11 Mindreading and Culture

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11Mindreading and Culture
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• Social Minds
• Our minds are adapted for social reasoning.
• We have a persistency to anthropomorphize we
  react to objects as theyre intentional agents.
• We dont have to decide whether to interpret
  another persons movement as action we do so
  automatically.
• No inferential reasoning, no analogy reasoning,

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• Interpretative competence is dissociated from
  other aspects of human cognition.
• This suggest the presence of a module operating
  independently of other cognitive faculties.

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• The module presence, is reinforced by studies on
  autism and schizophrenia.
• Autism is characterized by the incapacity to
  read other people mind but leaves other cognitive
  capacities intact.
• This suggests that the interpretative capacity
  is dissociated from other cognitive capacities
  (cf. argument from aphasia in favor of the
  language module).

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• Arguments for Modularity
• 1. Dissociation
• Two capacities are dissociated if one can be
  lost and the other retained. There is thus
  informational and operational autonomy.
• E.g. aphasia proves that linguistic skills can
  be lost while other dont thus there is a
  language module.

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• The same for our capacity to interpret others if
  it can be dissociated from general intelligence,
  it proves the existence of an interpretative
  module, i.e. a theory of mind module, ToM.

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• High functioning autists seem to prove this.
• E.g. high functioning autistic children fail
  the false-belief task, yet they pass the
  false-photography task (where a photo is taken
  from a scene which get subsequently changed the
  autistic children will say that the picture will
  be of the previous scene).

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• 2. Poverty of the Stimulus
• Children become competent reasoners about mental
  state even if they cannot see, hear, or feel them
  (cf. blind children).

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• Poverty of the stimulus
• A child may acquire a language even though the
  data itself is too poor to determine the
  language the child needs no evidence for much of
  the knowledge she brings to the learning
  situation.
• Children acquire language from pidgin.
• Roughly, children always make the right
  hypotheses as a function of their genetic
  endowment.

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• Since the child can fixate on any language in the
  face of a poverty of stimulus about each language
  and since all languages are equally acquirable,
  children all begin with the same universal
  linguistic knowledge.
• This is the essence of the poverty of stimulus
  argument.

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• The poverty of the stimulus argument does not
  tell us
• 1. What information is innate.
• 2. How the innate information is represented in
  the mind/brain.
• 3. Whether the information is available to a
  general learning mechanism or specific to a
  dedicated one (i.e. general intelligence or
  language module).
• These issues are to be decided by the normal
  scientific route of the testing and comparison of
  hypotheses.

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• Simulation Theory (ST) vs. ToM
• Either the great apes represent the action of
  their conspecifics in intentional terms or they
  represent them in terms of bodily motion.
• Even without a rudimentary theory of folk
  psychology we wouldnt see other agents as mere
  bulk of skin, but as animate, self-moving
  creatures with functionally organized behavior.

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• Simulation theory
• The behavior of others is interpreted and
  predicted by using our own decision-making
  procedure as model for others.
• Advantages ST fits the phenomenology of agency
  insofar as we often understand others by
  imagining ourselves in their situation.
• If ST is right it also frees us from the burden
  of calculation and discovery. ST is a less
  intelligence-hungry account.

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• Reply
• At most ST presents a supplement to the
  representational theory of representation. We
  often take into account differences between our
  thoughts and the ones of other agents.
• E.g. we can understand/adjust our expectations,
  predictions, etc. of agents from other cultures.
• ST looks more plausible when seen as part of a
  hybrid. It need to be combined with account of
  the information agents use to guide their
  simulations.

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• But why need that information be in the form of a
  theory?
• If our information about others was a mere form
  of empirical generalizations from our experience,
  then we could not predict the behavior of agents
  in novel situations.

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• Folk Psychology
• Can be seen (Sterelny) as a form of guided
  learning instead of a full blooded theory.
• As such, it is sensitive to development.
• Would it be similar to Chomskys LAD?

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• In favor of the view that folk psychology is a
  full blooded theory people (Scholl Leslie)
  mentions the
• 1. uniform outcomes all individuals across
  cultures manifest (with the exception of
  psychological pathologies) a more or less
  identical folk psychology.
• 2. Insensitivity of development to learning
  abilities the development of folk psychology
  seems insensitive to differences in general
  learning abilities.

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• But folk psychology (FP) can be learned.
• There are important differences, though, on the
  way FP is learned and ordinary learning.
• The acquisition is developmentally entrenched.
• But most of this developmental buffering is in
  the environment rather than the genome.

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• 3.The process of development is insensitive to
  evidence This campaign against the learning of
  FP. If FP is insensitive to evidence it cannot be
  learned.
• But richer environment (linguistically and
  socially) accelerate the development (e.g.
  children pass the false-belief test a bit
  faster).
• This difference, though, is only of timing not
  of degree.

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• Vs. Evolutionary Psychology (Sterelny)
• The idea that the human mind consists of an
  ensemble of domain-specific, innately specified,
  cognitive mechanisms that are adaptations to
  specific ecological and social problems of
  Pleistocene foraging is a radical
  oversimplification of the pattern of hominid
  evolution. It exaggerates the importance of
  evolution of specific adaptations to specific
  problems, and ignores adaptations to variability
  itself.

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• The evolution of some important aspects of
  hominid cognition are perceptual and affective
  mechanisms.
• This may explain for instance a particular
  preference of waist to hip ratio, and other
  phenomenon discussed by evolutionary psychology.

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• Humans inherits much more than genes from past
  generations.
• These information-transmitting inheritances are
  human-specific.
• Hence we cannot easily apply evolutionary models
  built for other species.
• Cultural evolution .

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• Cumulative niche constructions
• Behavioral innovations can trigger cascades of
  further changes that entrench the new behavior
  (e.g. lactose tolerance because of a new diet).
• The increasing cultural differentiation
  generated by cumulative niche construction made
  the boundaries between groups less permeable.

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• The importance of dual inheritance.
• Human inherits both genes and culture from their
  parents.
• This is an important factor in accelerating
  changes.
• For dual inheritance to work, group selection
  must be powerful, for the fidelity of
  transmission depends both on individual
  psychological adaptations (importance of
  learning) and developmental environment.
• Hence, culture contributes in shaping nature.

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• The Theory of Evolution
• The determiner the is the problem.
• We dont have a single theory, but a set of
  complex views with various degrees of certainty
  (Christians fundamentalists exploit that in
  favoring design ).

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• Evidence for evolution
• 1. Physiological
• Evidence of related structures
• E.g. the structure of mammalian forelimbs. The
  wing of the bat, the flipper of the whale and the
  human arm all share the same bones organized for
  different functions.

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• 2. Fossils
• They can be dated and show sequences of
  organisms from currently unknown forms to
  familiar forms.
• 3. Biogeography
• I.e., the geographical relationships between
  organisms of different kinds (e.g. Darwin finches
  who have been blown to different places and in
  the absence of competitors evolves differently).

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• Natural Selection
• Evolution by natural selection is Darwins great
  contribution.
• This is understood via the idea of heritable
  variations of fitness, i.e. the disposition to
  produce surviving offspring.
• If organisms differ in fitness some will have
  more offspring than others.

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• If fitness is heritable, and the features that
  ground differences in fitness are pass down from
  generation to generation then features conveying
  fitness will become more common. Well thus have
  changes in populations
• Main debate
• What exactly it is what natural selection
  select?
• Dawkins claims that are not organisms but genes,
  i.e. the prevalence of genes that were most
  efficient at reproducing themselves.

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• The selfish gene
• The organism is a mere vehicle built by genes in
  order to project themselves most effectively into
  the next generation.

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• Group selection
• Its the view that certain features of organisms
  favoring conspecifics rather than themselves have
  been produced by selection between groups of
  organisms.
• Unselfish groups survive better than those
  composed by merely selfish individuals.

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• The selection of genes is insufficient to explain
  the complexity of the evolutionary process.
• Selection occurs simultaneously at many levels,
  including the gene and the individual and
  possibly also the group and the species.

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• Multi-level selection
• It is probably the current orthodoxy among
  philosophers of biology.
• It rejects the idea that it is possible to
  separate out specific set of objects involved in
  a certain stage of the evolutionary process.

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• An influential version of this perspective is the
  developmental system theory.
• It provides a powerful criticism of the
  gene-centeredness (genes are not special or
  unique).
• Genes dont carry information, nor present a
  plan or a blueprint.
• They only provide reliable predictions about the
  state of another organism.

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• Other factors must be taken into consideration.
• E.g. The sun help tomatoes getting red. The
  mere genetic structure of tomatoes does not make
  them to become red.
• Lot of factors intervenes in the development of
  an organism.

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• If the multi-factors view is right, the divorce
  between evolution and development cannot be
  consumed.
• Evolution and development works together.

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• Difficulties with evolutionary explanations
• 1. Adaptations vs. exaptations
• The distinction between the views that
  typically
• (i) traits of organisms evolved because they
  serve some function that they can be seen now to
  promote, and
• (ii) the organism put the traits to a use that
  is different from that which explains its
  selection.

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• Expactation isnt just an anomaly that
  occasionally derails.
• It is a feature of almost any interesting
  explanation.
• E.g. the mammalian lung from swim-bladders.
• I.e. the mammalian lung developed gradually out
  of the organs that ancestral fish used to keep
  them afloat.

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• To evolve an organ to doing X an organism must
  start with an organ or structure that evolved to
  do Y
• E.g. the giraffes long neck or the peacocks
  tail.
• The neck first evolved to support the head .

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• 2. Organisms are integrated systems
• Hence, changes to one trait will cause
  correlative changes to other traits and these
  will have positive and negative effects on
  fitness.
• Even the traits that are the primary focus of
  attention will have many fitness effects.

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• General lesson
• Given the problem with the multiple exaptations
  and the multiplicity of interconnections we may
  end up to being capable to give only some hints
  or suggestions.
• We may be incapable to provide more than a
  fragment of the truth.
• Modesty
• We may have a modest but not completely vacuous
  conception of evolutionary explanation.