Building on the historical overview of the preceding chapter, this one looks more closely at the theories in the field, with detailed attention to simulation theory (ST). The material on simulation is crucial for the rest of the book. I begin by first emphasizing the desirability of a comprehensive theory, one that plausibly answers each of the four central questions about mentalizing (sec-tion 1.6). A theory tailored to one of these ques(sec-tions may have difficulties with others. Second, how exactly should each theory be formulated? Choice of formulation can make a big difference when confronting the evidence. Third, many current researchers are attracted by hybrids of the basic approaches, and I, too, shall advocate a hybrid: a blend of ST and TT, with emphasis on simulation. More will be said about the kinds of ST-TT hybrids on offer.
Fourth, because simulation is the linchpin of our theory, we shall consider carefully how simulation should be understood for present purposes.
Any comprehensive theory must proffer answers to all four questions on our list, and such a complete or comprehensive theory is what we ulti-mately want. But completeness isn’t everything. We also want a coherent or cohesive theory, one whose parts hang together. In a preliminary pass at the rival approaches, let us examine their prospects for completeness and coher-ence.
The rationality/charity theory, like many of its cousins, focuses on third-person attribution. Attributors decide what attitudes to ascribe to others by crediting them with rationality and determining what rationality dictates in their circumstances. How, then, do they ascertain their own attitudes? Also by dictates of rationality? Rationality theorists commonly stick to their guns,
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applying the theory to the first-person case as well (see Dennett, 1987: 91), but consider the difficulties for this extension.
Suppose I try to recall the name of a visitor I met at lunch last week. Suddenly it occurs to me, ‘‘Garcia.’’ I reflect on this act of recall and self-attribute a memory with the content, ‘‘The visitor’s name was ‘Garcia.’’’ Can this self-attribution, or metarepresentation, be explained by the rationality theory? What might be the rational relationships in virtue of which the memory episode is assigned this content (the Garcia content) rather than another? Wouldn’t it be equally rational for the memory episode to contain a different name instead?
(Suppose there isn’t anything else I believe about the visitor with which
‘‘Garcia’’ distinctively coheres, nothing distinctively Hispanic, for example.
The name ‘‘Garcia’’ just comes to mind.) How could rationality considerations dictate this particular content of my recall? Rationality/charity theorists obvi-ously hope for a unified, streamlined theory, but does this have any plausibility?
Another completeness challenge to the rationality theory concerns the range of mental-state types it encompasses. The approach is designed to handle the attitudes, but the attitudes don’t exhaust the mental states. We also attribute feelings such as pain and emotions like disgust. Are such attributions guided by considerations of rationality? When someone’s scream leads me to ascribe pain to him, do I appeal to the ‘‘rationality’’ of screaming when in pain? When someone’s facial expression tells me he is disgusted (see chap-ter 6), is it the ‘‘rationality’’ of displaying this facial configuration when disgusted that prompts my interpretation? No. It is not links of rationality that guide me. Nor have rationality theorists explicitly claimed that their theory applies to feelings or emotions. But, then, some other type of explanation is needed. The rationality story must be supplemented with an entirely different theme for sensation and emotion attribution. This need not impugn the ra-tionality approach to the attitudes, but more work is needed to turn the theory into a full-fledged competitor with suitable breadth.
Issues of completeness and coherence can equally be raised for other candidate theories. Consider ST. No simulation theorist claims that the sim-ulation routine is used in self-ascribing current mental states. (But it might be used for self-ascriptions of future, past, or hypothetical states.) So despite the labeling, no comprehensive theory will be simulationist through and through.
At best, simulation will be only a partial story of mentalizing. What story should ST tell about first-person current attribution? For the sake of coherence, the story should mesh with the simulation element in third-person attribution.
If a (pure) ST story denies that theoretical inference plays any role in other-attribution, it would be surprising if it invoked theoretical inference for self-attribution.1Still, this leaves many options from which ST can choose.
Both the rationality theory and ST are primarily driven by their stories of third-person attribution. Does the same hold of TT? And does this mean that TT requires all third-person attributions to involve inference from
folk-psychological laws or generalizations? There are two reasons to hesitate here. One reason is that some (erstwhile) proponents of TT offer a looser or more liberal version of TT. Stephen Stich and Shaun Nichols (1992: 46–47) consider any ‘‘internally stored body of information’’ about a given domain an internally represented ‘‘theory’’ of that domain, whether or not laws are included. This specification of a theory, however, is questionable. Is any body of information a theory? Is the information contained in a telephone directory a ‘‘theory’’? That would be a very loose use of the term indeed!
A second reason to hesitate is that TT might sometimes allow simulation to be used as a shortcut in third-person ascription, as an ‘‘epistemological tool’’
(Fuller, 1995). This seems right as a logical possibility. However, no working theory-theorists make much room for simulation. They typically emphasize putative problems for the simulation routine. So I shall proceed on the as-sumption that evidence for simulation-based attribution would be evidence against TT, certainly a pure form of TT.
What about TT and the question of first-person attribution? Is there a particular stance on self-attribution that must be taken to qualify as a specimen of TT? As we have seen, some theory-theorists (Gopnik, 1993) maintain that self-attribution also employs theoretical inference, in complete symmetry with other-attribution.
This represents the purest form of TT. A more diluted form of TT might combine theoretical inference in the third-person case with self-monitoring in the first-person case. This was, arguably, the view of TT’s founder, Wilfrid Sellars.
Sellars says that mentalistic language begins as a theory but can subsequently acquire, in the first-person case, a nontheorizing role. ‘‘What began as a language with a purely theoretical role has gained a reporting role’’ (1955/1997: 107).
Attempts to reconcile functionalism with special first-person access can also be found in other formulations of philosophical functionalism. Putnam (1960) and Shoemaker (1975, 1996) hold that an essential feature of being in a mental state is being disposed to believe one is in that state. Being in pain automatically causes one to believe one is in pain, at least if one possesses a concept of that type of state. Under this approach, believing one is (currently) in pain requires no theoretical inference to the presence of pain, nor is introspection, self-monitoring, or any other form of ‘‘recognition’’ required. It is debatable whether these philosophers mean to offer a theory of mentalizing, as opposed to a theory of the nature of mental states. But if so, they advocate functionalism while rejecting theoretical inference for self-attribution. Two other philosophers, David Armstrong (1980) and William Lycan (1996), also combine function-alism with a special, noninferential approach to self-knowledge. Indeed, both identify consciousness with a perception-like awareness of first-order psycho-logical states. So one can be a theory-theorist of sorts (assuming functionalists are theory-theorists) and not take a theoretical-inference view of self-attribution.
Another way of mixing special self-knowledge with theoretical inference is suggested by the following passage from the psychologist Paul Harris.
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.