine or pretend).
Figures 2.3 and 2.4 depict a simulation routine6for the same mindreading task, where figure 2.4 is simply an elaboration of figure 2.3. The initial states of the attributor are the same belief states shown in figure 2.2, but the at-tributor uses these states differently. As shown in figure 2.3, information that T desires g is used to create a pretend desire. Desires are represented by squares and pretend desires by shaded squares; shading in general represents pretense. Thus, the attributor creates a pretend desire for g, represented by the shaded square with the content g. This pretend desire is tagged with a ‘‘T’’ to indicate that it’s mentally associated with the target. Similarly, the attributor
T desires to attain g
Decision-making law
T will decide to do T believes (m g) m
Figure 2.2. Decision attribution reached by theory-based inference. (Adapted from Gallese and Goldman, 1998, with permission from Elsevier.)
creates a pretend belief that m is an effective means to g, represented by the shaded oval with the content, m? g. The pretend desire and belief express the idea that the attributor puts himself in the target’s (presumed) ‘‘mental shoes.’’ These states are then fed as inputs into a decision-making, or prac-tical reasoning, mechanism, depicted by the hexagon. A decision-making mechanism normally takes genuine (nonpretend) desires and beliefs as inputs and then outputs a genuine (nonpretend) decision. In simulation exercises, the decision-making mechanism is applied to pretend desires and beliefs and outputs pretend decisions. The shaded double-circle shape with the content
‘‘m’’ depicts the pretend decision.
The final step of the decision-prediction routine is to use the pretend decision to form a (genuine, not merely pretend) belief about the target, namely, that the target will make that decision. With this final belief, the sequence of states constitutes a process of mental attribution. The belief is represented by the right-most shape, the oval with the content ‘‘T will decide to do m.’’ Being a genuine belief, it is unshaded. Thus, the final stage of the simulation process coincides with the final stage of the theory-based process: a belief that the target will make a certain decision. Notice that figure 2.3, unlike figure 2.2, contains no belief in a folk-psychological law. According to (pure) ST, no such belief plays a causal role in generating the prediction that T will decide to do m.
Though not depicted in figure 2.3, it is often important to the success of a simulation for the attributor to quarantine his own idiosyncratic desires and beliefs (etc.) from the simulation routine. If the attributor has desires or beliefs that aren’t shared by the target, allowing them to seep into the routine could contaminate it. Such seepage can occur even when the attributor is cognizant of self-other discrepancies, as we shall see. The inaccurate simu-lation that results, however, would still qualify as attempted simusimu-lation under the ST construal (see section 2.4). Figure 2.4 is simply an elaboration of figure 2.3, which adds at the bottom a depiction of certain genuine desires and beliefs of the attributor that are successfully quarantined.
g T
T
T
m g
m
T will decideto do m
Figure 2.3. Decision attribution reached by simulation. (Adapted from Gallese and Goldman, 1998, with permission from Elsevier.)