The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity (Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research)

The Shared Mind

Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research (CELCR) Over the past decades, linguists have taken a broader view of language and are borrowing methods and findings from other disciplines such as cognition and computer sciences, neurology, biology, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. This development has enriched our knowledge of language and communication, but at the same time it has made it difficult for researchers in a particular field of language studies to be aware of how their findings might relate to those in other (sub-)disciplines. CELCR seeks to address this problem by taking a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of language and communication. The books in the series focus on a specific linguistic topic and offer studies pertaining to this topic from different disciplinary angles, thus taking converging evidence in language and communication research as its basic methodology.

Editors Marjolijn H. Verspoor University of Groningen

Wilbert Spooren

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Advisory Board Walter Daelemans

Leo Noordman

Cliff Goddard

Martin Pütz

University of Antwerp University of New England

Tilburg University University of Koblenz-Landau

Roeland van Hout

Radboud University Nijmegen

Volume 12 The Shared Mind. Perspectives on intersubjectivity Edited by Jordan Zlatev, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha and Esa Itkonen

The Shared Mind Perspectives on intersubjectivity

Edited by

Jordan Zlatev Lund University, Copenhagen Business School

Timothy P. Racine Simon Fraser University

Chris Sinha University of Portsmouth

Esa Itkonen University of Turku

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The shared mind : perspectives on intersubjectivity / edited by Jordan Zlatev ... [et al.]. p. cm. (Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, issn 1566-7774 ; v. 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Intersubjectivity. 2. Language and languages. 3. Communication. 4. Evolution. I. Zlatev, Jordan. P107.S535    2008 401--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 3900 6 (Hb; alk. paper)

2008015388

© 2008 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents

Foreword: Shared minds and the science of fiction: Why theories will differ Colwyn Trevarthen 1. Intersubjectivity: What makes us human? Jordan Zlatev, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha and Esa Itkonen

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Part I.  Development 2. Understanding others through primary interaction and narrative practice Shaun Gallagher and Daniel D. Hutto 3. The neuroscience of social understanding John Barresi and Chris Moore 4. Engaging, sharing, knowing: Some lessons from research in autism Peter Hobson and Jessica A. Hobson 5. Coming to agreement: Object use by infants and adults Cintia Rodríguez and Christiane Moro

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67 89

6. The role of intersubjectivity in the development of intentional communication Ingar Brinck

115

7. Sharing mental states: Causal and definitional issues in intersubjectivity Noah Susswein and Timothy P. Racine

141

Part II.  Evolution 8. What is the nature of the gestural communication of great apes? Simone Pika

165

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The Shared Mind

9. The heterochronic origins of explicit reference David A. Leavens, William D. Hopkins and Kim A. Bard

187

10. The co-evolution of intersubjectivity and bodily mimesis Jordan Zlatev

215

11. First communions: Mimetic sharing without theory of mind Daniel D. Hutto

245

Part III.  Language 12. The central role of normativity in language and linguistics Esa Itkonen

279

13. Intersubjectivity and the architecture of the language system Arie Verhagen

307

14. Intersubjectivity in interpreted interactions: The interpreter’s role in co-constructing meaning Terry Janzen and Barbara Shaffer

333

15. Language and the signifying object: From convention to imagination Chris Sinha and Cintia Rodríguez

357

Author index Subject index

379 383

Foreword

Shared minds and the science of fiction Why theories will differ Colwyn Trevarthen

It is a pleasure to respond to these essays on the collective story-making of culture: the experience of reality that human beings create together because they are motivated from birth to experiment with the exchange of fantasies and to find meaning in them. Human consciousness has the special gift of imaginative travel through times and places, and it grows through communication of intentions and interests. Language and the practical tools of our society enrich the products of the game, but its causes are in the movements and preferences of embodied minds, minds that have evolved to act in sympathy and to share history and invention, whatever may turn out to be the topic or task. Our common knowledge and perception of ourselves as knowers of meaningful facts depends upon, and grows from, our innate capacity for intersubjectivity. We know, of course, how involved we are with one another’s intentions, thoughts and feelings, and that much of this intimacy in experience cannot be carried in words. The mental life of others is, as Stein Bråten says, “felt immediately” (Bråten 1998). And yet mind science and its ambitious extension in brain science have, and still mainly do, regard us as single heads processing information, storing it up in memory for reprocessing, and transferring it symbolically. Even when we are granted a body that moves, it is a robot that struggles to know other minds by a hopeless effort of “theorizing” or “simulation”. Such unsympathetic entities are science fictions. We need a science of the imaginative fictions persons so easily share. The authors of this book accept that human life and culture is incomprehensible without intersubjective processes – so, the question mark of the title of the editors’ introduction in Chapter 1 must be rhetorical, and ironic. It is added, perhaps, because our experimental psychology has inherited and largely still pays homage to a scholastic philosophy of minds as separate experience-registering systems that act, and think, on what they alone perceive. But in the real sociable world every act we make, every feeling, has as much power to move others as it

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has to move our self. With compassion we can see causes of actions in another, even causes that they themselves fail to comprehend or control. All teaching and therapy, indeed all cooperative activities, depend on this sympathetic insight into motive impulses and emotions in human moving. I believe that all the inventions of culture, including the evolving languages that distinguish our different societies, and the arts and technologies that are necessary instruments of communal life and treasures of our history, grow from the ability that every young infant has to enter into the co-creation of a proto-conversational narrative with an entranced parent. Our stories of meaning are built on mimetic skills we have inherited from highly sociable animal ancestors, but we are born with new motives for fictional elaboration of rituals. Even our personality, the “who” we are and the narrative of what we have done and known, grants us the role of one protagonist in a social drama where significant others live as supportive allies or contentious rivals (Trevarthen 1993, 1998a, 1998b). Thus we become companions or aliens in relation to a meaningful world. Shared minds create all we know. Reading this book we sense the authors are glad to be free of a prison built of ideas that are unaware and unsympathetic of how we really live. They present an antithesis to the computational or representational mind, and seek to define the special human mind, which is not just conscious and rational, but has a unique intersubjective awareness that makes up explanations of a shared and artificial world – a mind that builds cultures with power to change nature. Given the exploratory nature of the topic, inevitably, they come to somewhat different conclusions. Because several authors make generous reference to my research on communication in infancy, and the theory of Innate Intersubjectivity I was rash enough to propose 30 years ago, I feel I should explain the particular scientific experience that supported the project, and the influence of teachers and colleagues who were ahead of me in the story. I was trained as a student of biology to master ways of observing in detail how plants grow and how animals move in adaptive ways. My undergraduate teachers were plant ecologists, physiologists and ethologists. My PhD research was on the experimental neuropsychology of visual consciousness in monkeys with Roger Sperry, who had proposed in 1952 that perceiving must be understood as information picked up to guide moving – that the science of consciousness or mind in the brain should begin by asking how the brain moves the body in intelligent ways (Sperry 1952). My experiments with split-brain monkeys proved that willing to do something can indeed determine what a brain sees. I began work with infants in 1967, in collaboration in with Jerome Bruner, who wished to examine infant cognition and learning in a different way from Piaget’s experiments on infants’ object concepts; Berry Brazelton, who was pioneering more sensitive and responsive paediatric care for newborns and their mothers (Brazelton 1979); and Martin Richards, an ethologist of mammalian



Foreword

­ aternal ­behaviour. Our aim was to observe what came about, rather than experm iment with a priori hypotheses about infant perception or cognition – to record in as complete detail as possible what could be seen and heard when a mother and infant were communicating, and to compare it with what the baby would do when oriented to an inanimate object. We saw complex conversation-like engagements in which both infant and mother exhibited intuitive competence for sharing their impulses, and we realised that there was no science to explain this. At about the same time two other persons – anthropologist and linguist Mary Catherine Bateson, and developmental psychiatrist Daniel Stern – were discovering the same phenomena and attributing them to innate motivations of an intersubjective kind (Bateson 1979; Stern 1971). We were, without knowing one another, exploring out of the psychological box, free to observe the cleverness in infants and their companions and free to speculate about their significance for human relationships and for cultural learning. All of us were entranced by the infants’ rhythmic sympathy with a parent’s attempts to communicate, and their joint inventiveness. Through the 1970s, using film and television to record and patiently microanalyse, I charted age-related changes in the play and attributed them to innate motives, the development of new sensory and motor competences in the infant, and sensitive intuitive support from the mother (Trevarthen 1974). I took the term ‘intersubjectivity’ from an inspiring article Joanna Ryan wrote on the development of ‘communicative competence’ before language (Ryan 1974), and her comparison of the infant’s tactics with those Jürgen Habermas had defined as the intersubjective functions or ‘dialogic universals’ through which conversational exchanges and cooperative meaning-making are regulated in society (Habermas 1970). At the same time Jerome Bruner led a neo-Vygotskian transformation of developmental and educational theory that gave primacy to collaborative learning in meaningful tasks (Bruner 1968, 1990). Children gain the skills and language of their culture, and learn how to manage the material world in cooperative ways, by way of their will to share purposes, interests and objects (Sinha and Rodríguez this volume). One of my young colleagues, Penelope Hubley, making a careful longitudinal study of mother-infant companionship in the early 1970s, observed changes from proto-conversations of two-month-olds, through play in games, first of the body, then with shared interest in objects, to the remarkable transformation of the infant’s motives at 9 months when the baby became a different kind of partner in intent participation (Hubley and Trevarthen 1979). The enjoyment of playful rituals by six-month olds in games with expressive gestures or toys, enjoying at a new ritualised level the teasing meta-communication that Gregory Bateson had identified as the critical element in animal play (Bateson 1955), was replaced by a more serious intent to do “work” with objects that had some potential for

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­ ractical use, which others would acknowledge. Guided by a companion’s shifting p focus of interest, and by exhortations to complete a little project set by movements of intention, the baby became a self-confident partner – a co-worker. At the same age, about 40 weeks after a full term birth, the baby was a self-possessed and self-conscious performer of many new rituals of social expression. The mutual understanding established in previous months and practiced in games was transformed into what Michael Halliday called proto-linguistic “acts of meaning”: vocal and gestural signals of things that might be named (Halliday 1975). We called it Secondary Intersubjectivity. The relevance to cultural learning of this trajectory in growth of the infant’s mind was clear, as was the primary importance of the “mutual attention” with a familiar companion. Strangers were too uncomprehending to be trusted in such first steps to a conventional world. And sensitive experimental studies by Lynne Murray proved how important contingent and respectful attention and sympathy of feelings was for the infant to build meaning in another’s company (Murray and Trevarthen 1985). True, as Susswein and Racine (this volume) say, my account of the developments, from Primary Intersubjectivity, through Games of the Person and Games with Objects to Secondary Intersubjectivity, which we continued beyond the first use of words to the Imaginative Play of 2 and 3 year olds, was descriptive. Yes, it was a taxonomy of stages in behaviour, but it was meant to be more than that. It implied and explored a theory, and I sought many kinds of evidence for the “causes” of change, especially causes in the infant’s growing mind. I was convinced that the only useful explanation was one that assumed that the fundamental adaptations of body and brain for intersubjectivity were innate, as were the direction and stages of developmental change through the early years, and the learning that was so obviously assisted by the companionship of the parent (Trevarthen 1979, 1989). True to my biological principles, and starting with a theory of how neural systems could generate motives, I looked for explanations in the ontogeny of the brain and body of the child, and for correlations with known age-related changes in brain anatomy and function. It was not difficult to collect evidence that an embryogenetic specification of the motor and sensory functions in somatotopic (body mapping) arrays was essential, as were the theories of experience anticipating motor images of Sperry (1952) and Bernstein (1967). At first we did not have a clue how the intersubjective transfer of these intentional images could be mediated, or what the evident emotional regulations were, but in the last two decades brain science has come some way to closing that gap (cf. Gallese 2005; Pankepp 2005; Barresi and Moore this volume). One discovery of major significance for any theory of the causal factors or processes of intersubjectivity, whether of humans or animals, is that the rhythmic



Foreword

timing and modulation of energy in moving is a “code or principle of conduct” that makes motives share-able. A breakthrough in the exploration of human communication before language has come from the demonstration of its special polyrhythmic “musicality” (Trevarthen 1999, 2008). The science of time in the mind or “biochronology” is discovering how impulses regulating the pace and harmony of moving pass from actor to perceiver of action. How, as Ellen Dissnayake claims (Dissnayake 2000), the temporal arts originate in intrinsic dynamic processes, already exquisitely present in a newborn baby, that keep the voluntary and conscious self whole and in well-being, and make them public for sharing in intimacy. Mimesis, which I see as richer already in the neonate than Zlatev (this volume) does (because I am sure that self and other are distinct negotiants in the newborn baby’s mind) is the parent of linguistic narrative, as Merlin Donald (2001) proposes, and ‘musical semantics’ as defined by Ole Kühl sets the stage for reference with symbols (Kühl 2007). I think these are the natural foundations for Itkonen’s “normative practices” that keep languages, and other cultural creations, coherent, productive and changing (Itkonen this volume). The story is new and there is plenty of room for different plots, but we have an open prospect and a sense of adventure. The science of the shared mind looks like the best game in town.

References Barresi, J. and Moore, C. this volume. “The neuroscience of social understanding.” Bateson, G. 1955. “A theory of play and fantasy.” Psychiatric Research Reports, Series A 2: 39–51 Bateson, M.C. 1979. “The epigenesis of conversational interaction: A personal account of research development.” In Before Speech: The Beginning of Human Communication, M. Bullowa (ed.), 63–77. London: Cambridge University Press. Bernstein, N. 1967. Coordination and Regulation of Movements. New York: Pergamon. Bråten, S. 1998. “Intersubjective communion and understanding: Development and perturbation.” In Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny, S. Bråten (ed.), 372–382. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brazelton, T.B. 1979. “Evidence of communication during neonatal behavioural assessment.” In Before Speech: The Beginning of Human Communication, M. Bullowa (ed.), 79–88. London, Cambridge University Press. Bruner, J.S. 1968. Processes of Cognitive Growth: Infancy. (Heinz Werner Lectures, 1968) Worcester, Mass: Clark University Press with Barri Publishers. Bruner, J.S. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Dissanayake, E. 2000. Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began. University of Washington Press, Seattle and London. Donald, M. 2001. A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York, NY and London, England: Norton.

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Gallese, V. 2005. “Embodied simulation: From neurons to phenomenal experience.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4: 23–48. Habermas, J. 1970. “Towards a theory of communicative competence.” Recent Sociology Vol. 12: 115–148, London: Macmillan. Halliday, M.A.K. 1975. Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language. London: Edward Arnold. Hubley, P. and Trevarthen, C. 1979. “Sharing a task in infancy.” In Social Interaction During Infancy: New Directions for Child Development, 4, I. Uzgiris (ed.), 57–80. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Itkonen, E. this volume. “The central role of normativity for language and linguistics.” Kühl, O. 2007. Musical Semantics. (European Semiotics: Language, Cognition and Culture. No. 7). Bern: Peter Lang. Murray, L. and Trevarthen, C. 1985. “Emotional regulation of interactions between two- montholds and their mothers.” In Social Perception in Infants, T.M. Field and N.A. Fox (eds), 177– 197. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Panksepp, J. (2005). “On the embodied neural nature of core emotional affects.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 12: 158–84. Ryan, J. 1974. “Early language development: Towards a communicational analysis.” In The Integration of a Child into a Social World, M.P.M. Richards (ed.), 185–213. London: Cambridge University Press. Sinha, C. and Rodríguez, C. this volume. “Language and the signifying object: From convention to imagination.” Sperry, R. W. 1952. “Neurology and the mind-brain problem.” American Scientist 40: 291–312. Stern, D.N. 1971. “A micro-analysis of mother-infant interaction: Behaviors regulating social contact between a mother and her three-and-a-half-month-old twins.” Journal of American Academy of Child Psychiatry 10: 501–517. Susswein, N and Racine, T.P. this volume. “Sharing mental states: Causal and definitional issues in intersubjectivity” Trevarthen, C. 1974. “Conversations with a two-month-old.” New Scientist 2 May: 230–235. Trevarthen, C. 1979. “Instincts for human understanding and for cultural cooperation: Their development in infancy.” In Human Ethology, M. von Cranach, K. Foppa, W. Lepenies and D. Ploog (eds), 530–571. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. 1989. “Motives for culture in young children – their natural development through communication.” In The Nature of Culture (Proceedings of the International and Interdisciplinary Symposium, Ruhr Universität, Bochum, October 7–11, 1986), W. Koch (ed.), 80–119. Bochum: Brockmeyer. Trevarthen, C. 1993. “The self born in intersubjectivity: An infant communicating.” In The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-Knowledge, U. Neisser (ed.), 121– 173. New York: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. 1998a. “The concept and foundations of infant intersubjectivity.” In Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny, S. Bråten (ed.), 15–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. 1998b. “The nature of motives for human consciousness.” Psychology: The Journal of the Hellenic Psychological Society (Special Issue: “The Place of Psychology in Contemporary Sciences”, Part 2. Guest Editor, T. Velli) 4(3): 187–221.



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Trevarthen, C. 1999. “Musicality and the Intrinsic Motive Pulse: Evidence from human psychobiology and infant communication.” Musicae Scientiae, Special Issue, 1999–2000, “Rhythms, musical narrative, and the origins of human communication”, 157–213. Liège: European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Trevarthen, C. 2008. “The musical art of infant conversation: Narrating in the time of sympathetic experience, without rational interpretation, before words.” In Musicae Scientiae, Special Issue “Narrative in music and interaction”. (in press), M. Imberty & M. Gratier (eds). Liège: European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. Zlatev, J. this volume. “The co-evolution of intersubjectivity and bodily mimesis.”

chapter 1

Intersubjectivity What makes us human? Jordan Zlatev, Timothy P. Racine, Chris Sinha and Esa Itkonen 1.

Introduction

The title of this book, The Shared Mind, conforms to a linguistic schema – “The X Mind” – that has become common within the interdisciplinary fields of cognitive science and consciousness studies. The current volume thus stands in a line of succession from The Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1992), The Discursive Mind (Harré and Gillet 1994), The Conscious Mind (Chalmers 1996), The Extended Mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998) and The Social Mind (Valsiner and van der Veer 2000). Like some of its predecessors, The Shared Mind advances an anti-thesis to the “classical” Computational (Jackendoff 1987) or Representational Mind (Fodor 1987), with its oft-criticised neglect of the role of the body, phenomenal experience, social interaction and culture. At the same time, the present volume advances a position (or rather, a set of related positions) that has not been sufficiently explored by its predecessors. Non-human animals also have an “embodied mind”, and there are no good reasons to deny that at least birds and mammals also have a “conscious mind” (­Edelman 1992). However, although other species may have varying degrees of awareness, they do not seem be fully aware of the subjectivity of others. And whereas human beings go on to engage in discursive practices and rely on material and symbolic culture, both of which have powerful formative effects on the human mind, something more ontogenetically and phylogenetically basic seems required to be able to benefit from these central aspects of human social life. This foundation seems to be provided by a uniquely human capacity for intersubjectivity. In the simplest terms, intersubjectivity is understood by the authors represented in this book as the sharing of experiential content (e.g., feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and linguistic meanings) among a plurality of subjects. Although some non-human species manifest some aspects of the capacity or capacities that make up intersubjectivity, they appear to lack others. On the other hand, no human being is entirely devoid of the human intersubjective potential – even though they



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may be delayed or challenged in the expression of some of its manifestations, such as is the case for people with autism. These considerations underlie our bold contentions that the human mind is quintessentially a shared mind and that intersubjectivity is at the heart of what makes us human.

2.

Intersubjectivity vs. “Theory of mind”

The hitherto dominant approach in psychology, cognitive science and philosophy has been to analyze what has come to be known as social cognition in terms of a “theory of mind” (or “mentalizing”) that purportedly solves the philosophical and developmental problem of “other minds”. Consider, for example, the title of a recent volume with an apparently similar theme to the present one: Other minds: How humans bridge the divide between self and others (Malle and Hodges 2005). Despite the important empirical findings and hypotheses generated by the Theory of Mind (ToM) approach, it is our contention that its framing of the research question has significantly obscured rather than clarified what needs to be explained. The basic assumptions of the ToM approach can be formulated as follows: – There is a primary separation between the self and (the minds of) others. – The individual must bridge this separation either by some form of “theory” or “simulation” of the other’s mind, a process that is more or less fallible. – The main “bodily” structures that are directly relevant for the process are those innate or acquired “modules” engaged in the inferential or simulation processes. – Cognition develops essentially “from the inside out”, with innate or acquired cognitive skills being eventually transferred or projected onto others for the purpose of explaining and predicting their behaviour. From such a point of departure, it is unsurprising that there appears to be not only a divide, but a veritable gulf between self and others, one that is so wide that it is doubtful whether it could ever truly be bridged. Such a pessimistic assessment of the human condition is hard to justify – how, if it were so, would young children be able to coordinate their basic activities with others, and eventually acquire a shared public language? How could we account for such universal forms of human experience as mutual affection and sympathy? In contrast to the four claims . In stating this we are aware that profound and multiple intellectual impairments may raise empirical questions about this claim, but we make it as a generalization with a fundamental theoretical status. We also stress that, even given cases of empirical doubt, our claim does not imply that such individuals should be thought of as not having the status of human beings.



Intersubjectivity: What makes us human?

listed above, the contributors to the present volume broadly agree on the following propositions: – Human beings are primordially connected in their subjectivity, rather than functioning as monads who need to “infer” that others are also endowed with experiences and mentalities that are similar to their own. – The sharing of experiences is not only, not even primarily, on a cognitive level, but also (and more basically) on the level of affect, perceptual processes and conative (action-oriented) engagements. – Such sharing and understanding is based on embodied interaction (e.g., empathic perception, imitation, gesture and practical collaboration). – Crucial cognitive capacities are initially social and interactional and are only later understand in private or representational terms. The main precursors and originators of these views in the last century were ­Husserl, Vygotsky and Wittgenstein. Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, has only recently been properly understood in the Anglo-Saxon world to be concerned not with the nature of private experience, but with structures of experience which give us a common life-world, serving as the pre-condition of any objectivity (­Zahavi 2003; Moran 2005). Furthermore, he was the first modern thinker to emphasize the role of the body for the emotional tone and the perceptual richness of the life-world, and for our transparent relations with others (cf. Gallagher 2005). For example, he stated: I do not first constitute my things and my world solipsistically, then grasp by empathy the other ‘I’ which too grasps itself solipsistically as constituting its world, and then and only then, the constituted unity of both are to be identified; my self unity (Sinneinheit) exists because of the facts that the foreign multiplicity is not different from mine, it is eo ipso the same…”  (Husserliana 14: 10, translated and quoted by Moran 2005: 225)

Other scholars such as Merleau-Ponty (1962), Scheler (1954) and Schutz (1966) continued this tradition and developed complementary accounts of intersubjectivity (cf. Zahavi 2001) whose common theme is that the basic forms of understanding others are not inferential, but rather direct (cf. the chapter by Gallagher and Hutto). Scheler stresses the implications of this for accounts of perception in a way that is reminiscent of J. J. Gibson’s (1979) ecological psychology: For we certainly believe ourselves to be directly acquainted with another person’s joy in his laughter, with his sorrow and pain in tears, with his shame in blushing, with his entreaty in his outstretched hands … And with the tenor of his thoughts in the sound of his words. If anyone tells me that this is not “perception”, for it





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cannot be so, in view of the fact that a perception is simply a “complex of physical sensations” … I would beg him to turn aside from such questionable theories and address himself to the phenomenological facts.  (Scheler 1954, cited in Gallagher 2005: 228)

Compare Scheler also to the later Wittgenstein (1980: §570), who similarly attempted to dispel the myth of the isolated subject: “We see emotion.” – As opposed to what? – We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features.

Through enigmatic aphorisms such as “Nothing is hidden” and “Understanding is not a mental phenomenon”, Wittgenstein highlighted the essential dependence of thinking on public criteria, and concentrating on the linguistic aspect of this issue, he rendered the notion of a “private language” self-contradictory (cf. the chapter by Itkonen). Wittgenstein also drew attention to the fact that body, mind and behaviour are different aspects of the unity that we call persons. Thus, although such aspects of persons are non-identical and we therefore cannot reduce one to the other, Wittgenstein argued that they are necessarily and, hence conceptually, related and that we typically talk about one via the other. Vygotsky was a more multi-faceted thinker, creatively combining philosophy, psychology, literature, primatology and education. From a broadly Marxist perspective (though he was accused of “idealism” by the guardians of Soviet ideological orthodoxy), he famously asserted the general principle of the primacy of social interaction in the development of what he considered to be the specifically human “higher mental functions”, such as memory, reasoning and language: Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relations between human individuals.   (Vygotsky 1978: 57)

Like Wittgenstein, the crucial social semiotic mediational “tool” for Vygotsky was language, but he also considered the role of other semiotic resources such as artifacts and gestures (cf. the chapters by Rodríguez and Moro; Sinha and Rodríguez) in the child’s cultural development.



3.

Intersubjectivity: What makes us human?

Perspectives

Although there is a good deal of coherence between the positions of the phenomenologists, Wittgenstein and Vygotsky (as well as those of other classic theorists who feature in the discussions in the following chapters, such as Durkheim, Mead and Bateson) with respect to what they reject – that is, the notion of a monadic, individual mind, ultimately incapable of reaching out beyond its confines to the world and others – there are important differences between the positions that they advocate. In a similar vein, while all the authors represented here agree on the crucial role of intersubjectivity in human communication and consciousness of self and other, they offer (as the subtitle of this volume suggests) different answers to questions such as the following: – What is or are the precise sense or senses of the term “intersubjectivity”, at what level of organization does it exist, and how does it relate to other notions of the shared mind such as “common knowledge” (cf. the chapters by Itkonen and Sinha and Rodríguez). – More specifically, should we understand the term “intersubjectivity” as pertaining primarily to a mental or inter-mental capacity, or to the actual instances of participatory practice that both depend upon, and are instrumental in developing, this human capacity? Are these merely different aspects or emphases, or do they constitute fundamentally different perspectives (cf. the chapter by Susswein & Racine)? – To what extent is there a species-specific, biological basis for the human capacity for intersubjectivity per se, and to what extent is it the consequence of social, ecological and cultural factors (cf. the chapters by Leavens, Hopkins and Bard, Rodríguez and Moro and Sinha and Rodríguez)? – To what extent is human intersubjectivity brought about by language, and what might be the prerequisite conditions for developing or evolving a capacity for language (cf. the chapters by Gallagher and Hutto, Hutto and Zlatev)? – Does intersubjectivity involve an irreducibly mental aspect that is accessible to consciousness, or is this an (over-) attribution based on manifest behaviour (cf. the chapters by Brinck and Leavens, Hopkins and Bard)? – What aspects of human intersubjectivity (e.g., the mutual understanding between two subjects that they are attending to the same object) might play a causal role in guiding action and which are definitional rather than causal (cf. the chapter by Susswein and Racine)?





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Because they are addressed within the chapters that follow, we will not attempt to answer these questions here. But we wish to highlight the following points of (possible) disagreement between some of the authors, to which the reader may wish to pay special attention: – The chapters by Gallagher and Hutto, Barresi and Moore and Zlatev adopt stage-based accounts of the development (and evolution) of intersubjectivity, while Brinck argues for more continuous development, involving partially independent capacities. – The chapters by Pika, Zlatev and Verhagen focus on both continuities and discontinuities between animal and human intersubjectivity, while Leavens, Hopkins and Bard find support for a strong form of continuity, prior to the emergence of language. – Hobson and Hobson base their account of autism on an impairment of a specifically human capacity for identification with others, while Brinck seeks an account in which more simple skills and developmental patterns combine and interact in order to yield more general cognitive and emotional endowments. – Susswein and Racine argue that “intersubjectivity” is primarily a taxonomic term, used to group together certain kinds of social interactions which we by definition take to involve one or another form of “experiential sharing”, rather than a term denoting hidden mental or neurological processes (in contradistinction to e.g., Barresi and Moore). – Finally, while most authors adopt a definition of intersubjectivity such as the sharing and understanding of experiential content, Sinha and Rodríguez conclude the volume by stressing the primacy of participatory engagement, and the need to extend “inter-mentality” to encompass “inter-corporeality” and “inter-objectivity”. In another sense of the word ‘perspectives’, this volume brings together approaches and insights from a variety of disciplines: philosophy, linguistics, primatology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience and typical and atypical human development. The authors do not limit themselves to their disciplinary confines, a fact that strengthens the dialogic aspect of the book. Nevertheless, for the sake of perspicuity, we have organised the contributions thematically into three parts dealing primarily with Development, Evolution and Language respectively.



4.

Intersubjectivity: What makes us human?

Overview of the chapters

It is appropriate that Part I should focus on ontogenetic development, since it is largely through the path-breaking work of Colwyn Trevarthen (1979) on primary (dyadic) and secondary (triadic) intersubjectivity in the first year of life, and Daniel Stern (1985) on the “interpersonal world of the infant”, that the concept of intersubjectivity has emerged as a key issue for the contemporary sciences of the human mind. Departing from Trevarthen’s seminal work, Gallagher and Hutto present an account of the progressive emergence of intersubjective skills in childhood, arguing that understanding others requires neither a “theory theory” nor a “simulation theory” of mind, but is made possible by a sensitivity to bodily movements, gazes, facial expressions and, in secondary intersubjectivity, interactions in pragmatic contexts. In reply to claims that a theory of mind is necessary to account for the more sophisticated interactions of older children and adults involving the concepts of folk psychology, Gallagher and Hutto propose the Narrative Practice Hypothesis, according to which it is through direct encounters with stories about reasons for acting in interactive contexts with caregivers that children become familiar with the core structure of folk psychology. Gallagher and Hutto demonstrate how combining insights from the phenomenological and the Wittgensteinian traditions can yield a productive and novel account of a range of empirical findings, consistent with recent developments in neuroscience. Barresi and Moore elaborate on this neuroscientific theme, going much further than the now familiar (but rarely explanatory) references to “mirror neurons”. They present an up-dated version of their theory of social understanding called Intentional Relations Theory, consisting of four levels, through which first-person and third-person information is “matched”, yielding both self-other equivalence and differentiation. Interestingly, the two models of the development of intersubjectivity presented in these two chapters, while formulated independently, appear to be largely compatible. At the same time, the relationship between intentional relations and narrative would merit further consideration, since the latter does not seem to play a crucial role in the model offered by Barresi and Moore. Finally, Barresi and Moore outline an application of their stage or level-based model to autism, suggesting that it is precisely the inability to combine proprioceptive and sensorimotor information about the self with exteroceptive information about others that is at the core of autism spectrum disorders.





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Autism is further discussed by Hobson and Hobson, who highlight the pivotal significance of the human propensity to identify with other persons, which they suggest is compromised in children with autism. In reviewing a number of their recent studies, the authors argue that in order to share experiences, typically developing children are psychologically linked to the other person and at the same time differentiated. Hobson and Hobson argue further that these early forms of sharing, and the varieties of communication that they support, provide the foundations for the conceptual understanding of self and other that emerges around the middle of the second year of life. Methodologically, the authors show that our human capacity for reflective intersubjectivity is necessary for analysts to be able to make their judgments in the coding of “overt behaviour”, and that such rating is itself a “second-person” phenomenon, rather than a matter of detached observation. Rodríguez and Moro also adopt the use of a qualitative, “clinical” method in analyzing parent-infant triadic interactions. They draw on Vygotsky and Wittgenstein to show that long before a child is able to produce his or her first symbolic and ostensive uses of objects, the first pointing gestures and the first words, the adult acts with the child as a “symbol maker”. That is, the adult produces ostensive actions with objects, points to them to make clear his or her intentions, using them in a canonical manner and talking to the child almost constantly. Rodríguez and Moro argue that this implies a long process and a variety of levels of intersubjective adult-baby “agreement” on the use of objects, which serves as a precondition for subsequent social and cognitive development. On a more general level they argue against the assumption (basic to ToM approaches) of the “opacity” of social reality. Brinck proposes a conceptual clarification of intersubjectivity as “the sharing of experiences”, suggesting that it divides into a multitude of sub-concepts depending on the understanding of the terms “sharing” and “experiences”. She distinguishes, following Stern (1985), three kinds of shared experiences: emotion, attention, and intention. However, Brinck argues for a more external, behaviourbased way of defining them (thus implicitly disagreeing methodologically with Hobson and Hobson). Brinck argues that different combinations of these forms of intersubjectivity enable corresponding intentionally communicative behaviours, providing a novel explanation of why intentional communication first appears at the end of the first year, despite the fact that its “ingredients” are manifest much earlier. It is, she claims, the ability to decontextualize and combine the various intersubjective skills in a flexible manner that underlies the emergence of intentional communication, rather than this being the culmination of a stage model. Susswein and Racine take a more deflationary approach than the preceding chapters, exploring the distinction between causal and definitional issues in order



Intersubjectivity: What makes us human?

to distinguish between explanations of what an organism is doing and how they are doing it, as well as between different types of causal explanation. They argue that intersubjectivity is a taxonomic rather than a causal explanatory concept, i.e., a technical concept used to classify interactive behaviours and abilities rather than to denote vehicles or causes of those behaviours and abilities. They critically examine the idea that intersubjective engagement involves the sharing of mental states, and argue that the role of mental states and experience in intersubjective engagement is often misconstrued. Finally they apply this approach to human activity to distinguish reflective and practical understanding and consider the meaning of “declarative” pointing in early childhood. Part II of the volume deals with the capacities for intentional communication and intersubjectivity of non-human primates, and especially of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the Great apes; and more generally, with the question of the evolution of human intersubjectivity. Comparative psychology is a field rife with controversies, with persistent disagreement between those who emphasize discontinuities and those who argue for (strong) continuity between non-human and human capacities. This debate is reflected by the diverging positions taken by the first two chapters in this section. Pika compares the communicative gestures of bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans and shows that Great apes have multifaceted gestural repertoires. She demonstrates that these gestures are performed in multiple contexts and are used flexibly, but unlike those of human children seem to be learned mainly via an individual learning process. Being intentional and referential acts, the gestures of the Great apes display at least a nascent understanding of intentionality, and can plausibly have served as a stepping stone in the evolution of language. On the other hand, Pika also emphasizes the differences between human and ape gestures, suggesting an innate bias for human cultural learning. In contrast, in analyzing the pointing gesture, Leavens, Hopkins and Bard argue against such an innate bias on the basis of the fact that although both captive and wild apes are sampled from the same gene pool, captive apes spontaneously point without overt training whereas wild apes almost never point. The authors review empirical evidence of the development of pointing in apes and in human children, highlighting the significance of species-typical motor development, culturally-specific patterns of child restraint, and stages of cognitive development for the development what they call “explicit reference”. Their major claim is that a capacity for explicit reference emerges in our nearest living relatives when they experience similar circumstances to those of human children, involving the rich emotional contours of human affectivity. Zlatev distinguishes between five evolutionary (and developmental) levels of intersubjectivity and suggests that the latter has co-evolved with bodily mimesis:



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the use of the body for communicative and representational purposes. He reviews evidence from primatology to suggest that feral and captive apes are at least to a degree capable of the first two levels (involving e.g., empathy, shared attention and imitation), but not of the third level, “triadic mimesis”, which involves an understanding of communicative intentions. Enculturated, language-trained apes, on the other hand, show some aspects of triadic mimesis, suggesting how our predecessors could have bootstrapped themselves to this level without language and may have inherited a biological bias for it. The emergence of language, on the other hand, opened the way to higher levels, allowing (consistently with the proposal of Gallagher and Hutto in Part I) the understanding of “beliefs” and the use of folk psychology. Hutto develops a similar evolutionary scenario in more detail, arguing that an innate “theory of mind” mechanism is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for the evolutionary course of hominid social interaction. Such a purported “module”, he argues, fails to explain the remarkable technical advances and the imitative capacities of Homo ergaster/erectus lying somewhere between those of apes and modern humans. Hutto considers the evidence instead for a Mimetic Ability Hypothesis and invokes the notion of re-enactive imagination in determining what this ancient adaptation was likely to have involved. He argues that this hypothesis provides a better explanation of the kinds of intersubjectivity that would have been necessary for the development of language, thereby undercutting the strongest argument for positing the existence of innate theory of mind modules, namely the support they lend to intention-based semantics. Part III takes up and develops the theme of the relationship between intersubjectivity and language. It is widely acknowledged that language requires intersubjectivity, most straightforwardly because one needs to know what another is referring to in order to learn a language. But this consensus conceals a good deal of debate concerning the nature of language and its relation to thought and consciousness, and the extent to which language might stretch and reshape our basic intersubjective capacities. Itkonen opens this section by focusing on the central role of normativity for language and linguistics, an issue discussed in brief by Zlatev in Part II, as well as the other contributors of this section. He supports his argument by Wittgenstein’s “private language argument”, showing that language is impossible without public criteria of correctness. Itkonen further presents and defends the “ontology of the social” as third-level common knowledge, and suggests a dialectical synthesis between “collectivism” and “individualism”: common knowledge consist of mental states in particular configurations, being therefore both based on and irreducible to (individual) consciousness. Finally, he spells out a number of ramifications of his arguments for theoretical and empirical linguistics and concludes by



Intersubjectivity: What makes us human?

­ inpointing a priori (cf. “devout”: Honderich 2006) physicalism (“there is nothing p but matter and energy fields”) as the roots for the anti-normative bias in linguistics and related fields. Verhagen argues that intersubjectivity is systemically encoded in natural languages, contrasting this view with the standard “informational” conception of linguistic communication. He reviews constructions at different levels of grammatical organization to show that linguistically coded relations of intersubjective coordination exhibit the specific character of being “rhetorical” or “argumentative”. He argues that although these forms may result in cooperation, their immediate function is to influence another person’s mind and to make discourse proceed in a particular direction. Because of this, he suggests that language is to some extent analogous with other animal communication systems, which also involve the management and assessment of other organisms, notably conspecifics. On the other hand, he argues for an important discontinuity, in that such management and assessment is oriented in human beings to other minds, rather than to immediate behavior. Janzen and Shaffer take this theme into a different context, noting that because interlocutors make constant assumptions about what information is active within each other’s consciousness, this process creates an interesting challenge in third-party interpretation from one language to another. Their major point is that when an interpreter is introduced into a discourse event this affects the nature of the interchange, since the interpreter will also make assumptions about each of the interlocutors’ knowledge states. They use examples from ASL-English interpretation and discuss the notion of “expansions”, which have been claimed to be grammatically required in ASL. The authors persuasively argue against this claim. Rather they suggest that understanding contextualization as a successful discourse strategy provides a more appropriate approach to the expression of shared and non-shared knowledge and discuss the implications of contextualization for the notion of intersubjectivity in general. Sinha and Rodríguez end the book where this introductory chapter began, by contrasting the approach to the human mind (and social cognition) based on intersubjectivity with that of “theory of mind”, arguing for the advantages of the former. By combining Durkheim’s notion of social facts with that of Searle (1995) they argue for the irreducibility of the social to the individual, in a way that converges with the chapter by Itkonen. They also argue against a purely mentalistic conception of intersubjectivity, as a property of the “unmediated mind”. Sinha and Rodríguez point out the need to consider inter-corporeality, which extends beyond the body to encompass “inter-objectivity”. Objects, they claim, are not only referents of language, but signifiers in their own right, and it is through participatory engagement with the social and material world that children enter the

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realm of language. Their chapter concludes by connecting with Gallagher and Hutto’s Narrative Practice Hypothesis, stressing the importance of narrativity in the construction of both complex human cognition and shared social cultural identity.

5.

Conclusion

As is obvious from these summaries, the “perspectives” expressed in these chapters do not converge on a single, univocal notion of intersubjectivity, but rather point to a complex phenomenon, or a set of related phenomena, in which experiential, behavioural, genetic and neural processes and levels are interwoven in both potentiating and actualizing “what it means to be human”. We hope that this introductory chapter has conveyed to the reader our enthusiasm in working on this interdisciplinary and “intersubjective” project. The increasing body of research on social cognition in developmental and comparative psychology, and the prefixing of the term “social” to previously rather individual-oriented fields such as cognitive linguistics and cognitive neuroscience, reflect a changing intellectual context in which we hope that The Shared Mind will make a significant contribution to rethinking some of the fundamental questions of our fields. Such a rethinking is an essential, but radically challenging enterprise. The conceptual difficulties encountered by the dominant tradition in the cognitive sciences in attempting to explain the nature of “social cognition”, language and communication are not accidental. They stem from the epistemological and methodological individualism inherited from the “possessive individualist” cast of Western culture (and capitalism), and the dominant position accorded in this tradition to natural science and technology vis-a-vis the humanities and social sciences (Macintyre 1997; Taylor 1989). Three of us have collaborated for over 15 years, and our conversations have often revolved around the need for a coherent theoretical statement addressing the centrality of intersubjectivity and normativity for linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. The press of other work, and the difficulty of integrating the various perspectives, has led to the repeated postponement of that venture. In the meantime, however, both the need for, and the timeliness of, a book like the present volume has become increasingly evident. Tim Racine joined the group at the Jean Piaget Society meeting in Vancouver in the summer of 2005, where the idea for the book emerged from two symposia in which half of the authors represented in the volume participated. Reading (and writing) a large number of drafts of the chapters of this book, and actively



Intersubjectivity: What makes us human?

c­ omparing the points of view of the entire volume, helped us, as editors, realize how much our agreement outweighs whatever differences remain. Although this book is a “polyphonic” enterprise, the voices of the different chapters do not always blend harmonically. This is only to be expected in addressing such a quintessentialy interdisciplinary topic as intersubjectivity. In this introductory chapter, we have attempted to show the reader both how a focus on intersubjectivity offers a different (and we believe more productive) perspective to social cognition than the “theory of mind” approach, and to highlight some of the controversies within this approach, thereby contributing to defining prospects for further empirical and conceptual investigations. Without meaning to seem unduly naïve, we offer this volume to the reader as a source for reflection on human nature, and on the possibilities for good and ill that are potentiated by the Shared Mind in our shared world.

References Chalmers, D. 1996. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, A. and Chalmers, D.J. 1998. “The extended mind.” Analysis 58: 10–23. Edelman, G. 1992. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire­: On the Matter of the Mind. New York: Basic Books. Fodor, J.A. 1987. Psychosemantics; The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gallagher, S. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, J.J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. Harré, R. and Gillet, G. 1994. The Discursive Mind. London: Sage Publications. Honderich, T. 2006. “Radical externalism.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (7–8): 2–13. Jackendoff, R. 1987. Consciousness and the Computational Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962 [1945]. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. MacIntyre, A. 1997. After Virtue. London: Duckworth. Malle, B.F. & Hodges, S.D. (eds.). 2005. Other Minds. New York: Guilford Press. Moran, D. 2005. Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Searle, J.R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York, NY: The Free Press. Scheler, M. 1954 [1913]. The Nature of Sympathy (translated by P. Heath). Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Schutz, A. 1966. Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Stern, D. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York, NY: Basic Books. Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University press. Trevarthen, C. 1979. “Communication and cooperation in early infancy. A description of primary intersubjectivity.” In Before Speech: The Beginning of Human Communication, M. Bullowa (ed.), 99–136. London: Cambridge University Press.

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Valsiner, J. and van der Veer, R. 2000. The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Varela, F., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. 1992. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. 1978. Mind in Society. The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1980. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 2 (translated by C.G. Luckhardt and M.A.E. Aue). Oxford: Blackwell. Zahavi, D. 2001. “Beyond empathy. Phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8: 151–167. Zahavi, D. 2003. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

part i

Development

chapter 2

Understanding others through primary interaction and narrative practice Shaun Gallagher and Daniel D. Hutto We argue that theory-of-mind (ToM) approaches, such as “theory theory” and “simulation theory”, are both problematic and not needed. They account for neither our primary and pervasive way of engaging with others nor the true basis of our folk psychological understanding, even when narrowly construed. Developmental evidence shows that young infants are capable of grasping the purposeful intentions of others through the perception of bodily movements, gestures, facial expressions etc. Trevarthen’s notion of primary intersubjectivity can provide a theoretical framework for understanding these capabilities and his notion of secondary intersubjectivity shows the importance of pragmatic contexts for infants starting around one year of age. The recent neuroscience of resonance systems (i.e., mirror neurons, shared representations) also supports this view. These ideas are worked out in the context of an embodied “Interaction Theory” of social cognition. Still, for more sophisticated intersubjective interactions in older children and adults, one might argue that some form of ToM is required. This thought is defused by appeal to narrative competency and the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (or NPH). We propose that repeated encounters with narratives of a distinctive kind is the normal route through which children acquire an understanding of the forms and norms that enable them to make sense of actions in terms of reasons. A potential objection to this hypothesis is that it presupposes ToM abilities. Interaction Theory is deployed once again to answer this by providing an alternative approach to understanding basic narrative competency and its development.

1.

Introduction

Our intention in this chapter is to explicate an account of how we come to understand others, without appealing to the dominant theory-of-mind (ToM) approaches of “theory theory” (e.g., Leslie 1987; Gopnik 1993) or “simulation theory” (e.g., Gordon 1986; Goldman 2002). We have elsewhere provided good reasons to

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doubt that either of these theories can give an accurate or adequate account of our everyday intersubjective abilities for understanding the intentions and the behaviours of other persons (see Gallagher 2001, 2004, 2006, 2007a, 2007b; Hutto 2004, 2005, 2006a, 2007a, 2007b, 2008). We will briefly summarize that critique here, but our main purpose is to set out a more positive account of just these everyday intersubjective abilities and show that they are not reducible (or inflatable) to the mind-reading or mentalizing described by approaches to social cognition which presume a “theory-of-mind”. This positive account involves three kinds of processes which together are sufficient to deliver the nuanced adult capacity for understanding (as well as for mis-understanding) others. These processes include (1) intersubjective perceptual processes, (2) pragmatically contextualized comprehension, and (3) narrative competence. We argue on the basis of evidence from developmental psychology that the capacity for understanding others is, on average, well established by the time the child reaches four or five years of age, and that it continues to be enriched on the basis of further experience as we become mature adults.

2.

A brief critique of the dominant approaches to social cognition

Theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST), the standard and dominant approaches to social cognition, share the important supposition that when we attempt to understand the actions of others, we do so by making sense of them in terms of their mental processes to which we have no direct access. That is, we attempt to “mind read” their beliefs, desires, and intentions, and such mind reading or mentalizing is our primary and pervasive way of understanding their behaviour. Furthermore, both TT and ST characterize social cognition as a process of explaining or predicting what another person has done or will do. TT claims that we explain another person’s behaviour by appealing to either an innate or acquired “theory” of how people behave in general, a theory that is framed in terms of mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) causing or motivating behaviour. ST claims that we have no need for a theory like this, because we have a model, namely, our own mind, that we can use to simulate the other person’s mental states. We model others’ beliefs and desires as if we were in their situation. Claims that such theory or simulation processes are explicit (conscious) are dubious from a phenomenological point of view. That is, if in fact such processes are primary, pervasive, and explicit, they should show up in our experience – in



Primary interaction and narrative practice

the way that we experience others – and they rarely do. The phenomenological critique also rejects the idea, clearly found in TT, that our everyday dealings with others involve an observational, third-person stance toward them – observing them and trying to come up with explanations of their behaviour. Rather, our everyday encounters with others tend to be second-person and interactive. Claims that the processes described by TT or ST are implicit (or not explicitly conscious) run into a different set of objections. In the case of TT, there is no evidence that such processes are implicit, or even clarity about what precisely that means. Moreover, although TT appeals to false-belief experiments, such experiments are set up to test for explicit rather than implicit theory-of-mind processes (Gallagher 2001) – subjects are asked to explicitly consider the meanings of an observed third-party’s behaviour. Implicit approaches to ST appeal to the neuroscience of mirror neurons and shared representations (cf. Barresi and Moore this volume), but there is no justification for calling these subpersonal processes “simulation”, since according to ST, simulation involves the instrumental use of a first-person model to form third-person “as if ” or “pretend” mental states. In subpersonal processes, (1) there is no first- or third-person (activation of mirror neurons, for example, are considered to be “neutral” in regard to who the agent is) (see e.g., deVignemont 2004; Gallese 2005; Hurley 2005; Jeannerod and ­Pacherie 2004); (2) nothing (or no one) is using a model; and (3) neuronal processes cannot pretend. As vehicles neurons either fire or they don’t. More importantly, in terms of relevant content, if they are neutral with respect to first- and third-person, pretence in just these terms (I pretend to be you) is not possible. In effect, simulation, as defined by ST, is a personal-level concept that cannot be legitimately applied to subpersonal processes. . This is not to deny that in some circumstances, for example, in observing puzzling cases of another person’s behaviour, we may in fact explicitly appeal to theory or employ simulation. The claim here is simply that most of our everyday interactions are not of this sort. Puzzling cases are the exception. . Goldman and Sripada (2005: 208), acknowledging the discrepancy between the ST definition of simulation and the working of subpersonal mirror processes, propose a minimal definition of simulation: “Applied to mindreading, a minimally necessary condition [for simulation] is that the state ascribed to the target is ascribed as a result of the attributor’s instantiating, undergoing, or experiencing, that very state. In the case of successful simulation, the experienced state matches that of the target”. If this is a necessary condition, it cannot be a sufficient one, because on this minimal definition and without something further, it’s not clear what would motivate me to ascribe the state that I was undergoing to someone else. Furthermore, if this were as automatic as mirror neurons firing, then it would seem that we would not be able to attribute a state different from our own to someone else. But we do this all the time. Practically speaking, this proposal also raises puzzles about interacting with more than one other person.

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In addition to these phenomenological and logical objections to TT and ST, there is good evidence from developmental psychology that our ability to understand others emerges much earlier than TT or ST would predict. An objection can also be raised against the idea that a general theory (folk psychology) would have sufficient explanatory power to explain the particularities of a large diversity of behaviours found in everyday life, or that it could be very reliable in the face of multiple possibilities for motivation. Similarly it has been objected that running a first-person simulation routine, that is, a process that is based on one’s own mental states, seems inadequate to explain the diversity of behaviours found in the world. These objections throw doubt on TT and ST approaches. The question, however, is whether there is a positive account that can avoid these objections. We turn now to the construction of that alternative account, in three parts: intersubjective perception, pragmatically contextualized comprehension, and narrative competency.

3.

Intersubjective perception and interaction

Long before the child reaches the age of four, the capacities for human interaction and intersubjective understanding are already accomplished in certain embodied practices – practices that are emotional, sensory-motor, perceptual, and nonconceptual. These practices include proto-mimesis (Zlatev, this volume), imitation, the parsing of perceived intentions (Baldwin, Baird, Saylor and Clark 2001), emotional interchange (Hobson 2004), and generally the processes that fall under the heading of primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen 1979). These embodied practices constitute our primary access for understanding others, and they continue to do so even after we attain our more sophisticated abilities in this regard (­Gallagher 2001). In most intersubjective situations, that is, in situations of social interaction, we have a direct perceptual understanding of another person’s intentions because their intentions are explicitly expressed in their embodied actions and their expressive behaviors. This understanding does not require us to postulate or infer a belief or a desire hidden away in the other person’s mind. What we might Is it possible to simulate the neural/mental/emotional states of two other people at the same time if in fact our simulations must be such that we instantiate, undergo, or experience, those two (possibly very different) states? (see Gallagher 2007b). We suggest that these issues would also have to be addressed by Barresi and Moore (this volume) in order to clarify their proposal for a matching system.



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r­ eflectively or abstractly call their belief or desire is expressed directly in their actions and behaviours. This phenomenologically direct understanding is likely made possible by the above mentioned complex neuronal processes described as the mirror neuron system(s) and shared representations. In contrast to interpreting these neuronal resonance processes as implicit simulations, which on the functional level would involve cognitive processes over and above the perception of action, Gallagher (2005, in press) has argued that they in fact instantiate a form of enactive social perception. A primary, perceptual sense of others is already implicit in the behaviour of the newborn. In neonate imitation, which depends not only on a contrast, in some sense, between self and non-self, and a proprioceptive sense of one’s own body, but also a responsiveness to the fact that the other is of the same sort as oneself (Bermúdez 1996; Gallagher 1996; Gallagher and Meltzoff 1996), infants are able to distinguish between inanimate objects and people. The fact that they imitate only human faces (see Legerstee 1991; Johnson 2000; Johnson et al. 1998) suggests that infants are able to parse the surrounding environment into those entities that perform human actions (people) and those that do not (things) (Meltzoff and Brooks 2001). An intermodal tie between a proprioceptive sense of one’s body and the face that one sees is already functioning at birth. For the infant, the other person’s body presents opportunities for action and expressive behaviour – opportunities that it can pursue through imitation. There is, in this case, a common bodily intentionality that is shared by the perceiving subject and the perceived other. From early infancy humans, and perhaps some animals (see e.g., the studies by Myowa-Yamakoshi 2001; Myowa-Yamakoshi et al. 2004; also cited by Zlatev this volume) have capabilities for primary-intersubjective interaction with ­others. The early capabilities that contribute to primary intersubjectivity constitute an immediate, non-mentalizing mode of interaction. Infants, notably without the intervention of theory or simulation, are able to see bodily movement as goal-directed intentional movement, and to perceive other persons as agents. This does not require advanced cognitive abilities; rather, it is a perceptual capacity that is “fast, automatic, irresistible and highly stimulus-driven” (Scholl and ­Tremoulet 2000: 299). Evidence for this early, non-mentalizing interpretation of the intentional actions of others can be found in numerous studies. Baldwin and colleagues, for example, have shown that infants at 10–11 months are able to parse some kinds of continuous action according to intentional boundaries (Baldwin and Baird 2001; Baldwin et al. 2001). The infant follows the other person’s eyes, and perceives various movements of the head, the mouth, the hands, and more general body movements as meaningful, goal-directed movements. Such perceptions give the infant, by the end of the first year of life, a non-conceptual,

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action-based understanding of the intentions and dispositions of other persons which does not involve inferences about beliefs or desires understood as mental states (Allison, Puce and McCarthy 2000; Baldwin 1993; Johnson 2000; Johnso, Slaughter and Carey 1998). Primary intersubjectivity also includes affective coordination between the gestures and expressions of the infant and those of caregivers with whom they interact. Infants “vocalize and gesture in a way that seems ‘tuned’ [affectively and temporally] to the vocalizations and gestures of the other person” (Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997: 131). Infants at 5 to 7 months detect correspondences between visual and auditory information that specify the expression of emotions (­Walker 1982). The perception of emotion in the movement of others, however, does not involve taking a theoretical stance or creating a simulation of some inner state. It is a perceptual experience of embodied comportment (Bertenthal, Proffitt and Cutting 1984; Moore, Hobson and Lee 1997). This kind of perception-based understanding, therefore, is not a form of mind-reading. In seeing the actions and expressive movements of the other person one already sees their meaning; no inference to a hidden set of mental states (beliefs, desires, etc.) is necessary. The capabilities involved in primary intersubjectivity suggest that before we are in a position to wonder what the other person believes or desires, we already have specific perceptual understanding about what they feel, whether they are attending to us or not, whether their intentions are friendly or not, and so forth. There is, in primary intersubjectivity, a common bodily intentionality that is shared across the perceiving subject and the perceived other. As Gopnik and ­Meltzoff indicate, “we innately map the visually perceived motions of others onto our own kinesthetic sensations” (1997: 129), and the evidence from recent research on mirror neurons and resonance systems in social neuroscience supports this. Thus, before we are in a position to theorize, simulate, explain or predict mental states in others, we are already in a position to interact with and to understand others in terms of their expressions, gestures, intentions, and emotions, and how they act toward ourselves and others. Furthermore, primary intersubjectivity is not primary simply in developmental terms. Rather it remains primary across all face-to-face intersubjective experiences, and it underpins those developmentally later, and occasional, practices that may involve explaining or predicting mental states in others (see e.g., Stern’s (1985) idea of a “layered model” in which

. In citing Gopnik and Meltzoff ’s claim about the necessity for innate mappings we are not thereby endorsing their theory-theoretic construal of what this involves. Indeed, much of the evidence developed by Meltzoff and cited by Gopnik and Meltzoff supports the idea of a strong intersubjective perceptual capacity in the infant.



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­ evelopmentally primary understandings are not “superseded” but remain and d operate in parallel to more advanced ones).

4.

Pragmatic intersubjectivity

If human faces are especially salient, even for the youngest infants, or if we continue to be capable of perceptually grasping the meaning of the other’s expressions and intentional movements, such face-to-face interaction does not exhaust the possibilities of intersubjective understanding. Expressions, intonations, gestures, and movements, along with the bodies that manifest them, do not float freely in the air; we find them in the world, and infants soon start to notice how others interact with the world. When infants begin to tie actions to pragmatic contexts, they enter into what Trevarthen calls ‘secondary intersubjectivity’. Around the age of 1 year, infants go beyond the person-to-person immediacy of primary intersubjectivity, and enter into contexts of shared attention – shared situations – in which they learn what things mean and what they are for (see Trevarthen and Hubley 1978). Behaviour representative of joint attention begins to develop around 9–14 months (Phillips, Baron-Cohen and Rutter 1992). In such interactions the child looks to the body and the expressive movement of the other to discern the intention of the person or to find the meaning of some object. The child can understand that the other person wants food or intends to open the door; that the other can see him (the child) or is looking at the door. This is not taking an intentional stance, i.e., treating the other as if they had desires or beliefs hidden away in their minds; rather, the intentionality is perceived in the embodied actions of others. They begin to see that another’s movements and expressions often depend on meaningful and pragmatic contexts and are mediated by the surrounding world. Others are not given (and never were given) primarily as objects that we encounter cognitively, or in need of explanation. We perceive them as agents whose actions are framed in pragmatic contexts. It follows that there is not one uniform way in which we relate to others, but that our relations are mediated through the various pragmatic circumstances of our encounters. Indeed, we are caught up in such pragmatic circumstances, and are already existing in reference to others, from the very beginning (consider for example the infant’s dependency on ­others . Of course, the fact that another’s feelings can be hidden is completely consistent with expressivism of this sort. As Wittgenstein says “One can say He is hiding his feelings. But that means that it is not a priori they are always hidden” (Wittgenstein 1992: 35e). The point is that our initial, basic engagements with others are not estranged, even if sophisticated creatures like us are capable of hiding or faking their emotions.

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for nourishment), even if it takes some time to sort out which agents provide sustenance, and which ones are engaged in other kinds of activities. As we noted, children do not simply observe others; they are not passive observers. Rather they interact with others and in doing so they develop further capabilities in the contexts of those interactions. If the capacities of primary intersubjectivity, like the detection of intentions in expressive movement and eye direction, are sufficient to enable the child to recognize dyadic relations between the other and the self, or between the other and the world, something more is added to this in secondary intersubjectivity. As noted, in joint attention, beginning around 9–14 months, the child alternates between monitoring the gaze of the other and what the other is gazing at, checking to verify that they are continuing to look at the same thing. Indeed, the child also learns to point at approximately this same time. Eighteen-month-old children comprehend what another person intends to do with an instrument in a specific context. They are able to re-enact to completion the goal-directed behaviour that someone else fails to complete. Thus, the child, on seeing an adult who tries to manipulate a toy and who appears frustrated about being unable to do so, quite readily picks up the toy and shows the adult how to do it (Meltzoff 1995; Meltzoff and Brooks 2001). Our understanding of the actions of others occurs on the highest, most appropriate pragmatic level possible. That is, we understand actions at the most relevant pragmatic (intentional, goal-oriented) level, ignoring possible subpersonal or lower-level descriptions, and also ignoring interpretations in terms of beliefs, desires, or hidden mental states. Rather than making an inference to what the other person is intending by starting with bodily movements, and moving thence to the level of mental events, we see actions as meaningful in the context of the physical and intersubjective environment. If, in the vicinity of a loose board, I see you reach for a hammer and nail, I know what your intentions are as much from the hammer, nail, and loose board as from anything that I observe about your bodily expression or postulate in your mind. We interpret the actions of others in terms of their goals and intentions set in contextualized situations, rather than abstractly in terms of either their muscular performance or their beliefs. The environment, the situation, or the pragmatic context is never perceived neutrally (without meaning), either in regard to our own possible actions, or in regard to the actions and possibilities of others. As Gibson’s theory of affordances . Our understanding of the performance of mimes who work without props depends on their excellent ability to express intentions in their movements, but also on our familiarity with contexts. The mime’s talent for expressive movements is clearly demonstrated in contrast to what we often experience in the game of charades or pantomime when we haven’t a clue about what the player is trying to represent.



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(e.g., ­Gibson 1979) suggests, we see things in relation to their possible uses, and therefore never as a disembodied observer. Likewise, our perception of the other person, as another agent, is never of an entity existing outside of a situation, but rather of an agent in a pragmatic context that throws light on the intentions (or possible intentions) of that agent. Theory-of-mind approaches, which involve theory (as an application of folk psychology) or simulation, and which focus on the acquisition of the concept of mental states (like belief) around age 3 or 4 years, miss some basic and important capacities for social cognition. Yet, the acknowledgement of capabilities for understanding others that define primary and secondary intersubjectivity – the embodied, sensory-motor (emotion informed) capabilities that enable us to perceive the intentions of others (from birth onward), and the perceptual and action capabilities that enable us to understand others in the pragmatically contextualized situations of everyday life (from 12–18 months onward) – is not sufficient to address what are clearly new developments around the ages of 2, 3 and 4 years. The “elephant in the room” around the age of 2 years is, of course, language. But if language development itself is something that depends on some of the capabilities of primary and secondary intersubjectivity, language also carries these capabilities forward and puts them into service in much more sophisticated social contexts (on this point, from a different perspective, also see Zlatev this volume). Do children, upon passing explicit false-belief tests, acquire the final conceptual component needed for their mature understanding of reasons, as is the pervasive claim in the theory-of-mind literature? Or does their newfound understanding of false belief simply equate to a capacity to recognize that the other (whether Maxie, or Sally-Ann, or Snoopy, etc.) has a divergent point of view from their own, and no more? And, what lies at the root of this sort of understanding? Is this sort of mastery of the concept of belief a natural consequence of the maturation of theory-of-mind modules, grounded in introspective acts of ostensive denotation or the product of extensive, evidence-based theorizing on their part? We propose that none of these proposals hold up well under close scrutiny (see Hutto 2008: Chs. 9 and 10). If so it is more plausible to think that an understanding of divergent cognitive perspectives is the result of children beginning to participate in conversations of the kind that require recognition of conflicting points of view. This sort of activity can be seen as a natural extension of those forms of imaginative pretend play that require children to occupy different character roles and adopt personas that are different to their own (Hutto 2008: Ch. 7). A child’s initial understanding of the concept of belief is likely to depend on many things but it is notable that many false-belief tests are presented in the form of a narrative and could be interpreted as tests for a certain level of narrative competency. It also worth observing that the strongest data concerning successful

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false-belief performance stems from experiments conducted almost entirely on European and American subjects, whose early lives are awash with folk psychological narratives encountered in fairy tales, children books, comic books, television and films (Richner and Nicolopoulou 2001: 408; Nelson 2003: 22). The form, content and focus of the stories and storytelling practices are much the same in these cultures. Indeed, they even share many of the same canonical ‘texts’. Even more important, we must ask, what role does this mature understanding of false-belief play in the lives of children? And, what drives its development and facilitates its incorporation into larger explanatory schemas of explicitly making sense of actions in terms of reasons (in which attributions of belief plays an important but nevertheless limited part)? In addressing these questions it is vital to be aware, as Carpendale and Lewis (2004: 91) stress, that: Proponents of the dominant theories have been notably quiet about what happens in development after the child’s fifth birthday. However research that explores whether 5-year-olds can use simple false belief knowledge to make inferences about their own and other’s perspectives finds that they singularly fail to do so.

5.

Making sense of reasons

The ability and motivation to use one’s knowledge of false belief in a wider explanatory context, it seems, is late-developing. It comes into play only after children gain an explicit, practical mastery of the concept of belief. This suggests that false belief understanding is not the crowning moment in their early understanding of other minds; children must develop further still if they are to make sense of actions in terms of reasons. What does this involve? Let’s focus on an example. Someone might ask: Why is Laura going to India? If I don’t really know Laura, and if I’ve never heard her say why she is going to India, then I may attempt to get at her reasons in the third-person. This is surely something we do regularly. This sort of speculative attempt at folk-psychological explanation might run as follows. Laura is a young, American college student. Why do young American college students travel to India? Laura, like many young American college students, may believe that India is a romantic place and that she can learn about Eastern meditation practices there and have an adventure. So Laura might desire to go to India for such reasons. One reaches this conclusion by calling on background knowledge – general knowledge or beliefs about what American college students tend to think and value as well as one’s knowledge and beliefs about widely held beliefs about India. The attributed reason may be correct



Primary interaction and narrative practice

or incorrect in Laura’s case, but lacking detailed information about Laura, one is forced to appeal to generalizations informed by knowledge of an impersonal sort. Two things are worthy of note. First, this kind of speculation is not likely to be very reliable in most interesting cases. Second, there is no obvious reason to think that the background knowledge or beliefs in question is theoretical. To say that one is operating with theories about India and theories about the belief-forming tendencies of American students in such cases is surely to stretch the notion of theory beyond reasonable limits. Let’s modify the example slightly. If I know Laura, but do not know precisely why she is going to India, I will be able to make a more informed guess about her reasons. Laura is the kind of person who really wants to help children in the third world, so that is probably why she is going to India. I will have learnt this about her from my previous exchanges with her or on the basis of what others have told me about her. In this case too, my attribution is knowledge-based but the knowledge in question this time is particular and personal. Although, again, hardly theoretical my attribution remains speculative and suppositional. Here’s a third case. Knowing Laura I may already know her reason for going to India or I might get at it by a much more reliable means. I may know why she is going because she may have already told me so. If not, I could always ask her. Of course, she may be lying or self-deceived, but even acknowledging those possibilities direct conversation is undeniably the most secure route to her reasons. It is important to stress that in each of these cases the capacity to understand why Laura acted (or might have acted), and our ability to digest these answers is framed by the activity of checking to see if her reason, as it were, makes sense. Guessing at or learning of a person’s reason is only a small part of the story of our everyday understanding of why others act. It is also necessary to situate and evaluate reasons in wider contexts and against certain normative assumptions. Would it make sense for anyone go to India for that sort of reason? In particular, does it make sense for Laura to go? Is doing so in line with her character, her larger ambitions, her existing projects, or her history? What does it say about her? Does it make her a generous person, an idealist or merely naïve? Understanding reasons for action demands more than simply knowing which beliefs and desires have moved a person to act. To understand intentional action requires contextualizing these, both in terms of cultural norms and the peculiarities of a particular person’s history or values. In this light, reasons for acting are best thought of as “the elements of a possible storyline” (Velleman 2000: 28). As such, making explicit a person’s narrative is the medium for understanding and evaluating reasons and making sense of

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actions. Such narratives allow us to understand a person’s ‘rationale’ when this is not immediately obvious. Sometimes there is a need to frame and justify our reasons but more often than not, when all proceeds normally there is simply no need. This does not imply that in such cases we quietly grasp and deploy a set of explicit generalizations about how others will act. Rather, it is through shared training about the roles and rules of our common world that I learn how I ought to behave in various circumstances, and at the same time I learn how you ought to behave as well, ceteris paribus. Knowledge of what I ought to do in certain circumstances supplies a handy guide to the likely behaviour of others, in so far as they do not step out of line. Such learning does not take the form of internalizing explicit rules (at least not as a set of theoretical propositions), nor does it depend on our applying ones that are somehow already built-in subpersonally. Rather our expectations of others results from our becoming accustomed to local norms, coming to embody them, as it were, through habit and practice. This, we suggest, and not the wielding of theoretical generalizations, is the crucial backdrop against which we make sense of reasons for action via narratives of the folk psychological variety.

6.

The narrative practice hypothesis

How do we get this sort of complex and nuanced understanding of why people do what they do? People do not wear their reasons for action on their sleeves and they cannot be readily discerned or understood by deploying the kind of embodied heuristics described earlier in this paper. We suggest that the pervasive presence of narrative in our daily lives, and the development of specific kinds of narrative competency, can provide a more parsimonious alternative to theory or simulation approaches, and a better way to account for the more nuanced understandings (and mis-understandings) we have of others. Competency with different kinds of narratives enables us to understand others in a variety of ways. Distinctive kinds of narrative encounters are what first allow us to develop our folk psychological competence. Hutto calls this “the narrative practice hypothesis”. It claims that “children normally achieve [folk psychological] understanding by engaging in story-telling practices, with the support of others. The stories about those who act for reasons – i.e., folk psychological narratives – are the foci of this practice. Stories of this special kind provide the crucial training set needed for understanding reasons” (Hutto 2007b: 53). Accordingly, children acquire their skilled competence in understanding reasons by being exposed to and by engaging with narratives when appropriately and actively supported by their care givers. For example, in acts of storytelling, such



Primary interaction and narrative practice

active support takes the form of children being prompted to answer certain questions and by having their attention directed at particular events. In the case of folk psychological narratives this will normally involve jointly attending to mentalistic terms such as “wish”, “believe” and “know” and discussing what the story characters know, feel and want. During this process children learn how these states of mind behave in relation to each other and other terms in the psychological family. Importantly, these attitudes exist in a wider context such that children learn how and why these attitudes matter to the protagonists of such stories. Time and time again reasons for acting, of different types and complexity, are put on show in this way. By attending to enough of these exemplars, it is possible for children to develop an implicit practical understanding of how to make sense of persons as those who act for reasons. This is nothing like fashioning the concepts of the attitudes by means of theorizing or having a core theory about how they interrelate. Coming to understand what it is to act for a reason – to understand folk psychologically – requires being trained by means of a specific kind of narrative practice. They can achieve this because even simple folk psychological narratives, like their more sophisticated cousins “represent the moment by moment experiences of fictional minds, as well as the coloration that those experiences acquire from the characters’ broader cognitive and emotional stances towards situations and events” (Herman 2007: 147). This proposal is consistent with a number of recent empirical studies that have established that there are important links between narrative abilities and our capacity to understand others (Astington 1990; Dunn 1991; Feldman, Bruner, Renderer and Spitzer 1990; Lewis 1994, Lewis, Freeman, Hagestadt and Douglas 1994; Nelson 2007, Peterson and McCabe 1994). Exposure to stories is a critical determiner of folk-psychological abilities and it has been shown that this relation is stronger than mere correlation. Apparently narrative training causally influences what are considered to be basic ‘theory-of-mind’ skills for the better (Guajardo and Watson 2002). Controlled studies have shown that narrative training is responsible for improving performances on false belief tasks. Thus, it has been concluded that narrative is an effective tool for “at least modest improvements in children’s theory of mind development” (Guajardo and Watson 2002: 320). Similarly, it has been observed that “frequent conversations about the mind can accelerate growth of a ToM” (Garfield, Peterson and Perry 2001: 513). A complementary idea is that other kinds of narrative competencies enable a less mediated interpretation of the other’s actions and intentions, that is, without the mediation of folk psychology. After all, folk psychological explanation is just one kind of narrative practice. We argue here that how we go about developing a nuanced understanding of others may involve one or both of these

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paths – ­employing a narrative-informed folk psychology, and/or a less mediated narrative practice – and which one is appropriate will depend on the context.

7.

Folk psychological and other kinds of narratives

What are narratives? This is a tricky question and providing a good answer to it is beyond the scope of this paper. A very minimal definition will suffice for our purposes. Larmarque tells us that for something to be a narrative “at least two events must be depicted in a narrative and there must be some more or less loose, albeit non-logical relation between the events. Crucially, there is a temporal dimension in narrative” (Lamarque 2004: 394; see also Lamarque and Olsen 1994: 225). This neutral characterisation easily lends itself to the idea that there are different types of narratives and that these can be classified by such common features as their constituents and subject matter. Folk psychological narratives – as exemplified by Little Red Riding Hood – are distinguished by being about agents who act for reasons. Importantly, narratives of this kind can play their special role in development by being the objects of joint attention in early learning. That is the core claim of the NPH. In this light it should be emphasised that, as social cognizers, we do not use folk psychological narratives nearly as often as the tradition supposes. They are not, for example, the basis of all interpersonal interaction. On the contrary, they generally only come into play in those cases in which the actions of others deviate from what is normally expected in such a way that we encounter difficulty understanding them. In such cases the other’s actions become noticeable, falling into the spotlight for special attention and explanation – and potentially, explanations of a specific sort that involve understanding the other’s reasons for taking the particular action – where this is not in some way obvious or already known. Folk psychology is needed only in rare cases where we are not already familiar with the other person’s story, or are perplexed by another’s actions. For “When things ‘are as they should be’, the narratives of folk psychology are unnecessary” (Bruner 1990: 40). Appeal to folk psychology may come into play when culturally-based expectations are violated. For the most part, well-rehearsed patterns of behaviour and coordination dominate. By and large, we get by without having to make any folk psychological attributions at all and without seeking explications from others because most everyday social interaction takes place in normal (and normalized) environments. Again, we can learn a great deal from developmental psychology. Around the age of two, children are in secure possession of “an early intentional understanding of persons having internal goals and wants that differ from person to person”



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(Wellman and Phillips 2001: 130; Bartsch and Wellman 1995). Young children are somewhat practiced in understanding things as other people understand them in pragmatic contexts, and when the capacities associated with primary and secondary intersubjectivity are combined with several other newly acquired capacities, young children are ready to understand things and people in emerging narrative structures. And in this context it must be acknowledged that many other kinds of narratives – those of the non-folk psychological variety – can take us a long way to the understanding we seek, without resorting to the folk psychological framework per se (or at least without always having to do so). We learn to make sense of persons (others as well as ourselves) in dramatic and narrative ways as young children. When children listen to stories, or play-act (and the same applies to adults who are exposed to parables, plays, myths, novels, etc.) they become familiarized with sets of characters and with a range of ordinary or extra-ordinary situations, and the sorts of actions appropriate to them, all of which helps to shape their expectations. An education in narratives of many sorts – even of the more general and less personal variety – provides knowledge of what actions are acceptable and in what circumstances, what sort of events are important and noteworthy, what can account for action, and what kind of explanations constitute the giving of good reasons. Moreover, children are well supported in this process. Typically, they are provided with running commentaries on stories that teach them not only which actions are suited to particular situations but also which reasons for acting are acceptable and which are not. It is by absorbing such standards that we first learn how to judge an action’s appropriateness (though, of course, in time such standards are sometimes questioned and overturned). Quite generally, stories – real or fictional – teach us what others can expect from us, but just as importantly, what we can expect from others in certain situations. This is not just coming to know what others ought to (and thus are likely to) do, but what they ought to (and thus are likely to) think and feel, as indexed to the sort of people they are. Narratives provide an important source of guidance for staking out the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not. Through them we learn the norms associated with social roles that pervade our everyday environments – shops, restaurants, homes and theatres.

. There are “two aspects of children’s narrative activity which are too often treated in mutual isolation: the discursive exposition of narratives in storytelling and their enactments in pretend play” (see Richner & Nicolopoulou 2001: 408). “Children’s first narrative productions occur in action, in episodes of symbolic play by groups of peers, accompanied by – rather than solely through – language. Play is an important developmental source of narrative” (Nelson 2003: 28).

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Engaging with narratives is not a passive affair: it presupposes a wide range of emotive and interactive abilities. To appreciate such stories children must initially be capable, at least to some degree, of imaginative identification and of responding emotively, just as they do in basic social engagements. In this respect “conversations about written and oral stories are natural extensions of children’s earlier experiences with the sharing of event structures” (Guajardo and Watson 2002: 307). Through them children discover why characters act as they do in particular cases, becoming accustomed to standard scripts – scenarios, characters, plots, etc. The kind of emotional resonance that one finds already in infancy, in primary intersubjectivity, seems to play an important role in gaining narrative competency. Decety and Chaminade (2003) have shown this connection as it plays out in the brain. In their fMRI study, subjects were presented with a series of video clips showing actors telling sad and neutral stories, as if they had personally experienced them. The stories were told with either congruent or incongruent motor expression of emotion. Subjects were then asked to rate the mood of the actor and how likeable they found that person. Watching sad stories versus neutral stories was associated with increased processing activity in emotion related structures (including the amygdala and parieto-frontal areas, predominantly in the right hemisphere). These areas were not activated when the narrator showed incongruent facial expressions. The reasonable hypothesis is that conflict between what we sense as the emotional state of the other person, simply on the basis of seeing their faces and actions, and the narrative content they present, is disruptive to understanding. Whatever is going on in the brain correlates not simply to features of action and expression (and the subjectivity of the other person) but to the larger story, the scene, the circumstance of the other person, and how features of action and expression match or fail to match those circumstances. If the emotional character of the other person is not in character with the narrative framework – with the story that I could tell about her and her circumstances – it is difficult to understand that person, the story, or both.

8.

Narrative competency and “landscape of consciousness”

We have argued that the abilities for intersubjective interaction and understanding that start with primary and secondary intersubjectivity, develop along a route that in most ordinary cases exploits narrative competency rather than the procedures, subpersonal or explicit, associated with traditional theory-of-mind accounts. This should provide the means of staving off a common worry about the NPH. Janet Astington (1990) has argued that acquiring narrative competency requires having a theory of mind. Citing Bruner’s concept of the landscape of



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consciousness (“what those involved in the action know, think, or feel, or do not know, think, or feel” [Bruner 1986: 14]), she suggests that to understand narrative we need access to the characters’ minds, and to have the latter requires us to have a theory-of-mind. But Bruner himself offers good experimental evidence against the necessity of the landscape of consciousness (LC) for understanding narratives. Feldman, Bruner et al. (1990), in a study of narrative comprehension in adults, presented two different versions of the same story to two groups, respectively. The first and original story mentioned the mental states of the characters as the story develops, and so was rich in LC. The second story was the very same story stripped of mental terms, leaving only the landscape of actions (LA). The results showed no significant differences (1) in subjects using reader-related mental verbs when they recount the LC narrative; (2) in recounting the facts of the stories – “the retellings were virtually indistinguishable”; (3) in recounting the order of events; and (4) when providing a meaning summary (gist) for the story “there is no version difference in the kind of gist given.” A likely explanation of these results is that the structure of these person-narratives, as revealed explicitly in basic plots, can be identified, responded to and described on several levels and ways. Often this happens all at once. But not everyone is equally proficient at this. It is possible to be alive to the major events in a drama without always being able to decipher, with full clarity or perhaps not at all, the reasons why a protagonist will have acted. It is thus possible to have some sense of what is going on in an unfolding drama without understanding it in toto (this is apparently a common experience for those first encountering Shakespearean plays). What is important is that seeking a narrative understanding of the other’s reasons is not a matter of characterizing the other’s ‘inner’ life – if this is understood as a series of causally efficacious mental states. What we are attempting to understand is much richer, it is the other’s reasons as they figure against the larger history and set of projects, and that is best captured in a narrative form. Coming to understand another’s reasons should not be understood as designating their discrete ‘mental states’ but their attitudes and responses as whole situated persons. I encounter the other person, not abstracted from their circumstances, but in the middle of something that has a beginning and that is going somewhere. I see them in the framework of a story in which either I have a part to play or I don’t. The narrative is not primarily about what is ‘going on inside their heads’; it’s about the events going on in the world around them, the world that we share with them,

. For further discussion of the distinction between properly folk psychological narratives and those dramatic re-enactments which only involve intentional attitudes, yet which share the same basic formats (see Hutto 2006).

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and in their lives and the way they understand and respond to such events. Crucially, coming to appreciate the other’s story – to see why they are doing what they are doing – does not require a capacity for mentalizing inferences or simulations. Our understanding of others is ordinarily not based on attempts to get into their heads; typically we do not need to access a “landscape of consciousness” since we already have access to a “landscape of action” which is constituted by their embodied actions and the rich worldly contexts within which they act – contexts that operate as scaffolds for the meaning and significance of actions and expressive movements.

9.

Conclusions

In this chapter we have argued that there is no need to appeal to standard theoryof-mind and simulative explanations of how we understand others as the basis for making sense of them folk psychologically. What begins as perceptual and emotional resonance processes in early infancy, which allow us to pick up the feelings and intentions of others from their movements, gestures, and facial expressions, feeds into the development of a more nuanced understanding of how and why people act as they do, found in our ability to frame their actions, and our own, in narrative ways. Our everyday abilities for intersubjective engagement and . This is not to deny that some narratives are more psychological than others – those of James Joyce or Dostoyevsky, as Jordan Zlatev suggests (private correspondence). Luckily Joyce, Dostoyevsky and other novelists put us in the heads of their characters and we do not have to theorize or simulate our way in there. The NPH does not deny that human beings are complicated psychological creatures, or that the psychological lives of Stephen Dedalus or Raskolnikov are not fascinating in ways that outstrip an understanding in folk psychological terms. The issue is how we come to understand people in our everyday interactions with them. . The idea that narrative understanding does not rest on or presuppose ToM abilities per se (including simulation capacities that involve making belief/desire predictions and explanations) is in line with Greg Currie’s (2007) recent claim that our skills in comprehending narratives involve the adoption of frameworks through which we identify with (and are effectively ‘asked to’ take on) certain personas, which can be understood as embodied ‘stances’ that particular narratives invite us to adopt. The activity of framework adoption is quite distinct from understanding a story’s content – as detailed in its plot or fabula. As Currie characterizes it, adoption or attention to a narrative framework activates our subpersonal mechanisms for imitative and emotional responding – thus it is something that engages us viscerally. He contrasts this with the idea that attention to narrative framework involves developing a ‘theory’ (even if a not very explicit one) about the persona embedded in narrative; although he does not wholly reject the latter proposal since he acknowledges it may have a role when it comes to communicating about narratives.



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interaction are, in the later stages of childhood, transformed by encounters with narratives. It is exposure to these complex objects of joint attention – and not facility with theoretical knowledge or simulative routines – that is responsible for the development of sophisticated folk psychological abilities and understanding; abilities which remain importantly in play in our adult life.

References Allison, T., Puce, Q. and McCarthy, G. 2000. “Social perception from visual cues: role of the STS region.” Trends in Cognitive Science 4 (7): 267–278. Astington, J. 1990. “Narrative and the child’s theory of mind.” In Narrative Thought and Narrative Language, B.K. Britton and A.D. Pellegrini (eds.), 151–71. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum. Baldwin, D.A. 1993. “Infants’ ability to consult the speaker for clues to word reference.” Journal of Child Language 20: 395–418. Baldwin, D.A. and Baird, J.A. 2001. “Discerning intentions in dynamic human action.” Trends in Cognitive Science 5 (4): 171–78. Baldwin, D.A., Baird, J.A., Saylor, M.M. and Clark, M.A. 2001. “Infants parse dynamic action.” Child Development 72 (3): 708–17. Barresi, J. and Moore, C. this volume. “The neuroscience of social understanding.” Bartsch, K. and Wellman, H. 1995. Children Talk About the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Bermúdez, J.L. 1996. “The moral significance of birth.” Ethics 106: 378–403. Bertenthal, B.I., Proffitt, D.R. and Cutting, J.E. 1984. “Infant sensitivity to figural coherence in biomechanical motions.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 37: 213–30. Bruner, J. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carpendale, J.I.M. and Lewis, C. 2004. “Constructing an understanding of the mind: The development of children’s social understanding within social interaction.” Behavioural and Brain Sciences 27: 79–151. Currie, G. 2007. “Framing narratives.” In Narrative and Understanding Persons, D.D. Hutto (ed.), 17–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. deVignemont, F. 2004. “The co-consciousness hypothesis.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3 (1): 97–114. Decety, J. and Chaminade, T. 2003. “Neural correlates of feeling sympathy.” Neuropsychologia 41: 127–128. Dunn, J. 1991. “Understanding others: Evidence from naturalistic studies of children”. In Natural Theories of Mind, A Whiten (ed.), 51–61. Oxford: Blackwell Feldman, C.F., Bruner, J., Renderer, B. and Spitzer, S. 1990. “Narrative comprehension.” In Narrative Thought and Narrative Language, B.K. Britton and A.D. Pellegrini (eds.), 1–78. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gallagher, S. 1996. “The moral significance of primitive self-consciousness.” Ethics 107: 129– 140.

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Gallagher, S. 2001. “The practice of mind: Theory, simulation or primary interaction?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8(5–7): 83–108. Gallagher, S. 2004. “Understanding interpersonal problems in autism: Interaction theory as an alternative to theory of mind.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11 (3): 199–217. Gallagher, S. 2005. “Phenomenological contributions to a theory of social cognition.” Husserl Studies 21: 95–110. Gallagher, S. 2006. “The narrative alternative to theory of mind.” In Radical Enactivism: Intentionality, Phenomenology, and Narrative, R. Menary (ed.), 223–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gallagher S. 2007a. “Logical and phenomenological arguments against simulation theory.” In Folk Psychology Re-Assessed, D. D. Hutto and M Ratcliffe (eds.), 63–78. Dordrecht: Springer. Gallagher, S. 2007b. “Simulation trouble.” Social Neuroscience 2 (3–4): 353–65. Gallagher, S. in press. “Direct perception in the intersubjective context”. Consciousness and Cognition. Gallagher, S. and Meltzoff, A. 1996. “The earliest sense of self and others: Merleau-Ponty and recent developmental studies.” Philosophical Psychology 9: 213–236. Garfield, J.L., Peterson, C.C. and Perry T. 2001. “Social cognition, language acquisition and the development of the theory of mind.” Mind and Language 16: 494–541 Gallese, V. 2005. “‘Being like me’: Self-other identity, mirror neurons and empathy.” In Perspectives on Imitation, S.L. Hurley and N. Chater (eds.), 101–118. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gibson, J.J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. Goldman, A. I. 2002. Simulation theory and mental concepts. In Simulation and Knowledge of Action, J. Dokic and J. Proust (eds.), 1–19. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Goldman, A. and Sripada, C.S. 2005. “Simulationist models of face-based emotion recognition.” Cognition 94: 193–213. Gopnik, A. 1993. “How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 1–14. Gopnik, A. and Meltzoff, A. 1997. Words, Thoughts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gordon, R. 1986. “Folk psychology as simulation.” Mind and Language 1: 158–171. Guajardo, N.R. and Watson, A. 2002. “Narrative discourse and theory of mind development.” The Journal of Genetic Psychology 163: 305–25. Herman, D. 2007. “Cognition, emotion and consciousness.” In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, D. Herman (ed.), 245–259. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hurley, S.L. 2005. “Active perception and perceiving action: The shared circuits model.” In Perceptual Experience, T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.), New York: Oxford University Press. Hutto, D.D. 2004. “The limits of spectatorial folk psychology.” Mind and Language 19: 548–73. Hutto, D.D. 2005. “Knowing what?: Radical versus conservative enactivism.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4(4): 389–405. Hutto, D.D. 2006. “Narrative practice and understanding reasons: Reply to Gallagher.” Radical Enactivism: Intentionality, Phenomenology, and Narrative, R. Menary (ed.), 231–247. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hutto, D.D. 2007a. “Folk psychology without theory or simulation.” In Folk Psychology Reassessed, D.D. Hutto and M. Ratcliffe (eds.), 115–135. Dordrecht: Springer.



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Hutto, D.D. 2007b. “The narrative practice hypothesis.” In Narrative and Understanding Persons, D.D. Hutto (ed.), 43–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutto, D.D. 2008. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jeannerod, M. and Pacherie, E. 2004. “Agency, simulation, and self-identification.” Mind and Language 19 (2): 113–46. Johnson, S.C. 2000. “The recognition of mentalistic agents in infancy.” Trends in Cognitive Science 4: 22–28. Johnson, S. Slaughter, V. and Carey, S. 1998. “Whose gaze will infants follow? The elicitation of gaze-following in 12-month-old infants.” Developmental Science 1: 233–38. Lamarque P., 2004. “On not expecting too much from narrative.” Mind and Language 19: 393–408. Lamarque P. and Olsen S. 1994. Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Legerstee, M. 1991. “The role of person and object in eliciting early imitation.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 51: 423–33. Leslie, A.M. 1987. “Pretense and representation: The origins of ‘theory of mind’.” Psychological Review 94: 412–426. Lewis, C. 1994. “Episodes, events and narratives in the child’s understanding of mind.” In Children’s Early Understanding of the Mind, C. Lewis and P. Mitchell (eds.), 457–478. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum Lewis, C., Freeman, N.H., Hagestadt, C. and Douglas, H. 1994. “Narrative access and production in preschooler’s false belief reasoning.” Cognitive Development 9: 397–424 Meltzoff, A.N. 1995. “Understanding the intentions of others: Re-enactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children.” Developmental Psychology 31: 838–50. Meltzoff, A.N. and Brooks, R. 2001. “‘Like Me’ as a building block for understanding other minds: Bodily acts, attention, and intention.” In Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition, B. Malle, L.J. Moses and D.A. Baldwin (eds.), 171–191. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moore, D. G., Hobson, R. P. and Lee, A. 1997. “Components of person perception: An investigation with autistic, non-autistic retarded and typically developing children and adolescents.” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 15: 401–423. Myowa-Yamakoshi, M. 2001. “Evolutionary foundation and development of imitation.” In Primate Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior, T. Matsuzawa (ed.), 349–367. Dordrecht: Springer. Myowa-Yamakoshi, M., Tomonaga, M., Tanaka, M. and Matsuzawa, T. 2004. “Imitation in neonatal chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).” Developmental Science 7 (4): 437–42. Nelson, K. 2003. “Narrative and the emergence of a consciousness of Self.” In Narrative and Consciousness, G. D. Fireman, T. E. J. McVay and O. Flanagan (eds.), 17–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nelson, K. 2007. Young Minds in Social Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Peterson, C. and McCabe, A. 1994. “A social interactionist account of developing decontextualised narrative skill.” Developmental Psychology 30: 937–48 Phillips, W., Baron-Cohen, S. and Rutter, M. 1992. “The role of eye-contact in the detection of goals: Evidence from normal toddlers, and children with autism or mental handicap.” Development and Psychopathology 4: 375–83.

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Richner E.S. and Nicolopoulou A. 2001. “The narrative construction of differing conceptions of the person in the development of young children’s social understanding.” Early Education and Development 12: 393–432. Scholl, B.J. and Tremoulet, P.D. 2000. “Perceptual causality and animacy.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4 (8): 299–309. Stern, D. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books. Trevarthen, C. 1979. “Communication and cooperation in early infancy. A description of primary intersubjectivity.” In Before Speech: The Beginning of Human Communication, M. Bullowa (ed.), 99–136. London: Cambridge University Press. Trevarthen, C. and Hubley, P. 1978. “Secondary intersubjectivity: Confidence, confiding and acts of meaning in the first year.” In Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language, A. Lock (ed.), 183–229. London: Academic Press. Velleman, J.D. 2000. The Possibility of Practical Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press Walker, A.S. 1982. “Intermodal perception of expressive behaviors by human infants.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 33: 514–35. Wellman H. and Phillips A. 2001. “Developing intentional understandings. In Intentions and Intentionality, B. Malle, L. J. Moses and D.A. Baldwin (eds.), 125–148. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wittgenstein L. 1992. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology Volume 2: The Inner and the Outer. Cambridge: Blackwell. Zlatev, J. this volume. “The co-evolution of intersubjectivity and bodily mimesis.”

chapter 3

The neuroscience of social understanding John Barresi and Chris Moore How do we understand and engage with the purposeful, emotional and mental activities of other people and how does this knowledge develop? What can recent work on mirror neurons in monkeys and human beings teach us about how the brain supports social understanding? According to Intentional Relations Theory (Barresi and Moore 1996), the understanding of the self-other equivalence requires concurrent knowledge of mind from both a first- and a third-person point of view and that any mental concept must directly match and link these two ways of knowing it. In this chapter we will argue that Intentional Relations Theory is consistent with and can help interpret recent neurophysiological findings on “mirror neurons” that fire equivalently for intentional relations (i.e., object-directed actions, emotions, and mental activities) of self and other.

1.

Introduction

Human beings, like many other social animals, spend an enormous amount of time engaged in activities that require quick adjustments to socially transmitted information. By observing others we learn to adapt effectively to changes in the environment as well as to the actions and reactions of our social peers. How do we do it? To what extent do we need to understand the mental processes governing our own and others’ actions or can we function socially based on simple mechanisms by which we come to share psychological states with others, without understanding them? In other words, to what extent does a skill at mind sharing function as a form of social understanding well before we come to a level of mind understanding? Furthermore, how do these two capacities – mind-sharing and mind-understanding – relate to each other? In the Theory of Mind (ToM) approach to social understanding emphasis is placed on sophisticated abilities to understand mental states – in particular the ability to attribute representational mental states such as beliefs to self and other. It is the ability to attribute false beliefs that is taken as a hallmark of the specifically human form of mentalistic social understanding that characterizes a “theory of

40 John Barresi and Chris Moore

mind”. However, social understanding is a more general phenomenon that occurs both in many social species that seem to have no ToM of this kind, and in children well before the late preschool period when the understanding of false beliefs develops. Indeed, an early form of social understanding is evidenced essentially from birth as neonates show a particular sensitivity to human social stimuli. We suggest that the kinds of social sensitivity observed in infants as well as in many social animals should be seen as forms of non-reflective social understanding, dependent on an array of mechanisms that yield an ability to share mental states with others without necessarily recognizing that those shared mental states are in fact attributable to individual agents. A satisfactory account of the development of social understanding will require an explanation of how these original mechanisms that enable early social responsiveness combine with later developing skills to yield more sophisticated forms of intersubjectivity. In parallel, such an account must specify how engaging in shared understanding or shared mental activities with others facilitates the later more individualistic understanding of mind. In the present chapter we will approach these problems with a focus on recent findings in the neuroscience of social understanding. With the discovery in monkeys of pre-motor “mirror neurons” that respond to the actions of others as well as to their own motor plans, there is reason to believe that even monkeys somehow understand actions of both self and others in a similar object-directed way. But should such a “common code” between perception and action be treated merely as an instance supporting the common coding hypothesis (Prinz 1997; Knoblich and Jordan 2002) or a more elaborate understanding for what we have called action intentional relations (Barresi and Moore 1996)? Even if it seems unlikely that monkeys represent these actions as full-blown mental events involving conscious intentions of the other, distinct from their own, it is still a question of how simple is their understanding here and how it connects to more elaborate forms of social understanding. Perhaps their understanding occurs more simply as sharing in the goal-directed nature of the activity of the other by entering into a comparable goal-directed pre-motor state, while not themselves engaging in the activity. Such a sub-personal level of understanding of the action of another would in effect convert it into a first-person representation of one’s own actions, but it would not yet represent that action as what we call an intentional relation, involving a representation of an agent as well as the object-directed action. Nevertheless, such sub-personal matching between goal-directed actions of self and other provides a basis for eventual understanding of full blown intentional relations that can be applied to agent-oriented actions directed at objects at a personal level, whether of self or other. We believe that this is the way that these phenomena should be understood and that this matching between aspects of the observing monkey’s intentional relations (IRs) and the IRs of others provides evidence for the matching



The neuroscience of social understanding

hypothesis that we have previously proposed as the basis of social understanding. We believe that our general account, which we have named Intentional Relations Theory (IRT) is superior to alternative accounts of the origins and development of intersubjectivity, and in the present chapter will bring neuroscientific evidence involving humans as well as monkeys to support our position.

2.

The matching problem of social understanding and three approaches to intersubjectivity

A fundamental aspect of human social understanding is what we have previously referred to as ‘self-other equivalence’. Human beings understand self and other to be essentially the same kind of thing – namely a human agent or person that can engage in a variety of intentional relations with objects or states of affairs. This aspect of human social understanding is quite obvious and passes unnoticed in commonsense psychology and yet it hides a significant epistemic problem. How can we attribute the same meaning to actions of other individuals that we attribute to our own actions when the third-person information that we have of the actions of others is radically different from the first-person information that we have of our own actions? The information we get about others’ actions is apparently information about the overt aspects of behavior, while the object towards which the action is directed is often not obvious (or even opaque in the case of mental states such as beliefs). In contrast the information we get about our own actions is apparently information about our orientations towards the objects and events we witness or imagine but does not typically include information about ourselves as the actor or agent being so oriented. So how are these qualitatively different forms of information recognized to be tokens of the same type – expressions of intentional relations between an agent (self or other) and some object or state of affairs? In the recent history of research on social understanding, there are three fundamentally different answers to this question. According to the ‘theory theory’ (TT) approach humans have innately, or acquire early in development, a ToM mechanism that can be applied uniformly to self and other based purely on inference from behavior (e.g., Gopnik 1993; Leslie 1987). Self-other equivalence in this account is based on the fact that one can interpret one’s own behavior in the same way that one can interpret the behavior of others. For instance, consider an example of what we have called an emotional intentional relation – the case of love. Since love is a public concept, whose main criterion of application is supposedly based on behavior, a person can know when she or another person is in love by noticing the same kinds of behavior of self and other directed toward the object of love.

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In contrast, Simulation theorists (ST) would take a different view from TT on how a person knows about her own love versus another person’s love (e.g., Goldman 1992; Gordon 1986; Humphrey 1984; Harris 1989). On their view, love may have some behavioral consequences that can be used to identify it in another person, but it is fundamentally a subjective mental state, and without a personal appreciation of the “feeling state” that usually goes with the overt behavior, we cannot truly understand love as a psychological state. We understand love “directly” in our own case, but only indirectly and by simulation in the case of another person. We must imagine what someone else feels when we observe their behavior in context (e.g., around the object of love), in order to understand the psychological, intentional, and subjective meaning of their behavior. In our own case, our behavior is a consequence of this subjective state, so no inference is necessary from our own behavior to the mental state that we are in. Although we need to reflect on these states to categorize them, we do not need knowledge of comparable states in other people to form these categories and concepts. A third kind of theory invokes the notion of matching or sharing attitudes or psychological states between self and other and is represented in a range of different accounts (e.g., Gallagher and Hutto this volume; Gallese, Keysers and Rizzolatti 2004; Hobson 1991, 1998; Hobson and Hobson this volume; Wilson and Knoblich 2005; Zlatev this volume). Although the various theories in this third group can all be considered to invoke some form of intersubjectivity – understood widely as involving matched or shared mental states between or among individuals – they vary on the extent to which they provide an account of the foundations or the origins of intersubjectivity and on the processes by which infants are hypothesized to move from forms of intersubjective sharing of mental states to understanding that self and other are persons or selves that might have distinct mental states. Several of these theories (e.g., Gallagher and Hutto this volume; Hobson and Hobson this volume) invoke Trevarthen’s (e.g., Trevarthen and Hubley 1978) concepts of “primary intersubjectivity” and “secondary intersubjectivity” to describe early phases of development. However, while the capacity for mind-sharing is evident in these forms of intersubjectivity, what isn’t clear is how the infant moves from sharing mental states with others to understanding mental phenomena as distinct and possibly different in self and other. In the case of Gallagher and Hutto, this latter form of understanding is thought to rely on the acquisition of language and of the differentiating roles of self and other in situated narratives, some of which involve folk psychological terms. Our own Intentional Relations Theory (Barresi 2001, 2004; Barresi and Moore 1996; Moore 1999, 2006, 2007) does not differ substantially from these accounts in its interpretation of the early phases of development of social understanding that involve mind-sharing through processes that produce interpersonal ­matching



The neuroscience of social understanding

of self and other. However, it differs from these other accounts, as well as from ToM accounts, in explicitly addressing the genesis of the recognition of self-other equivalence and difference, as involving a developmental shift from mind-sharing to mind-understanding. The key notion in IRT is that the first-person information that we have about our own IRs (e.g., the “feeling” of love for someone) is distinctly different from the third-person information that we have about the IRs of others (e.g., another’s “behavior” toward the object of love), and that in order to develop uniform concepts or representations of IRs that can be applied equally, but distinctly, to self and other, we need to match these two types of information in a single concept or form of knowledge that contains both types of information. In Barresi and Moore (1996) we posited an “intentional schema” to integrate this multimodal combination of first- and third-person information initially derived from self and other. On this view, being in love should not be defined primarily as a private, subjective experience, as in the ST view, nor as a mental intentional state that can be inferred from behavior, as in the TT view, but as an embodied IR between the agent and object, that, in the case of love, involves both feelings and concomitant behavioral expressions. Moreover, in learning the concept of love or any other IR, it is supposed that we must learn both the first-person, “inner” aspect, of the IR, as well as the third-person, “outer” aspect; otherwise, we fail to have the concept. For instance, one can be in love, say for the first time, without knowing it, because all one knows about love is the outer aspect, and one does not recognize this outer aspect in one’s feelings for another until one’s concomitant behavior is pointed out to one. Of course, love in our culture is primarily a social concept and learned to a large extent through language. But other more basic IRs, like fearing, seeing, or picking up are more fundamental, and may be understood to some extent by an organism without the mediation of language. In the rest of the chapter, we consider in more detail Intentional Relations Theory and specifically the issue of how 1st and 3rd person information about intentional relations are integrated. We go on to review the neuroscientific findings that support this approach to social understanding. We then consider autism as a case of failure to integrate 1st and 3rd person information in the understanding of self and other.

3.

Matching of 1st and 3rd person information and their integration

In Barresi and Moore (1996) we developed a model of social understanding that focused on the origins of understanding of IRs. We distinguished 4 levels of ­understanding IRs and used these levels to interpret both developmental and phylogenetic differences in social understanding (cf. Zlatev this volume, for a

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similar multilevel model). At level 1, the organism represents the activities of self and other in distinctly different ways and neither in terms of IRs. We suggested that most animals typically operate at this level and it may also characterize social understanding in certain forms of psychopathology such as autism. We will return to consider this level and the case of autism in Section 5. In the rest of this section we review 3 levels of social understanding in which first and third person information about IRs are integrated. We devote most attention to how such integration is possible in the first place.

3.1

Interactive routes to matching

In order to understand IRs at all, the organism must be able to combine first person information about IRs with third person information about IRs into integrated representations involving an agent, an intentional relation and an object that can be equally applied both to the IRs of self and the IRs of others or to the joint activity of self and other. This combination occurs at level 2 of our model when there is matched first- and third-person information about intentional action available to the organism. There are various ways in which such matching can come about. Our suggestion is that matching occurs normally in human development when infant and mother engage in interactions, initially dyadic and later triadic. These interactions are typically patterned in such a way that the infant and mother both express and experience similar psychological activity. For example, in dyadic interactions, infant and mother may smile and vocalize in close synchrony. Whether the synchrony between an infant and adult in interactions of this sort is based on innate contagious mechanisms, or occurs through a form of mimicry initiated at first by the adult, it seems clear that there is a matching in such cases, where first-person information about self can be experienced concurrently with matched third-person information about the other. We believe that in such early dyadic communicative interactions the infant acquires integrated knowledge of first- and third-person aspects of emotional expressions, though not yet of intentional relations involving those expressions directed at objects. Dyadic interactions do not revolve around objects so the intentionality of the shared psychological activity is at best implicit. However, in the triadic interactions that develop at about 9 months of age, the patterned interaction is now object-focused so that both infant and mother may share psychological activity to a particular object – they may look at the same object or produce similar object-directed actions through imitation. We have argued that such interactive ­experiences are crucial for the development of understanding IRs because it is



The neuroscience of social understanding

in these interactions that the infant’s first-person experience of her own ­objectdirected psychological activity is coordinated reliably with their corresponding third-person experience of the mother’s object-directed psychological activity. Reliable coordination of the available first- and third-person information allows the construction of representations of intentional activity that integrate both forms of information and are thereby applicable to the joint activity of self and other, and subsequently with further development to individual activities of either self or other.

3.2 Noninteractive routes to matching Although dyadic and triadic interactions provide the normal context for the sharing of psychological activity in human development, it is probably not necessary for there to be joint engagement of either dyadic or triadic kinds for a degree of matching of intentional relations to occur. For instance, as indicated earlier, research on monkeys seems to show that they can represent the goal-directed actions of another organism in the same manner as they represent their own actions (Gallese et al. 1996; Rizzolatti et al. 1996). The pre-motor ‘mirror’ neurons mediating these representations fire in the planning and execution of the monkey’s own actions, but also in perceiving comparable goal-directed actions in another animate being. While we do not wish to exclude the possibility of innate forms of matching between self and other, for instance in emotional expressive domains where unlearned forms of mimicry may be the basic mechanism for matching, in the case of action understanding a learning mechanism needs to be involved. Matching between perception and action may come about because for certain forms of psychological activity such as object-directed reaching, the organism gains information about its own action via more than one perceptual modality (Keysers and Perrett 2004). When a monkey reaches for objects, it is reliably provided with both visual and proprioceptive information about its own reaching, and an integrated multimodal representation of the action will result. Then vision may mediate the connection to the action of others. The same multimodal representation will later be activated by only the relevant visual information and thereby can be applied to the experience of seeing another organism perform the action. Vision here serves as a third-person ‘bridging’ modality that can be applied to both self and other, thus linking the strictly first-person information of proprioception to the available third-person information about goal-directedness. In this way a representation of action that is similarly applicable to the actions of both self and other may be achieved. ­However, it should be noted that

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all that is involved here is the understanding of the action, per se, not of an agent performing the action. Thus the representation is at a sub-personal rather than at a personal, or agent, level of representation. Hence, an organism does not here understand intentional relations involving agents, but only sub-personal actions directed at objects. There is evidence that such a process may also operate in early human development. Woodward (1998) has shown that infants are able to recognize the goal-directed reaches of others at about the same time as they themselves engage in visually guided reaching. Importantly, teaching infants to make object-directed reaches at an early age is correlated with their representation of similar reaching actions of another person (Sommerville, Woodward, and Needham 2005). Thus, at least for simple actions, it seems that learning to succeed at an action, which involves coordination of first-person (e.g., proprioceptive) and typically third-person (e.g., visual) information of one’s own action, may be correlated with representing the similar actions of others.

3.3 Sub-personal and interpersonal forms of understanding IRs It will be recognized that the latter route to representations of actions that are equally applicable to self and other will only serve for those actions, such as manual reaching, for which the same perceptual information is available for both self and other. It is in such circumstances that a common code for the perception and production of action can bear fruit both in monkeys and humans, with a sub-personal level of understanding of goal-directed actions. However, in the understanding of intentional relations more is required. The difference between the human case and the cases of monkeys is that the dyadic and triadic interactive contexts of early human development provide multiple instances in which there are richly elaborated structures of shared intentional relations. For example, in a typical episode of a joint attentional (triadic) interaction, there may be shared emotional experience (e.g., smiling), shared object-directed action (e.g., object exchange) and shared epistemic activity (e.g., gaze following). These interactive structures therefore provide not just experiences in which a particular, simply observable, action intentional relation is shared but experiences in which a variety of different yet complementary intentional relations of various types are shared. As a result, there is the opportunity for infants to acquire complex representations of intentional activity that combine and integrate the first-person information pertaining to their own activity and the third-person information pertaining to the activity of others across a range of intentional relations. This difference between the human and animal cases, such as monkeys, is important because it may explain why humans step onto the path of development that leads ultimately to an agent level



The neuroscience of social understanding

form of social understanding, whereas monkeys appear not to. To see why, it is important to examine whether the earliest forms of integrated representations of intentional relations are recognized to be at a ‘personal’ or at a ‘subpersonal’ level. Some authors (e.g., Tomasello 1999) have argued that the phenomena of triadic interactions arising at about 9 months signal the development of a concept of an ‘intentional agent’ that can be applied equally to self and other agents. However, a plausible alternative is that concepts of intentionality are initially acquired in a more piecemeal way. For example, Woodward and her colleagues’ research (for a review see Woodward 2005) has shown that infants represent the object-directedness of different actions at different points in development. Whereas reaching is represented as object-directed before 6 months, gaze is not represented as object-directed until the end of the first year. Furthermore, when such intentional relations are first being acquired, the acquisition does not appear to be correlated so that infants who represent gaze as object-directed may not represent pointing as object-directed and vice versa. To explain this pattern of results, Moore (2006) proposed the notion of ‘intentional islands’ (cf. Tomasello 1992, on ‘verb islands’ in language acquisition), whereby intentional representations start out as separate sub-personal ‘islands’ relevant to particular object-directed actions and are only gradually integrated into more complex concepts at a personal level relevant to goal-directed agents. We suggest that it is the richly structured patterns of intentional relations that occur in triadic interactions, which allows the generation of the more complex representations of goal-directed agents. In contrast, while other animals such as monkeys may acquire sub-personal integrated representations of object-directed actions, such as reaching, without experience of rich combinations of shared intentional relations, they do not proceed to construct representations of goal-directed agents.

. Great apes provide evidence that they stepped onto a new path similar to, but not the same as, our own. Chimpanzees, and probably other apes, engage in intense social interactions that promote an understanding of other’s actions on an individual level, through what Zlatev (this volume), ascribes to dyadic mimesis and which, we (Barresi and Moore 1996) originally hypothesized was associated with their general imitative ability. Recent research suggests that the evolutionary path taken here may be different from our own in that while learning in dyadic interactions between infant and mother chimpanzees involves an apprenticeship relationship (Matsuzawa 2007) human dyadic and triadic relationships between human infant and adults is much more intensely communicative and collaborative (Tomasello et al. 2005). A consequence of this latter form of interaction results in what Zlatev calls triadic mimesis, which is roughly similar to level 2 interactions transforming to level 3 interactions in our own model.

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3.4 Individualistic understanding of IRs So far we have advanced from a sub-personal understanding of the simple actions of self and other that do not explicitly code for agent to the capacity for understanding shared IRs evident at level 2 of our model. This sharing entails the existence of representations of IRs that are interpersonal, though probably not explicitly represented as interpersonal. Rather the interrelated and similar IRs of self and other are understood using a uniform representational form that codes for the concurrent identity between first-person information of self and third-person information of the other. But it is not yet the case that agents are recognized to be individual centres of intentional activity. The next level of understanding IRs (­Barresi and Moore 1996) requires the ability to reflect on, or imagine IRs as properties of individual agents. According to IRT this requires the use of imagination to fill in the third-person information for IRs of self and first-person information for IRs of others. Without this ability it would not be possible to represent diversity of intentional relations across self and other when the same object is involved. In the developmental account given in Barresi and Moore (1996), children attain level 3 of understanding IRs during the second year of life. A variety of phenomena evidence this change (see Moore 2007). On the one hand the child becomes capable of recognizing the self as an individual agent as seen by phenomena such as mirror self-recognition. On the other hand, children become able to appreciate that others may have a different intentional orientation to an object from the self. For example, 18-month-olds understand that someone else may like something that they do not and vice versa (Repacholi and Gopnik 1997) and they understand that they may see something that someone else does not and vice versa (Moll and Tomasello 2005). At this point in development, therefore, children are able to attribute some forms of mental states, those exhibited in present activities, to individual agents, both self and other. This level of understanding goes beyond mind-sharing toward a conceptual understanding of individuals as embodied agents with points of views that may differ from each other. In some respects our account here is similar to the simulation account. However, whereas ST proposes that we simulate the mental state of the other through imaginative substitution of our own mental states, we here suggest that only the first-person aspect of the intentional relation of the other requires imaginative construction, as the third-person aspect is pragmatically available in the situation. Moreover, we suggest that at this same time the infant acquires the skill to understand its own intentional relations by imagining the third-person aspect that goes with the currently first-person experience of the intentional relation, something the ST does not even attempt to explain. Our account also differs from Gallagher and Hutto, since we do not think that language



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alone mediates the conceptual development that occurs at this time, which allows one to distinguish one’s own from the other’s embodied mental states. Indeed, their narrative interpretation of how children distinguish mental states of self and other, seems to focus on only representational mental states such as false beliefs, a capacity for which we provide a separate account in the next section.

3.5 Representation of mental agents In the fourth year, pre-school children achieve yet another level of social understanding, when they can imagine both first- and third-person properties of a mental state. This results in children developing knowledge of mental representation as such, which allows them to show evidence of the conceptual understanding of mind seen in traditional ToM tasks. However, according to IRT, the levels of intentional understanding at which there is an understanding of individual minds derive from previous shared intentional activities where first- and third-person information originally became associated. It is the derivation from shared psychological activity that enables the concepts of mind that humans have, yielding notions like love having both internal bases involving feelings and external bases involving behavior. All levels of social understanding which depend originally on the integration of first- and third-person information are held to be different from Level 1 forms of understanding of self and other, which rely separately on firstperson information alone to understand self and third-person information alone to understand others. Consideration of level 1 will become important later in the chapter when we discuss autism (see Section 5). We turn now to research on the neuroscience of social understanding to see to what extent there is support for the model of social understanding we have outlined here. We should note, however, that whereas the evidence from neuroscience indicates a particular pattern of brain organization underlying social understanding in adult human beings as well as nonhuman primates, there is of course no guarantee that the same organization exists at all earlier stages of human development.

4.

Neuroscience and social understanding

In reviewing research on the neuroscience of social understanding, we will organize the initial review into sections dealing with action IRs, emotion IRs, and epistemic IRs, respectively. In these sections our concern will be to identify brain regions and processes that deal primarily with first- and third-person information separately, from areas where first- and third-person information meet and

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where their integration makes possible relatively uniform application of these representations to both self and others. Where first- and third-person information is separated we would expect them to apply differentially to self and other, with first-person information tending to apply mostly to self and third-person information mostly to other. Where they are integrated, the question becomes how we use this integrated information to distinguish between self and other. We will also identify regions in which lower level perceptual processing can be distinguished from higher level metacognitive processing. Finally, we identify research indicating that first- and third-person information is sometimes represented independently, in particular in the case of autistic individuals. Figure 1 depicts essential compontents of IRT along with possible anatomical correlates that will be described in subsequent sections of this chapter.

4.1 Action intentional relations Since the discovery of mirror neurons in the premotor cortex in monkeys that respond to the goal-directed actions of others (Rizzolatti et al. 1996), studies have investigated whether evidence can be found for similar neural structures in humans. A standard paradigm used in a number of these studies is to compare an observation condition, where participants watch the activity of another person, an execution condition where participants perform the action on cue, and an imitation condition, where participants perform the action that they observe another person perform. Transitory Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) studies affecting processing in the relevant neural systems have attempted either to facilitate/produce actions in observation conditions, or to interfere with actions in action or imitation conditions (see Iacoboni 2005, for a review). Taken together these studies affirm that premotor and parietal cortices in humans show mirror properties similar to those in individual neurons of monkeys. Both of these areas are active when performing the actions or observing the actions of others, and more active than in either of these conditions when these actions are both observed and imitated. In contrast to the additional activation found in these two regions (premotor and parietal) when imitating compared to mere observing, a third region, the Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS), tends to show the same level of activation in both observation and imitation conditions but is inactive in the action-only condition. Iacoboni, Kaplan and Wilson (in press) have proposed a model incorporating IRT in accounting for these findings. They propose that the STS provides thirdperson visual information of the action that is being performed. This information is transferred to the Posterior Parietal, where it is matched with first-person information on the kinesthetic, kinematic and somatosensory properties that might go

Figure 1.  Essential components of Intentional Relations Theory and possible anatomical correlates. Third-person information involves exterior senses, which tend to apply more to others than to self; first-person information involves action intentions and interior senses, which tend to apply more to self than to others. Intentional schemas are posited to involve multimodal association areas where first- and third-person information get integrated. Although our main focus is on object-directed intentional relations, non-object directed integration are expected to occur at body-schema levels as well. The central site for the integration of first- and third-person information involving agents in intentional relations is hypothesized to be the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ) and/or inferior parietal (IP), which is hypothesized to involve an egocentric or first-person representation of the agent in space in the right hemisphere and a connected allocentric or third-person representation of the agent in the left. Second order, or reflective representations of intentional relations are hypothesized to occur in the prefrontal cortex. The directions of arrows represent the dominant direction of information processing, though feedback and other connections also occur between anatomical regions both within and between boxes of the model.

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with the action – information provided by internal first-person sources of information integrated in the inferior parietal (see Figure 1). This matched representation of embodied action is then forwarded to the pre-motor area where alternative action plans can be compared to this input. This feed forward mechanism, is then matched to information being fed back from alternative pre-motor plans, and an interpretation is made, in the inferior parietal, between alternative interpretations. In their model, both the pre-motor area and the inferior parietal areas involve matching between first- and third-person properties and so are attributed to involve integration of first- and third-person information by intentional schemas. One way to conceive of the relationship between these two areas is that the inferior parietal (and/or nearby Temporal/Parietal Junction – TPJ) provides an egocentric, body-centered representation of the source of action of an agent-inworld, while the pre-motor area represents the goal or object of the action. Both require matching of first- and third-person information and together provide a full representation of the action intentional relation. From the point of view of IRT, the more important area of integration of first- and third-person information is the inferior parietal or TPJ, rather than the pre-motor area, particularly as this area seems to reappear on complex ToM tasks, and may be crucial for distinguishing self and other as intentional agents. Whereas mirror neurons in the pre-motor area may be insensitive to the difference between self and other and focus mainly on the goals of actions, something that monkeys and young infants can represent, we would hypothesize that left and right parietal regions represent agents in intentional relations, and might be used to distinguish self from other as intentional agents. Studies by Decety and his colleagues (see Decety and Grezes 2006 for a review) provide support for the idea that the TPJ is the locus of a body-centered integration of first- and third-person information that applies both to self and to other but that may also be used to distinguish self from other. In these studies, imitations of other-by-self or self-byother are compared. The general finding is that TPJ (they include studies citing inferior parietal as well as posterior STS) is more active on the right side when other imitates self, but more active on the left side, when self imitates other. One way to interpret this difference is that left TPJ is more active, when a third-person representation of a human body in space is more dominant than a first-person representation, and that the reverse is true for right TPJ. In other words, when the participant is the original source of the action, the right hemisphere is dominant and when the participant is imitating the other, the left hemisphere is dominant. More typically, we would suggest that when left TPJ is dominant, another person is being represented, where third-person information is perceived but first-person information is imagined (what might be called an allocentric representation of a person in space). However, when right TPJ is dominant, it is the self that



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is typically being represented, where first-person information is perceived and third-person information imagined (what might be called an egocentric representation). Independent support for this idea comes from studies of brain damage on these two sides. As we shall see, damage at the left TPJ is found to be associated with failure at false belief tasks involving representations of others, whereas other studies have demonstrated that damage at the right TPJ is associated with spatial neglect, a distortion of egocentric or first-person perspective of space (see Halligan, Fink, Marshall and Vallar 2003). Furthermore, damage at the TJP (or IP) has recently been shown to produce autoscopic hallucinations – seeing oneself – with right-sided damage associated with a non-egocentric out-of-body experience of self, and left-sided damage associated with an egocentric seeing of one’s double (Blanke and Mohr 2005). Taken together, these findings support Iacoboni et al.’s application of the IRT to their imitation studies, and their attribution of our notion of intentional schema to the inferior parietal, as they provide independent evidence that the inferior parietal or TPJ is the main center for an integrated representation of a person in space, whether it is self or other. But these findings also highlight how we can distinguish self from other through the source of information that drives the representation, third-person if it is other and first-person if it is self. These findings also provide a basis for connecting the more complex human activities involved in traditional false belief tasks, which have been shown also to require representations involving the TPJ and more mundane actions that are investigated in imitation tasks. However, in considering imitative tasks, it should be noted that imitation of novel actions requires skills that do not appear in monkeys, and only appear in humans in a full blown state during the second year of life, when the infant is forming its concept of an intentional agent. Indeed, two-year-olds find it particularly fascinating to engage in mutual imitation, where they take turns leading and following each other in novel intentional actions, in a manner analogous to the Decety studies. This play behavior can be interpreted as working out possibilities made available at this time by developments in the use of the intentional schema, both to understand self and other individually and to discriminate self from other even in contexts, where both actors are performing similar actions.

4.2 Affective and motivational intentional relations Typically, when dealing with action IRs, first-person information directly involves motor plans, proprioception, and kinesthetic feedback, while third-person information directly involves visual and auditory information. The integration of these

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sources of information yields representations of a body acting in space with these first- and third-person resources integrated into a representation that can be applied to self or other, possibly through the use of vision and audition as bridging modalities that provide information about actions of self as well as other. Even so, there is a residual motor component, including a readiness to act (see, e.g., Ramnani and Miall 2004), as well as the sense of agency previously discussed that tends to distinguish self from other. When it comes to affective and motivational IRs, the focus is more on sensation than on action. So, the distinction between first-person information and third-person information and their integration, will tend to focus more on internal states within the body rather than on external appearances and expressions. Research involving such affective intentional relations has been consistent in showing the importance of integrated somatic representations of internal feeling states of a person whether such representations are applied to self or other. Generalizing such representations of internal states to another person occurs even when there is no social judgment involved in the task and where the participant merely observes the other. Recent research on pain has been particularly revealing. With respect to pain in self and other, single cells in the Cingulate Cortex (CC) have been found to respond not only to own pain, but also to the appearance of pain in another (Hutchinson et al. 1999). This response occurred even though no instructions to empathize were involved. In an fMRI study of empathy for another’s pain, where again no instructions to empathize were involved, Singer, et al. (2004) had female participants and their partners receive mild shocks following a signal which indicated who was to receive the shock. The participants could see the hands of self and other as well as the signals while they were in the magnetic resonance chamber. It was found that certain primary somatosensory areas responded only to pain in self, but that the Anterior Insula, and the CC responded to the shock signal and anticipated pain both in self and in other. It has been hypothesized by Craig (2003) and Damasio (1999) that the anterior portion of the Insula, particularly on the right side, is a recently evolved region of the brain that represents a “feeling self ”. This region and the CC may both be involved in conscious representation of pain, in contrast to the primary sensory cortex, which may measure the intensity and sensory quality of the pain stimulus, but which may not always contribute to consciousness of pain. Part of the evidence for the distinction is that placebo effects, where perception of pain is induced, produce activations in Anterior Insula but not in the primary sensory areas (Wager et al. 2004). It seems then that, like mirror regions in the pre-motor and parietal areas, this ‘feeling self ’ level of representation of pain is responsive, not only to one’s own feeling of pain, but to the expressed, or merely inferred, pain of another person.



The neuroscience of social understanding

What the Singer et al. (2004) study seems to show is that the areas involved in conscious perception or feeling of one’s own pain, are also active for the anticipated pain of another. Without instructions to do so, the participants seem to participate empathically in the anticipated pain of the other, thus sharing in it, and presumably being aware of their pain by sharing in it. Further support for this interpretation comes from the fact that dispositional measures of empathic ability were obtained in this study and a correlation between degree of dispositional empathy and degree of activation in the Insula and CC for the observeother condition was found. Therefore, not only does the third-person perception of the other’s behavioral situation apparently result in a conceptual understanding of the feeling state of the other, but it actually induces a comparable feeling state in the observer, which may be the ground upon which conceptual understanding is based. The degree to which this internal feeling state is induced seems to depend on the capacity for empathy, or sympathetic imagination, of the observer. However, as a subsequent study shows (Singer et al. 2006), it also depends on how one feels about the other person. If one has reason to like the other, then there is a stronger tendency to show an empathic response to the other’s pain, than if one has reason to dislike the other person. In the latter case, men, but not women, were shown not to have this empathic response to the other’s pain, but instead showed evidence of personal pleasure at seeing the other in pain. So the story here is fairly complex. Unlike the action mirror system in the pre-motor area, which seems to depend only on attention to the activity of the other, the degree of identification with or caring for the other may matter in representing the feeling states of the other in the same mode as one’s own feeling states. In the original Singer, et al. (2004) study, as well as in similar studies on observing touch (Keysers et al. 2004), and disgust (Wicker et al. 2003) in others, primary sensory areas could be used to provide first-person information that distinguished between self and other. However, subsequent research on observation of localized pain inducing stimuli on another person raises the issue of whether primary sensory areas are immune to empathically induced responses. For instance, Avenanti et al. (2005) had participants observe needles being pierced into the hand of another person and found TMS motor cortex induced inhibitory responses of hand muscles that matched those that would have occurred in their own case. Based on this and other findings, Singer and Frith (2005) have suggested that whether one is attending to – or imagining – the emotional response of the other person or the sensory quality of the pain may be what distinguishes these two kinds of results. The implication of this is that to the extent that one can project oneself into the particular situation and experiential state of the other to that extent will one tend to display a matching embodied state. According to IRT, it is the fact that one has at one’s disposal this personal shared experiential base upon

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which to understand the state of the other person that one succeeds in accurately imagining that state. But to elicit such an internal state that typically applies to self when observing another, a matching must occur between the expressed state of the other and one’s own associated experience of being in a comparable state, or be elicited by attending to the situation that the other is in as if it were shared. In the case of an expressed state this requires matching of first-person information about the appropriate internal state to third-person information about expressed state. So motor aspects of the behavior of others may be a mediating factor in situations where we have no direct personal experience of emotional responses in those situations, or where we would respond differently from the other person. Several other studies conducted by Iacoboni and his colleagues indicate that mirroring of expressed affective states may be an important basis for understanding emotions in others. In these studies fMRI brain imaging of participants occurred either while they were engaged in observing or imitating a variety of emotional expressions depicted in photos (Carr et al. 2003; Dapretto et al. 2006). In the study reported by Carr et al. (2003), observing and imitating emotional expressions in others activated regions involved in those emotional expressions for self, in particular the amygdala and insula were involved, but also the pre-motor area and STS. Again these results can be interpreted as eliciting from third-person information (STS) the matching first-person action information necessary to understand the internal state of the other individual. Because the observation and imitation condition had similar pre-motor findings to action studies, this suggests that implicit if not explicit matching of emotional expression is involved in emotional empathy, which may feed into the representation of the feeling self in the insula. So far we have seen that matching between first- and third-person information seems to occur when observing another person’s affective state, and it may not require active use of imagination to feel and understand another’s affective IRs in that a form of affective sharing may occur directly in response to the situation or the other’s expression. Indeed, from a phylogenetic as well as developmental perspective contagion of emotional states from one organism to another is the original basis of emotional sharing (cf. Zlatev this volume). However, as we have argued, sharing a psychological state is not the same as understanding that state. Other evidence suggests that understanding affective states in the sense of attributing emotions and other affective states to individuals as well as discriminating one’s own from another’s emotional state, likely requires frontal activity, and occurs later in human development. It appears necessary to have the involvement of frontal areas, in particular, the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC), in order to reflect on and understand the mental state as either one’s own, or another’s.



The neuroscience of social understanding

The role of the MPFC in understanding at a reflective level pain states in self and other is highlighted in another recent study directly comparing imagination of self and other in pain as compared to damage to a manikin figure (Jackson et al. 2006). While in a magnet, participants viewed images of arms and legs apparently from a first-person perspective in situations likely to be painful or neutral. They were told to imagine the body part as their own, or another person’s, or that of a manikin. In line with the notion that the MPFC is involved in representing second order IRs, there was a strong response in this region only for the humans, but not for the manikin. In addition, there was differential activation in the posterior cingulate, which responded to pain in self and other, and to the inferior parietal. As in previous studies the insula and ACC were responsive to both self and other in a comparison between pain and non-pain conditions. But differences between self and other also occurred. The comparison between self and other found several regions of difference, indicating different routes to representing the same pain state in self and other, and the ability to distinguish between our own and another’s pain. Taken together the results on emotional processing show that matching can occur not only in the motor system where actions or expressions of others are mimicked, perhaps subpersonally, but that feeling states that are connected to those expressions in ourselves are often also active when observing others or in inferring their emotional states in conditions where sympathetic contagion or empathy might be elicited. These internal feeling states are then processed further in frontal areas when we are attempting to understand the emotional state of the other as distinguished from our own emotional response. Both the matching in the premotor area and in the feeling self can be viewed as first-person aspects of emotional IRs, while the visual expressions can be viewed as third-person aspects. However, for second-order representations of these IRs, frontal activity is necessary.

4.3 False belief and complex social inference tasks A considerable amount of research has been devoted to establishing the brain basis of the understanding of the more complex intentional relations characteristic of “theory of mind”. The focus of studies using ToM tasks is on determining brain regions functionally involved in the interpretation of complex stories of social interaction that are visually or verbally presented and in attributing mental states to individuals in these stories. Two brain regions have been shown to be most active in brain imaging studies using various techniques, when compared to control conditions involving comparable processing of non-ToM stimuli: (1) The Temporal/Parietal Junction (TPJ; including neighboring Superior ­Temporal ­regions

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i­ ncorporating STS as well as Inferior Parietal regions, cf. Decety and Grezes 2006); (2) The Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC). The TPJ is believed to be an area in which complex visual stimuli, often involving biological motion and social interaction, are analyzed or represented perceptually and semantically. In the section on action IRs our discussion of the TPJ focused only on intentional actions of a single agent, but the TPJ is also crucial for social interactions and for interpreting more complex mental states than actions. Hence, in terms of IRT the TPJ, at least on the left side, can be understood as representing the third-person information about IRs of one or more organisms, involved in simple or complex object and interpersonal interactions. For instance, even in monkeys this area has individual neurons that are sensitive to eye direction of a person being observed by the monkey and the congruence with the person’s behavior involving another object, with their direction of gaze. Comparable findings with humans, involving more complex IRs, for instance, involving intentions, have been made using fMRI (see, e.g., Pelphery et al. 2004). So this region can pick up epistemic as well as action IRs and is also involved in emotion IRs, involving multiple agents. The second region of importance for the ToM tasks is the MPFC. This region appears to be important for “decoupling” (Leslie 1994), or creating second order representations of IRs that can be attributed to individuals. Reflective or conceptual understanding of the intentionality of the behavior seems an important activity for this region. Indeed, merely noting a stimulus as an act of an intentional agent rather than a machine seems sufficient to involve this region (Ramani and Miall 2004). But this region has a number of other functions of a metacognitive, or executive, sort, and there appear to be subregions with specialized functions, some of which we will consider shortly. Some recent elegant research using simple false belief tasks presented in stories and in videos, along with a number of important controls, to brain damaged patients with frontal and/or temporal-parietal lesions (Apperly, Samson, ­Chiavarino and Humphreys 2004; Samson, Apperly, Chiavarino and Humphreys 2004; ­ Samson, Apperly, Kathirgamanathan, and Humphreys 2005) has provided evidence in partial congruence with these imaging studies. They found that damage to the left TPJ produces a fairly specific deficit in false belief reasoning about others, but that damage in the frontal regions does not. So it appears that a functional TPJ at least on the left (no tested patients had right TPJ damage) is necessary for false belief reasoning. By contrast, it appears that the impact of brain damage in frontal regions is less specific and more diverse, including effects on performance on tasks involving executive function but not on ToM tasks. Indeed, in one of their patients with frontal damage, there was evidence that problems occurred only on false belief tasks that required the inhibition of first-person knowledge of the real location but not on false belief tasks for which the participant



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did not have knowledge of the real location (Samson et al. 2005). This result is congruent with other findings which suggest that executive function associated with frontal activity may be necessary to differentiate between mental states of self and other, and thus for attributing distinct mental states to individuals. In these circumstances a single mental state that is shared between self and other that might be used in cases of passive observation or empathic responding, will not be sufficient for mental state attribution. If we consider just the two main regions involved in research with complex ToM tasks, these results fit well with what we would expect based on the “theory theory” (TT) approach to social understanding. The TPJ provides third-person behavioral analysis of animate activity or apparently animate activity, while the MPFC decouples or represents abstractly IRs, presumably in a theoretical or conceptual format. That the same behavioral analysis and conceptual representation could be applied to self and other is suggested by the fact that the MPFC shows overlap in activity for a variety of tasks involving self and other (e.g., see Decety and Sommerville 2003, for a summary of this research). It is possible that, in line with TT, TPJ analyzes and represents animate activity and IRs based mostly on visual or third-person information. As such the matching problem may not arise if the IRs of self and other are both analyzed in a behavioristic (or third-person) mode. MPFC could then provide “decoupled” (second order) representations of intentional relations of agents, whether they are of self or other (or jointly self and other). However, the fact that the MPFC (and perhaps the TPC, particularly on the right side) is activated in cases of self-representation that seem not to be based entirely on third-person information about the self suggests that integrated representations involving both first- and third-person information of the kind postulated by IRT are involved. Furthermore, the frontal region and other regions along the midline have been postulated to be part of a system for representation and regulation of self (Northoff and Bermpohl 2004). So, perhaps, the MPFC generates a second order representation of another’s mental states, through prior association between a third-person behavioral analysis mainly from the left TPJ that applies more often to another person than to self and a simulation of firstperson components of mental states found in the rest of the typically right-sided self-system. This latter interpretation is consistent with studies showing differential responses for self and other in high level processing of social stimuli (e.g., Lou et al. 2004). The main conclusion to be drawn from these studies is that complex ToM tasks involve two main regions of the brain, a posterior one associated with perceptual representation of IRs and an anterior one associated with metarepresentation of these perceptual representations. Furthermore, there is a good deal of

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overlap between the regions involved in representing self and other. Nevertheless, differences that occur suggest a mapping of third-person information typical of what we have from others to first-person information more typically associated with self. While the need for perceptual and metarepresentational processes for understanding individual IRs in complex ToM tasks is congruent with TT, the overlap between self and other, and use of first-person information as well as third-person information in these tasks fits better with the IRT approach to social understanding.

5.

Level 1 understanding of intentional relations – the case of autism

Finally, it is worth mentioning some imaging research that supports the notion that representations of intentional relations can occur in distinct forms. Dapretto et al. (2006) studied high functioning autistic children and matched controls using the same imitation task as in the Carr et al. (2003) study mentioned earlier. However, in addition to observing and imitating emotional expressions, the autistic participants were measured on severity of autism, using several standardized scales. The behavioral findings were that the autistic participants were as able to imitate emotional expressions as other children, but the imaging findings suggested that the means that they used were different. The typically developing children replicated the results of the adult study, where mirror neuron pre-motor and insula areas were involved in observation and imitation of emotions, along with other areas. But in autistic children these mirror neuron areas were not as involved, and degree of involvement of these areas during imitation was inversely related to severity of autism in the social domain. Furthermore, other areas, the left anterior parietal and the right visual association areas, were more involved for autistic than for typical children. It was suggested that these latter areas served as an alternative route to imitation in this group instead of the usual one involving the mirror neuron system. These results, combined with other findings, support the notion put forward by Barresi and Moore (1996) that the main reason why autistic people have difficulty in ToM tasks as well as emotion understanding and imitation is that they do not match and integrate first- and third-person information through an intermodal intentional schema, hence that they acquire and deploy independent first-person (or egocentric) and third-person (or allocentric) theories of mind. At the time that we wrote our article we had no idea how the notion of intentional schema might relate to brain activity. However, with the discovery of mirror neurons at about the same time, we, as well as others (e.g., Iacoboni et al. 2007) have



The neuroscience of social understanding

been able to make the connection. The Dapretto et al. study probably provides the best confirmation for the view that it is the lack of matching of these two types of information through an intentional schema that is at the heart of problems in social understanding of autistic individuals. The inability to readily transform third-person perceptions into first-person matching experiences, as well as to make the reverse mapping, and thus to engage in mind sharing, makes it difficult for autistic individuals to make sense of mind, because of the absence of a direct connection between the two necessary, inseparably tied aspects of all mental phenomena, an externally available bodily expressive component, and an internally available feeling component. As a result of this deficiency in ability to share mind with others, they lose interest in other people, and have difficulty learning from them. Eventually, if they do attempt to reflect on and understand mind in self and others, they form two radically different accounts: on the one hand they develop rather complex TT-like accounts of mind from a third-person view of their own and other people’s behavior; and on the other hand they overgeneralize in apparent simulation their own egocentric first-person perspective to others (cf. Frith and de Vignemont 2005). Because of lack of mind sharing during infancy and beyond, they are faced with intractable problems in understanding mind beyond those that appear as purely third-person TT types, or purely first-person ST types, instead of integrated theories where matching of first- and third-person information is involved as we have proposed in IRT.

6.

Conclusion

Recent discoveries in the neuroscience of social understanding have opened a new window through which to evaluate theories of social understanding. In the present chapter we have primarily examined our own intentional relations theory (Barresi and Moore 1996) in light of these new discoveries. IRT has three important elements. First, it postulates a distinction between first- and third-person information pertaining to intentional relations, as well as a requirement that both forms of information be combined in order to generate representations of intentional action that are shared between, or equally applicable to, self and others. Second, it postulates that a distinction may be made between a level of social understanding at which first- and third-person information are integrated without being attributable to individual agents and more complex levels of social understanding at which integrated representations are recognized to be properties of individual agents. In human ontogeny (and possibly in phylogeny), the latter levels of social understanding are founded on the former level. Third, it postulates that under

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certain conditions first- and third-person information about ­intentional relations may be processed separately so that the activities of self and other are represented independently. In humans, such a condition is seen in autism. The neuroscience of social understanding shows that integrating first- and third-person information through matching these two types of information occurs in the understanding of action, emotion, as well as epistemic IRs of self and other. The fact that matching between first- and third-person aspects of IRs for self and other occurs immediately on-line for a variety of IRs is congruent with the notion that both aspects are necessary to fully extract the meaning of these activities. Such matching occurs early on in life, though this process of mindsharing does not develop into understanding individual minds until later in development. On our account, it is only through processes that bring about shared psychological states between individuals early on, and provide the initial basis for social understanding, that later development of our usual understanding of individual minds becomes a possibility. Although TT might account for some instances of theories of mind generated purely from behavior, it is only in autistic individuals were we see exaggerated “theories” of this type. However, in autistic individuals there is evidence of a failure in mapping first- and third-person information from very early on in life, which prevents shared mental activity in dyadic interactions. ST does better than TT in accounting for a variety of phenomena involving emotional empathy, and understanding epistemic states. But it cannot account, without special pleading, for matching phenomena involved in action understanding. Again, autistic individuals provide a window into the problem. They can generalize either first- or third-person representations separately from self to other or the reverse. However, because they did not initially engage in shared mental life with others, they have problems understanding the meaning of social activity when the integration of both first- and third-person information is involved. Without prior matching and integrating these two types of information in earlier shared mental activity associated with dyadic and triadic interactions, the concepts that they generate based either on behavior alone or internal states alone are diminished when compared to our usual understanding of IRs of self and other. Thus, we believe that matching theories like IRT provide the best account of how we come to understand our own as well as other minds.



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References Apperly, I.A., Samson D., Chiavarino C. and Humphreys G.W. 2004. “Frontal and left temporoparietal contributions to theory of mind: Neuropsychological evidence from a false belief task with reduced language and executive demands.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16: 1773–84. Avenanti, A., Bueti, D., Galati, G. and Aglioti, S.M. 2005. “Transcranial magnetic stimulation highlights the sensorimotor side of empathy for pain.” Nature Neuroscience 8: 955–960. Barresi, J. 2001. “Extending self-consciousness into the future.” In The Self in Time: Developmental Perspectives, C. Moore and K. Lemmon (eds.), 141–161. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Barresi, J. 2004. “Intentional relations and divergent perspectives in social understanding.” In Ipseity and Alterity: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Intersubjectivity, S. Gallagher and S. Watson (eds.), 74–99. Rouen: Presses Universitaires de Rouen. Barresi, J. and Moore, C. 1996. “Intentional relations and social understanding.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19: 107–154. Blanke, O. and Mohr, C. 2005. “Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy, and autoscopic hallucination of neurological origin Implications for neurocognitive mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self consciousness.” Brain Research Reviews 50: 184–199. Carr, L., Iacoboni, M., Dubeau, M.C., Mazziotta, J.C. and Lenzi, G.L. 2003. “Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: A relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 100: 5497–5502. Craig, A.D. 2003. “Interoception: The sense of the physiological condition of the body.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 13: 500–505. Damasio, A.R. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace. Dapretto, M., Davies, M.S., Pfeifer, J.H., Scott, A.A., Sigman, M., Bookheimer S.Y. and Iacoboni, M. 2006. “Understanding emotions in others: mirror neuron dysfunction in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Nature Neuroscience 9: 28–30. Decety, J. and Grezes, J. 2006. “The power of simulation: Imagining one’s own and other’s behavior.” Brain Research 1079: 4–14. Decety, J. and Sommerville, J. 2003. “Shared representations between self and other: A social cognitive neuroscience view.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7: 527–533. Frith, U. and de Vignemont, F. 2005. “Egocentrism, allocentrism, and Asperger syndrome.” Consciousness and Cognition 14: 719–738. Gallagher, S. and Hutto, D.D. this volume. “Understanding others through primary interaction and narrative practice.” Gallese, V., Keysers, C. and Rizzolatti, G. 2004. “A unifying view of the basis of social cognition.” Trends in Cognitive Science 8: 396–403. Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L. and Rizzolatti, G. 1996. “Action recognition in the premotor cortex.” Brain 119: 593–609. Goldman, A. 1992. “In defense of the simulation theory.” Mind and Language 7: 104–119. Gopnik, A. 1993. “How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 1–14. Gordon, R. 1986. “Folk psychology as simulation.” Mind and Language 1: 158–171.

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Moore, C. 2006. “Representing intentional relations and acting intentionally in infancy: Current insights and open questions.” In Human Body Perception from the Inside Out, G. Knoblich, I. Thornton, M. Grosjean and M. Shiffrar (eds.), 427–442. New York: Oxford University Press. Moore, C. 2007. “Understanding self and other in the second year.” In Transitions in Early Socioemotional Development: The Toddler Years, C.A. Brownell and C.B. Kopp (eds.), 43–65. New York: Guilford Press. Northoff, G. and Bermpohl, F. 2004. “Cortical midline structures and the self.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8: 102–7. Prinz, W. 1997. “Perception and action planning.” European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 9: 129–154. Ramnani, N., and Miall, C.R. 2004. “A system in the human brain for predicting the actions of others.” Nature Neuroscience 7: 85–90. Repacholi, B.M. and Gopnik, A. 1997. “Early reasoning about desires: Evidence from 14- and 18-month-olds.” Developmental Psychology 33: 12–21. Rizzolatti, G., Fadiga, L., Gallese,V. and Fogassi, L. 1996. “Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions.” Cognitive Brain Research 3: 131–141. Samson D., Apperly I.A., Chiavarino C. and Humphreys G.W. 2004. “Left temporoparietal junction is necessary for representing someone else’s belief.” Nature Neuroscience 7: 499–500. Samson, D., Apperly, I. A., Kathirgamanathan, U., and Humphreys, G.W. 2005. “Seeing it my way: A case of a selective deficit in inhibiting self-perspective.” Brain 128: 1102–1111. Sebanz, N. and Frith, C. 2004. “Beyond simulation? Neural mechanisms for predicting the actions of others.” Nature Neuroscience 7: 5–6. Singer, T. and Frith, C. 2005. “The painful side of empathy.” Nature Neuroscience 8: 845–846. Singer, T., Seymour, B., O’Doherty, J., Kaube, H., Dolan, R. and Frith, C. 2004. “Empathy for pain involves the affective but not sensory components of pain.” Science 303: 1157–1162. Singer, T., Seymour, B., O’Doherty, J.P., Stephan, K.E., Dolan, R.J. and Frith, C.D. 2006. “Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others.” Nature 439: 466–469. Sommerville, J.A., Woodward, A.L. and Needham, A. 2005. “Action experience alters 3-monthold infants’ perception of others’ actions.” Cognition 96: B1–B11. Swanson, D., Apperly, I.A., Kathirgamanathan, U. and Humphreys G.W. 2005. “Seeing it my way: A case of a selective deficit in inhibiting self-perspective.” Brain 128: 1102–1111. Tomasello, M. 1992. First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tomasello, M. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T. & Moll, H. 2005. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 675–691. Trevarthen, C. & Hubley, P. 1978. Secondary intersubjectivity: Confidence, confiding and acts of meaning in the first year. In Action, Gesture, and Symbol: The Emergence of Language. A. Lock (ed.), 183–229. New York: Academic Press. Wager, T.D., Rilling, J.K., Smith, E.E., Sokolik, A., Casey, K.L., Davidson, R.J., Kosslyn, S.M., Rose, R.M. and Cohen, J.D. 2004. “Placebo-Induced Changes in fMRI in the Anticipation and Experience of Pain.” Science 303: 1162–1167.

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Wicker, B., Keysers, C., Plailly, J., Royet, J.-P., Gallese, V. and Rizzolatti, G. 2003. “Both of us disgusted in my insula: The common neural basis of seeing and feeling disgust.” Neuron 40: 655–664. Wilson, M. and Knoblich, G. 2005. “The case for motor involvement in perceiving conspecifics.” Psychological Bulletin 131: 460–473. Woodward, A.L. 1998. “Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach.” Cognition 69: 1–34. Woodward, A.L. 2005. “The infant origins of intentional understanding.” Advances in Child Development and Behavior 33: 229–262. Zlatev, J. this volume. “The co-evolution of intersubjectivity and bodily mimesis.”

chapter 4

Engaging, sharing, knowing Some lessons from research in autism Peter Hobson and Jessica A. Hobson Our aim in this chapter is to consider how intersubjective co-ordination is integral to human forms of interpersonal engagement, sharing experiences with others, and acquiring knowledge about persons with minds. We dwell on three studies involving children and adolescents with autism, each concerned with different aspects of non-verbal communication in greetings and farewells, conversation, and imitation, respectively. Other researchers’ reactions to these studies illustrate how scientists tend to be sceptical of measures (however reliable) intended to capture the intersubjective dimension of personal relatedness. On a more theoretical note, we suggest that intersubjectivity acquires the structure that it does, and has the developmental implications that it does, in virtue of human beings’ propensity to identify with others’ attitudes.

1.

Introduction: Qualities of relatedness

Why do we need to bother ourselves with intersubjectivity? To many scientists, the concept has all the wrong kinds of qualities. It is vague; it seems to be trying to capture something that exists between or among individuals, a systemic property, rather than an identifiable feature or function of a given organism; and it is difficult to operationalize, to quantify or otherwise objectify. Moreover, it smacks of emotion – a matter that should not be so much of a problem, were the concept not framed in a manner so unaccommodating to cognitive/computational, information-processing models of the mind. Our aim in this chapter is to illustrate why the concept of intersubjectivity is indispensable for any account of the development of psychological functioning early in life, and pivotal for understanding the syndrome of autism. We begin by describing three studies of children and adolescents with autism, and indicate why the systemic and emotional qualities of intersubjectivity are so important for interpreting the findings. Each of the studies focuses on different aspects of

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non-verbal communication – participants’ greetings and farewells, their bodily expressions during conversation, and their sharing looks during tests of imitation – but they have in common a concern with what such expressions mean as expressions of affective relatedness and interpersonal co-ordination. A primary purpose of the studies is to pinpoint atypical qualities of relatedness among individuals with autism, and the results provide a basis for a discussion of what autism might reveal about the nature of intersubjectivity. We also consider the developmental implications of intersubjective engagement for the ability to share experiences with others and to arrive at knowledge of personswith-minds. Perhaps we should provide brief clarification of our use of four terms: social, interpersonal, intersubjective, and identification. We shall employ the word ‘social’ to refer to happenings between people, without prejudging the degree to which the participants in the exchanges experience each other as persons (rather than as, say, things). The word ‘interpersonal’ is intended to reflect a special form of relatedness to other embodied persons that includes the potential for intersubjective engagement (Trevarthen 1979), that is, connectedness and co-ordination between the subjective orientations of each person involved (see also Susswein and Racine this volume). We shall be suggesting that a process of ‘identifying with’ the attitudes of others is what structures intersubjectivity in human beings – but not, we believe, in other primates – and gives intersubjective transactions the power to shape the course of human cognitive as well as social development. Rather than attempting to define identification at this point – an especially difficult task, given that it is a process that operates on different levels at successive points in development – in what follows we shall illustrate its meaning through specific instances of its expression. Critically, to identify with someone else is to assume (and paradigmatically, be moved by) attitudes perceived in the other, in such a way that those attitudes become a part of one’s own experience (for example, when one shares experiences) and, potentially at least, part of one’s own emotional repertoire. The picture of scientific scepticism that we painted at the beginning of the chapter may seem an unfair caricature. So in describing our three empirical studies, we shall recount some stories of scientists’ reactions to our own research. In each case we shall convey the responses we received when we submitted the findings to mainstream academic journals.



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2.

Three empirical studies

2.1

Hello and goodbye

The first study we shall report appeared in a paper entitled: ‘Hello and goodbye: A study of social engagement in autism’ (Hobson and Lee 1998). In order to capture the spontaneous greetings and farewells of children and adolescents with and without autism relating to an unfamiliar person, a colleague Tony Lee videotaped participants as they entered and departed from a familiar but empty classroom in which there was a stranger (PH, the first author) to whom they were introduced, and from whom they later took their leave. In outline, the findings were as follows. Compared with participants without autism, there were about half as many of those with autism who gave spontaneous expressions of greeting in the ‘Hello’ episode, and a substantial proportion failed to respond even after prompting. All the young people without autism made eye contact, but a third of those with autism failed to do so; no fewer than 17 out of 24 of the former group smiled, but only six out of 24 of those with autism. In the ‘Goodbye’ episode, half the individuals without autism but only three of those with autism made eye contact and said a goodbye. And not only were there few participants with autism who waved in response to PH’s final prompt, but also their waves were strangely uncoordinated and limp. When we designed this study, we were aware that behavioural data would fail to do justice to the intersubjective phenomena we were attempting to capture, even though such conventional ratings might do the job of highlighting atypical forms of social exchange. We expected that we should have to resist others’ attempts to impose a conceptual framework in which the phenomena were reduced to the social transmission of non-verbal communicative cues. Therefore we also asked our judges to look at the greeting episode up to the time the child sat down at the table, and to rate the degree of personal engagement with PH. It turned out that different judges who made these ratings independently were in good agreement with each other. The results were that 14 participants without autism but only two with autism were judged to be in the most strongly engaged category, and only two without autism but 13 with autism in the least engaged category. What do these findings really mean? Here is how one female adolescent with autism negotiated the greeting and farewell. This person gave only the briefest

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glance towards PH as she entered, and then looked away. As Tony said ‘This is Peter’, she continued to look away for about a second, then looked towards PH without moving her rather set facial expression, and gave a brief and toneless ‘Unn’ in acknowledgement of PH’s presence. Then she looked away to one side, and maintained this lack of eye contact as she walked across the room with her hands linked together in front of her body. She sat down without looking at PH. Once seated, she did not look up at PH across the table. She fixed her gaze towards her lap. Throughout the sequence, she gave little sense of any emotional contact with either adult present. Then when she was told that our session was over, she stood up rather abruptly without making eye contact with PH, and only made any gesture towards PH when he said a first, rather insistent ‘Goodbye’ as she turned to leave. Even here, the gesture was to flap her left hand behind her vaguely in PH’s direction – a wave that hardly seemed like a wave, especially since she was still looking away – and her only remark was a rather nasal and flat ‘Bye’. PH’s final ‘Goodbye’ was met with the faintest of head-turns, another quiet (and hardly expressive) ‘Bye’, and what seemed like a stiff extension of her right wrist behind her body, which might have been a further wave. Although she had seemed aware of PH’s presence, he felt this involved little sense of himself as a person. When we reviewed the videotapes, something else struck us. This concerned PH’s own behaviour. Although he had been trying to relate to each participant in a consistent manner, it seemed that in being unable to sustain a fluency and spontaneity of exchange with the participants who had autism, his own behaviour and gestures became stiff and forced. We shall return to this observation in due course. When we first submitted our paper for publication, it carried the title: ‘Hello and goodbye: A study of interpersonal engagement in autism’. The journal editor who dealt with our manuscript favoured something more neutral about the greeting and farewell ‘behaviors’ of the children we studied. Thanks to our ratings of engagement, we were able to negotiate a compromise title, replacing the word ‘interpersonal’ with ‘social’. We had weathered what was to prove the first of a succession of encounters over our attempts to measure and describe patterns of intersubjective relatedness.

2.2 Head-nodding The second study (García-Pérez, Lee and Hobson 2007) arose out of a previous investigation in which Tony Lee had engaged adolescents with and without autism in conversation in the form of a semi-structured interview (Lee and Hobson 1998). We had videotaped the interviews, and now we wanted to test whether, as we supposed, the intersubjective impairments that characterize autism would be



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manifest in atypical patterns of interpersonal co-ordination in this conversational setting. Two previous studies of this issue by Capps, Kehres and Sigman (1998) and Tantam, Holmes and Cordess (1993) had yielded surprisingly few indications of such abnormalities. In keeping with these previous studies, we decided to apply behavioural measures such as the amount of smiling and head-shaking and nodding, but also predicted group differences when ratings of videotaped interactions were made of two relational characteristics: participants’ degree of affective engagement with the interviewer, and the flow of the dyadic exchange. Beyond this, on the basis of an hypothesis that individuals with autism are seldom ‘moved’ to adopt the bodily expressed psychological orientation of others (Hobson 1993a) – a phenomenon we consider to reflect a limited propensity to align one’s own subjective stance with that of someone else through the process of identification – we anticipated that participants with autism would show fewer episodes of nods and shakes of their heads and a smaller proportion of time looking to the interviewer’s face. We anticipated that these group differences might be more marked at those times when the interviewer was talking than in periods when they (the participants) were talking. The point here is that according to our hypothesis, there should be a specific difficulty when individuals with autism need to accommodate to and connect with someone else’s stance-in-talking, rather than simply needing to show non-verbal communicative expressions. The results were striking for the discrepancy between the very marked group differences that appeared on subjective (but objectively reliable) judgments of affective engagement and interactive flow between the conversational partners, and what seemed to be either absent, or subtle but modest, group differences on behavioural measures of amounts of looking, smiling, and head-nods/shakes. The participants with autism were rated as low in affective engagement and even more markedly discrepant from the control group in the smoothness of their exchanges (in keeping with clinical descriptions by Bosch 1970; Hobson 2002; Kanner 1943), yet they appeared more similar than different in the behavioural components of non-verbal communication. Perhaps there is something about the subtle yet powerful interplay between conversational partners that eludes capture by measures of behavioural events. And when we looked more closely at certain of the behavioural measures, there appeared to be tell-tale signs that all was not well in the interpersonal co-ordination of the exchanges. More specifically, we found that exactly as in the study by Capps et al. (1998), participants with autism often showed an absence of headshakes/nods when the partner was talking, even though the group difference was not significant when the participants themselves were talking. Therefore it seemed that the group difference was not reducible to a general disinclination to nod the head among participants with autism.

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What might this set of results signify? In our view, it probably signifies that children with autism are limited in the degree to which they identify with another person in conversation. We suggest that in the case of people who do not have autism, one individual nods in accordance with what he/she is saying when he/she is talking, and nods ‘in accordance with him/herself in identification with the other person’ when the other person is talking. In other words, it is because of the kind of engagement people have with the stance (and corresponding ideas) expressed by the other person’s speech and expressive behaviour – an engagement that leads one to adopt the other person’s cognitive-affective orientation in the act of comprehending the other – that the natural, unselfconscious kind of noddingin-communicating follows. Individuals with autism are specifically impaired in this kind of intersubjective linkage and attunement. This interpretation accords with other recent evidence that children with autism are limited in the degree to which they identify with the actions of others in imitative contexts (Hobson and Lee 1999; Hobson and Meyer 2005; Meyer and Hobson 2004). And it is in keeping with the fact that there were marked group differences in affective engagement and the flow of interpersonal exchanges during conversation. In fact, half-way through the study we made one additional prediction. We reasoned that if children with autism have a lowered propensity to identify with and feel moved by another person, then the other person might have a reciprocal difficulty in identifying with individuals who have autism. Therefore we predicted that the interviewer would also show less head-shaking/nodding specifically when the participant was talking, owing to the interviewer’s difficulty in identifying with the stance of the participant. This prediction was borne out – even though the interviewer did not look significantly less to the participants with autism when they were talking, nor was he lacking in smiles. Therefore the result was not simply a reflection of his looking less to the participants, nor showing less feeling. It was, we considered, a reflection of the fact that the intersubjective system of two people in relation to one another was awry. We were reminded of PH’s own stiffness towards participants with autism in the Hello-Goodbye study. In both cases, the workings (or not-workings) of intersubjectivity were reflected in each individual’s behaviour, and in all probability each individual’s experience, towards the other. When we submitted this paper for publication, the reviews were positive. However, one anonymous reviewer expressed concern that the interviewer had failed to interview all the participants in the same way, and recommended that we should control for this effect statistically. Otherwise, the reviewer explained, it is not possible to be sure that it was the participants rather than the interviewer who contributed to the outcome on measures of intersubjective engagement. Of course this raises an important point, for it is possible (though much in the results



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suggested was not actually the case) that the interviewer was systematically biased in his approach to the participants with autism. Yet here the dangers of trying to dissect the essentially interpersonal phenomenon of intersubjectivity into independent parts threatened to undermine the measurement of what was (necessarily) expressed by both components in an interlinked system.

2.3 Sharing looks and self/other-orientated imitation Our third study (Hobson and Hobson 2007) proved the most problematic of all when it came to arguing for its scientific respectability. This was because we invited independent raters to watch videotapes of participants interacting (one at a time) with an adult, and to judge the quality of each look they made to the adult’s face. We had not anticipated how strongly other researchers would contest the appropriateness or even the feasibility of judging what we defined as ‘sharing looks’ in distinction to ‘checking looks’ or ‘orientating looks’. The set-up (originally described in Meyer and Hobson 2004), involved a tester demonstrating actions that might or might not be imitated from the tester’s viewpoint, and then instructing the child: ‘Now you’. Imitation of self/other-orientation occurred when the child adopted the examiner’s demonstrated self/otheranchored orientation, thereby reversing the positioning of the object and directedness of the action. An example of this is when they saw the tester rolling a wheel far-from-herself and close-to-the-participant, and imitated by rolling the wheel far-from-themselves and close-to-the-tester. It turned out that participants with autism were less likely to respond in this way. What we now wanted to test, was our prediction that those participants who imitated the tester’s self/other-orientation would also be those most likely to manifest ‘sharing looks’ towards the tester in the imitation task itself. The rationale was that sharing looks, too, serve as indices of the quality of intersubjective engagement that implicates a degree of identification with the person related-to. The methodology was as follows. As a first step, two raters were found to agree in the amounts of time for which children directed their gaze to the tester. The next stage involved raters judging each look with respect to the quality and/or function of the look according to the following mutually exclusive and exhaustive scheme. ‘Sharing looks’ were defined as those looks directed to the tester that could be seen to express a participant sharing experience through interpersonal contact with the tester. They involved a deep gaze which conveyed personal involvement with reciprocity, depth and affective contact, in contrast to checking looks that involved superficial glances at the tester and were more superficial and lacking in mutuality. ‘Checking looks’ were defined as those looks towards the

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tester that were used in order to assess or check out either the situation, the tester’s response, or to determine what might happen next. ‘Orientating looks’ were those that appeared to occur in direct response to an action, sound, or movement on the part of the tester. It proved that mostly, such looks were easily distinguished: two independent judges agreed on 89% of the sample of looks they rated according to this three-way classification. The results were that each of the three forms of looking were less prevalent among participants with autism, and most of the participants in each group showed some ‘checking’ and ‘orientating’ looks. However, two-thirds of participants with autism never showed a ‘sharing’ look, whereas this was the case for one-third of the comparison group. Concerning our critical prediction that sharing looks, and only sharing looks, would relate to imitation of self/other-orientation, it turned out that indeed, participants in each group who showed sharing looks tended to be those who imitated the demonstrator’s self/other-orientation, whereas all those with the lowest scores of self/other-orientation also showed a complete absence of sharing looks. Our interpretation of the findings was that sharing involves a structure of interpersonal engagement (involving identification) that is easily overlooked until it becomes manifest through imitative self/ other-orientation. When the paper describing this study was sent out for review, all three of the anonymous reviewers made criticisms of the ratings and/or definition of ‘sharing looks’. The essence of their objections was that, despite the fact that we had established how the ratings could be made with high inter-rater reliability, there needed to be some better kind of behavioural operationalization that defined when a look could be considered a sharing look. We shall hold back from citing chapter and verse of the reviewers’ points, because this seems uncharitable when they are not here to argue their case. It should be evident from the two studies already described that we are not averse to measuring the kinds of behavioural components of communicative exchanges that these reviewers had in mind for our sharing looks. Yet it seems important to make two observations that, in our view, have a bearing on methodological approaches to measuring or evaluating intersubjectivity. Firstly, was it the case that we had failed to operationalize the concepts in terms of which our hypotheses and predictions were framed? Is it not standard science, for example in the domains of psychiatry and social psychology, to appraise all kinds of goings-on through human beings’ judgements of complex processes – with the only requirement being that independent judges arrive at acceptable levels of agreement in their ratings? Why would one suppose that alternative kinds of behavioural ratings would provide more reliable or more valid estimates of ‘sharing looks’? Of course this might be so, although as a matter of



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fact, our subsequent attempts to find some behavioural indices that corresponded with judgements of sharing looks failed miserably, so that (for example) they were often but often not accompanied by smiles, and participants sometimes showed smiles that were associated with other kinds of looks. The issue here is whether the kinds of subjective ratings applicable to intersubjective phenomena are going to be accorded the kind of status that appears to be justified – providing, of course, the usual scientific criteria of inter-rater reliabilities in judgement are satisfied. Secondly, and related to this, recall that our hypothesis was specifically concerned with looks that reflected sharing of experiences. Why? Because we considered that it was in virtue of the fact that sharing was happening that the looks reflected how a participant was so engaged with the tester through identification, that the imitation of self/other-orientation would be likely to occur. Now if this is the case, how are we to establish that any behavioural index or indices of sharing do indeed reflect sharing, without also making subjective judgements of sharing? Such behavioural components do not come ready-flagged, as it were. One reviewer pointed out that previous researchers had found ways of making behavioural ratings that (in his/her view) seemed to capture phenomena that were similar to those we were trying to measure. Yet if this judgement was not corroborated by ratings of sharing, then it seems the interpretation of the data as reflecting sharing must be questionable. At some point, measures of sharing need to enter the picture if claims are going to be made about the behavioural expressions and developmental implications of sharing.

2.4 Overview of the studies One theme has gained prominence through this research. In the Hello-Goodbye study, we saw that individuals with autism are less likely to orientate to and affectively engage with a stranger, or to depart with typical gestures of farewell. For example, all the participants with autism who waved did so with a strangely configured and ill-directed gesture that hardly seemed a wave at all. Why should that be? How do children without autism come to adopt and shape their waving, so that observed waves-from-others-to-self become waves-from-self-to-others? In the study of non-verbal communication during conversations involving a person with autism, again there was a lack of smooth and affectively co-ordinated exchanges, but also evidence of a subtle but deep failure of each conversational partner to link in with the subjective states that found bodily expression in headshakes and nods. Finally, in the tests of imitation and sharing looks, there appeared to be a relation between adopting the self/other-orientation of someone else, and making a connection with that person through sharing looks (see also

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Barresi and Moore this volume). Connectedness through identifying with another person’s psychological stance is what makes intersubjectivity a system of selves-in-relation-to-other. Studies such as these yield fresh insights into qualities of interpersonal engagement that are pivotal for human social and cognitive development. It is with clinical observations and research on childhood autism firmly in mind, that we turn to consider the nature and implications of intersubjectivity.

3.

The irreducibly social

The answer we give to the rhetorical question with which we began, is that it is only by bothering with intersubjectivity, that one can pinpoint what is essential to the social relations of human beings. If this were not enough, it is only if we accord intersubjectivity an appropriate place within our account of early human development that we shall be able to explain how social and cognitive development take the course that they do. Our purpose in the remainder of this chapter is to explicate what is involved in these claims, from two points of view; firstly, what intersubjectivity entails in terms of person-with-person engagement, and secondly, why it is so central an influence on the growth of the human mind, and so indispensable when we come to consider the kind of profound social impairment that occurs among children with autism. One important line of development that threads its way through an account of very young children’s increasingly differentiated and sophisticated social and cognitive lives concerns their ability to acquire concepts of other people that encompass people’s experiences and psychological orientations – their ‘minds’ – as well as bodies. We put the matter this way, with explicit reference to persons, for reasons that will soon become clear; in short, relative neglect of how the mind is a feature of embodied persons and selves has been damaging for much recent theorizing in developmental psychology. Having said this, such theorizing has also been hugely beneficial in re-focussing attention on the intimate connections among interpersonal understanding (as broadly conceived), communication, and thought. Our first claim, then, is that intersubjective relations between bodily expressive persons are at the core of what is irreducibly interpersonal. Perhaps the quintessential, but by no means only, example of intersubjectivity is to be found in human forms of sharing. To put it bluntly: you cannot share experiences with a stone, a tree, or a squirrel. It is only in a very limited sense that you can share experiences with a dog or chimpanzee – more limited, we believe, than with a two-month-old human infant, and infinitely more limited than with a 10-month-old. Already, then, we may distinguish between what is social, and



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what is ­interpersonal and more specifically, intersubjective in a uniquely human sense. One can have social relations with a dog or chimpanzee, just as dogs and chimpanzees can have social relations with conspecifics, and such relations are not completely devoid of intersubjectivity; on the other hand, one can relate to other people without this entailing much that is intersubjective. So it would seem worthwhile to think through what sharing might entail, so that we are in a better position to consider the origins and development of the ability to share in human ontogeny and phylogeny. In order to do so, it is necessary as a preliminary to distinguish between two kinds of sharing, what Trevarthen (1979; Trevarthen and Hubley 1978) called primary and secondary intersubjectivity. Primary intersubjectivity concerns the transactions that go on between two people, paradigmatically in face-to-face engagements, where the subjective states of each are closely co-ordinated one way or another, for example when they experience joy together, or one is angry and the other upset; secondary intersubjectivity concerns transactions that implicate shared experience of some real or imagined object or event external to the two or more people involved, for example when they share pleasure in watching cricket at Lord’s or argue about who pays for the tickets. Then of course one might wish to distinguish among many forms as well as degrees of intersubjectivity or (more specifically) sharing, so that sharing a joke is not the same as sharing a friendship. Our thesis is that human forms of sharing have qualities that are special to humankind, from very early in life. Let us focus on simple cases. Firstly, consider the following description of a typically developing two-month-old whom we videotaped during a still-face procedure as part of a study of mother-infant relations (previously described and discussed in Hobson 2005). When the mother assumed the still-face and unreactive posture as requested, the infant responded by becoming uneasy, restless, and jerky in her movements, and lost the infectious smiling and smooth tonguing movements that had been evident just moments before. Her bright, protracted gazes into her mother’s eyes were transformed into brief, checking glances. More important for the present purposes, after about 40 seconds her behaviour changed again, and she began to give longer looks to her mother accompanied by forced smiles. There was a strong impression that she was seeking to re-establish contact with her mother, trying to elicit a resumption of the joyful interpersonal exchange that was now missing. If all this is correct, then we see how the infant participates in experience with the other. Sharing experience with someone else is not merely like having one’s own experience of the world, and then adding something. It seems more like having one’s own subjective state and registering something of the other’s attitudes conjointly, in a qualitatively new form of experience (also Tronick et al. 1998).

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To explore this at a later point in development, we consider two further examples that come from videotaped interactions with typically developing children at the end of the first year of life, during semi-structured interactions with a tester. In the first example, a 13-month-old girl and a tester were seated across a table from one another. After playing together, the tester secured the child’s gaze to her face and then looked to her right while extending her right arm and finger into a point and exclaiming ‘look at that’. Initially, the child’s gaze lingered on the tester’s outstretched hand. Next she looked back to the tester’s face as if to ascertain what the tester might be trying to communicate. For a moment she seemed to dwell on her face and then suddenly she shifted her gaze to the target of the tester’s still outstretched finger. This case illustrates something about the means by which infants achieve shared reference by their psychological movement through the other. It is not simply that the other’s point or gaze or other gesture serves as a signpost to objects and events in the world. It is also that the infant is drawn into alignment with the other’s orientation toward a shared world. In a second videotaped interaction from a similar testing arrangement, a 12month-old girl swiftly followed the tester’s gaze and outstretched finger to locate a poster on the wall and then, giving herself barely enough time to take in the contents of the poster, quickly looked back to the tester’s face with an engaging smile. The tester (JH) spontaneously commented on this sharing, with a playful and affirming “Did you see Big Bird?” and the child immediately turned, still smiling, to look back at the poster again. Therefore sharing attention may involve more than being reorientated to see what another person sees, or even being moved to adopt a new attitude to the world; it can also mean that the people involved register and share that sharing is going on. Researchers have come a long way in measuring behavioural accompaniments to sharing experiences. Especially important and influential has been research into the forms of joint attention that occur at the end of the first year of life (Bruner 1983; Seibert, Hogan and Mundy 1982; Sugarman 1984; Walden and Ogan 1988). In joint attention, infants monitor and follow the gaze of others and point to, show, and/or alternate eye contact with reference to object and events in order to direct a person’s attention, share experiences, request things, or inform. In one form of joint attention (initiating joint attention, or IJA), infants use gaze and gesture to achieve sharing of experience with another (Kasari, Sigman, Mundy and Yirmiya 1990). Mundy, Kasari and Sigman (1992) provided evidence that directing the attention of others to objects, rather than to obtain objects, is especially associated with positive affect (also Bruner 1981; Hornik and Gunnar 1988; Rheingold, Hay and West 1976), and infants show more positive affect during joint attention involving both objects and caregivers than when playing with objects by themselves (­Adamson



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and ­Bakeman 1985). Mundy et al. (1992) ­considered how such measures of positive affect in joint attention may contribute to operationalizing aspects of intersubjectivity, or the sharing of one’s inner subjective experiences with others. The important thing here is not to allow such concepts as joint attention, displays of positive affect, or even smiles to displace the meaning of intersubjective engagement, and in particular, to diminish the importance of joint attention as an expression of the human propensity to share the experience of sharing. In order to avoid this, it is essential to return to the meaning of what has been operationalized. By way of illustration, here are two examples of studies which seek behavioural evidence for what might be referred to as sharing looks (Venezia, ­Messinger, Thorp and Mundy 2004) and knowing looks (Rakoczy, Tomasello and Striano 2005). Both approaches involve the timing of smiles in relation to looks at a social partner during triadic experiences with objects, and both remain alert to the need to consider the intersubjective meaning toward which the evidence points. Venezia et al. (2004) provided evidence to suggest that although the frequency of smiling during joint attention remains stable between eight and 12 months, the timing changes so that the older infants begin to smile in anticipation of sharing the event with a social partner. These ‘anticipatory smiles’ involve smiling at an object and then gazing at the tester while smiling. The authors suggest that this developmental change may reveal increasing ability to communicate pre-existing positive affect about an object to another person, or be an index of social referencing in which the infants attempt to confirm their emotional response, but they also go further when they raise the possibility that anticipatory smiling “may index an intersubjective sense of the social partner as someone with whom experiences can be shared”(Venezia et al. 2004: 404). We would argue even further that such sharing looks might reflect the pleasure of psychological linkage with another person vis-à-vis a shared world – and after all, the infant is more likely to be smiling in the first place, if someone else is there sharing the experience. The smile toward the person with whom one is sharing might be expressive of sharing rather than communicating information. It might even be part of the communicative act: “We are enjoying this together.” Consider this vignette. A 15-month-old toddler seated across the table from a tester utters the word ‘Look’ as he extends his index finger into a point while gazing intently at the tester’s face. He ascertains that he has her attention, and then begins to point vaguely to one side while turning to a poster just behind him. He seems to pass this by, as he swings his body to look and point definitively to another poster on the wall to his right side. At the moment he extends his arm to a fully-fledged point, he looks back to the tester’s face with a broad smile. His gaze and smile seem to affirm that he has created an experience for them to share.

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He had decided to show something to his conversational partner, long before he knew what that something would be. Moments later, the tester activates a pop-up clown. When this emerges from hiding, the boy lets out a shriek of delight as he watches the clown dance, but his full exuberance (a way of characterizing the intense positive affect and social gregariousness that can be associated with initiating joint attention, Vaughan, van Hecke and Mundy personal communication September 2006) is only manifest when he lifts his gaze to connect with the tester with whom he is sharing the experience. At this moment, his face bursts into a smile: he is sharing the sharing. His heightened positive affect is an expression of the pleasure in sharing. Our second example comes from research conducted by Rakoczy et al. (2005) with 24-month-olds. These researchers gave an operationalized definition for smiles: “retracting both lip corners upwards and backwards”(Rakoczy et al. 2005: 61). Among the toddlers they studied, looks accompanied by smiles (let’s just call them smiles) were as likely to occur during the imitation of instrumental and pretence actions, but the smiles associated with pretence were more likely to coincide with looking at the social partner, while those associated with instrumental actions were more likely to have their onset while the child was still looking at the object. The investigators considered their data in terms of “some special interpersonal behavior by the child in pretending… and perhaps more ‘knowing smiles’ than in instrumental actions” (Rakoczy et al. 2005: 59). Here we find pointers to the interpersonal nature of symbolizing (also Hobson 1993), and again, reflections of intersubjective engagement.

4.

From engaging and sharing to knowing

The key idea here is that it takes emotional engagement to be moved by others, not least to be moved into sharing experiences. Movements in subjective orientation are essential for much of what is so special about human life – for transitions in thought as well as feeling – and their early beginnings are well illustrated by the phenomena of social referencing (e.g., Sorce et al. 1985). An especially important developmental implication of the ability to apprehend, respond to, and be moved by the subjective states of other people in relation to the world, is that such movements create mental space for negotiating attitudes and meanings. It is only once an infant has experience of shifting across person-anchored stances through assimilating another person’s attitudes – but at the same time, registering the source of those attitudes as ‘other’ – that it becomes possible for the infant to achieve understanding of what it means to have and to pass through alternative perspectives.



Engaging, sharing, knowing

Understanding what it means to have a perspective is critical if the infant is to develop the capacity knowingly to introduce new meanings/perspectives on to the materials of symbolic play. It is also part of achieving a conceptual grasp of the relation between ‘selves’ and the world, where the very idea of a self is that people are each a self with his or her own take on the world that may be shared or challenged, aligned-with or repudiated. So by the middle of the second year of life, pre-reflective and intuitive forms of role-taking are yielding both the means to conceptualise (symbols), and contents to conceptualize selves-with-attitudes in correspondence with a world that is the focus of attitudes and co-reference. It is here we find the beginnings of explicit forms of knowing, not least knowing about selves-with-minds. Humans think and know in virtue of having a form of life that is held in common with others, and in which agreements in judgement are possible (Wittgenstein 1958). In our view, all of this becomes possible through special forms of interpersonal engagement. Initially, there is dyadic engagement – as we described in the two-month-old infant above. Subsequently, there is engagement with others’ engagement with the world, through which one may be ‘moved’ in attitudes towards the world (as in social referencing). Out of this emerges the propensity to move within our own minds, from one psychological orientation to another as if from one person’s stance to another’s. It is in the propensity to dwell in the experience of the other, and to experience the world through the other – that is, to identify with the attitudes of another person from the stance of the other – that we believe the specialness of human forms of sharing are grounded.

5.

Four questions with brief replies

In the opening pages of this contribution, we summarized three studies in autism. Our aim was not only to illustrate the possible yield from such research for our understanding of typical as well as atypical development, nor merely to share our struggles to publish measures of intersubjectivity. We also wanted to introduce the notion that intersubjective engagement might be structured by the process of identifying with the bodily expressed attitudes and actions of other persons. We proceeded to develop the idea that intersubjective sharing is pivotal for development, and highlighted some of the motivational as well as cognitive implications of this fact. At this point, we shall not attempt to explicate the notion of identification in detail, nor try to unravel the details of development from interpersonal engagement to interpersonal understanding (and understanding of everything else, come to that) over the first two years of life. Instead, we offer some brief responses

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to four rhetorical questions that we consider important in thinking about intersubjectivity. We hope that the studies in autism cited earlier, and the vignettes of typically developing young children offered subsequently, will give personal colouring to this schematic account. Our four questions are as follows: Firstly, what is the structure to human interpersonal engagement that is so special, and that is unfolded (as it were) in the forms of joint attention and social referencing towards the end of the first year of life? Secondly, is this same mode of relatedness operative when a toddler achieves not simply interpersonal co-ordination, but also understanding of what it means to be a person or ‘self ’ who is able to respond to other persons and to move through a variety of person-anchored perspectives in his or her own mind? Thirdly, what has this to do with the origins of ‘theory of mind’? Finally, what does it mean that intersubjectivity works as a ‘system’ of self-in-relation-to-other, and what does autism tell us about this? In brief, our answers to these questions are as follows. We believe that in order for sharing to be possible by, say, the second month of life, there needs to be a capacity to register the attitudes expressed through another person’s body in such a way that they can be experienced in relation to one’s own state. This is what sharing entails, after all. We suppose this to be an early form of identifying with the attitudes of others. This natural propensity not only to respond to, but also to assume (in part) another persons’ feelings, gives motivational impetus to what we have referred to as being moved by others. Importantly, the boundary within the self-other mode of experience – and of course, this is prior to any concept of self and other – is also operative in settings of joint attention and social referencing. When an infant is moved to adopt the orientation of other people, it is vital that he or she has the pre-reflective capacity to register the source of the new orientation as ‘other’. This is important for the reason that the child has to reach the point of adopting such perspectives knowingly – and in part, by adopting an otherperson-anchored perspective on him or herself. This would not be possible without the differentiation of person-anchored stances within the child’s own mind. Now to ‘theory of mind’. This is a theoretically loaded expression that is – or should be – concerned with concepts of the mind such as those of thinking, believing, feeling, intending, and so on. In some quarters, the theory is framed in terms of a computational metaphor, with talk of representations, metarepresentations, and computations. Although there are strengths to this approach, among many limitations is the lack of a developmental theory (beyond innatism) to explain the acquisition of concepts of persons-with-minds. The present approach begins with interpersonal co-ordination of bodily-anchored expressive acts, and through a developmental pathway that opens such co-ordination to encompass



Engaging, sharing, knowing

co-orientation with others towards a shared world, leads to the acquisition of symbolic representations along with newfound abilities to relate to one’s own relations with that world. Of course there are developments between the second year of life, and again around the end of the third year when children seem to acquire a new grasp of the concept of belief. In our view, the critical acquisition here is the concept of ‘reality’, so that children can now grasp how people may ‘falsely hold as true of reality’ – and again, we take it that the notion of reality is that which transcends individual human viewpoints, insofar as it is ‘the way things are’. In other words, children who understand what it is to hold a belief grasp what Perner (1990) calls the representational relation. We think that it is through intersubjective engagement and communication with others that children come to see the force of this supra-personal characterization, this arbiter between my view and yours – reality as a given in relation to which humans should merely assent. Finally, the system of self-in-relation-to-other, although remarkably robust, is not immune to disruption from various sources. Autism is instructive for helping us see not only the implications of such disruption – impaired creative symbolic play, limited interpersonal (and ‘theory of mind’) understanding, and impaired self-monitoring probably among these (see also Barresi and Moore this volume) – but also how different forms of dysfunction may underlie the serious impairments in interpersonal engagement that characterize the syndrome. One of our special interests has been in congenital blindness (e.g. Hobson 2005), where the lack of visual (and probably to a lesser extent, affective) co-orientation with others towards a shared world is a serious risk factor for developing the syndrome of autism. Through the association between congenital blindness and autism, we may discern the importance of interpersonal engagement and sharing attitudes towards particular, visually perceived objects and events in the environment for coming to know about symbols, about selves, and more specifically about people’s minds.

6.

Methodology revisited

In this final section of the chapter, we return to issues of methodology. We have already indicated how one way to investigate intersubjectivity is to study human beings in whom the ability to engage with others is compromised, specifically those with childhood autism. Here we turn the argument around, and consider how in order to understand the nature of autism, and even to diagnose the condition, we need to be attuned to the significance of intersubjective engagement. Whatever the resistances to according intersubjective phenomena a central place in our

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a­ ccounts of autism and in our methodological approaches to its ­investigation, it is already the case that judgements about intersubjectivity pervade authoritative diagnostic approaches. Among individuals with autism, something is unusual or limited in the kind of interpersonal engagement we have been describing. In early clinical descriptions of the condition, Kanner (1943) highlighted the children’s “inborn autistic disturbances of affective contact” (Kanner 1943: 250). The phrase “affective contact” is notable for attempting to capture what it is like for a person to be in relation to another, an issue that is still marginalized in much theorizing about autism. Kanner captured something of this when he wrote that “people, so long as they left the child alone, figured in about the same manner as did the desk, the bookshelf, or the filing cabinet” (Kanner 1943: 246). It is instructive to consider how we measure whether or not a child has autism. One approach is to focus upon a relative lack of the presence of particular forms of social-communicative exchange described earlier. For example, Mundy (2003) describes the children’s fundamental social disturbance in terms of early and robust impairments in joint attention development. These are those specific forms of eye contact, affect and gestures used ‘for the singularly social purpose of sharing experiences with others’ (Mundy and Neal 2001). When one administers the Early Social Communication Scales (ESCS: Seibert et al. 1982), for example, young children with autism between the ages of three and seven years of age are likely to initiate one or two joint attention bids (Mundy et al. 1986), far below what one would expect in children without autism. This approach succeeds in characterizing a pivotal aspect of the children’s social-communication impairments, and such impairments have serious implications for the children’s language and cognitive development. Still one needs to ask in what sense such impairments in joint attention are the crux of the developmental psychopathology of autism and to what extent they represent prominent early manifestations of something deeper and yet earlier in the children’s atypical interpersonal engagement. But to return to the assessment of autism: one of the most widely-respected approaches to formal research diagnosis is the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS-G: Lord et al. 2000), a semi-structured series of planned social presses to prompt requests, engagement in joint attention, and communication with the tester. It is very effective in eliciting certain kinds of interpersonal exchange that are often limited in autism. Not only this, but also the standardized way of administering and scoring the measure means one can interpret scores across research laboratories for diverse populations around the world. Interrater agreement standards are high. Items are typically scored on a three-point scale from 0 (no evidence of abnormality related to autism) ranging to 2 (definite ­evidence of



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abnormalities related to autism). Some of the items are as follows (and these are just a few examples): unusual eye contact, quality of social overtures, quality of social response, and overall quality of rapport. Note the degrees of appropriately subjective judgement in the ratings. Or again, here are a few examples of items from the Parent Interview for Autism (PIA: Stone and Hogan 1993). Parents are asked whether the child “enjoys interacting with familiar adults,” “enjoys playing with other children,” “looks through people as if they weren’t there,” “seems to be hard to reach or in his or her own world.” Our point here is that intersubjective judgements are a necessary and important part of conventional diagnostic procedures. So why is there such resistance to incorporating them into the broader domain of scientific investigation? Even though informally, eminent researchers will refer to the lack of “emotional sparkle” in imitative events (Rogers 2006) or the absence of “warm, joyful expressions” (Wetherby 2006) among children with autism – both examples from presentations at the recent International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) in Montreal – we have a long way to go before the developmental significance of the phenomena that such expressions capture is fully appreciated. As a final flourish, here is one last study of our own (Hobson et al. 2006). In this study, we asked children and adolescents to pose for a picture. While one tester took the participant’s photograph with a Polaroid camera, a second tester filmed the encounter. All of the participants looked at the camera when their photograph was taken, and there were no group differences in the tendency to sustain or avert gaze during the episode. But when it came to the quality of these looks, there were marked and highly significant differences between the participants with and without autism. The participants without autism were judged to show self-consciousness in their looks away and their looks to the tester. Those with autism were judged to give blank looks away and to the tester. So, even when the numbers of looks were similar, the quality of the encounter – the feel of the exchange – contrasted sharply between the groups. Once again, here were looks that raters could judge reliably. Although one might now try to track down which behavioral/expressive characteristics corresponded with the ‘self-consciousness’ of participants’ looks, it was only through the ratings of intersubjectively attuned human beings that such looks could be identified as self-conscious in the first place. These issues matter when we think about treatment for children with autism. It is only when those involved in treatment cease to consider “emotion recognition” or “interpersonal skills” as abilities that can be taught or trained (even by computer), and instead seek ways to foster development in intersubjective engagement through efforts to draw individuals into appropriate kinds of socially co-ordinated experience by providing manageable and positively engaging exchanges

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(e.g., Gutstein, Burgess and Montfort 2007) do we come closer to finding ways to help children with autism shift to a more fruitful developmental trajectory. To conclude: there are indeed intersubjective foundations for engaging, sharing, and knowing. Intersubjectivity has self-other structure, in our view a structure inherent in the process of identifying with others. One way to explore this claim is to study children with autism. And one of the most promising startingpoints for understanding, diagnosing, and treating autism is to consider how intersubjective engagement shapes the development of social relations and creative symbolic thinking.

Acknowledgements This chapter was written while we were at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, Stanford, California. We are hugely grateful to the Center, and also to the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, for making our stay possible and so rewarding.

References Adamson, L. and Bakeman, R. 1985. “Affect and attention: Infants observed with mothers and peers.” Child Development 56: 582–593. Bosch, G. 1970. Infantile Autism. New York: Springer-Verlag. Bruner, J. 1981. “Learning how to do things with words.” In Human Growth and Development, J. Bruner and A. Garton (eds.), 62–83. London: Oxford University Press. Bruner, J. 1983. Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language. New York: Norton. Capps, L., Kehres, J. and Sigman, M. 1998. “Conversational abilities among children with autism and children with developmental delays.” Autism 2: 325–344. García-Pérez, R.M., Lee, A. and Hobson, R.P. 2007. “On intersubjective engagement: A controlled study of nonverbal communication in autism.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 37: 1310–1322. Gutstein, S.E., Burgess, A.F. and Montfort, K. 2007. “Evaluation of the Relationship Development Intervention Program.” Autism 11: 397–411. Hobson, J.A. and Hobson, R.P. 2007. “Identification: The missing link between joint attention and imitation?” Development and Psychopathology, 19: 411–431. Hobson, R.P. 1993. Autism and the Development of Mind. Hove, Sussex: Erlbaum. Hobson, R.P. 2002/2004. The Cradle of Thought. London: Pan Macmillan & New York: Oxford University Press. Hobson, R.P. 2005. “Autism and emotion.” In Handbook of Autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorders (3rd ed), F.R. Volkmar, R. Paul, A. Klin and D. Cohen (eds.), 406–424. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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Hobson, R.P., Chidambi, G., Lee, A. and Meyer, J.A. 2006. “Foundations for self-awareness: An exploration through autism.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, Serial No. 284, 71. Hobson, R.P. and Lee, A. 1998. “Hello and goodbye: A study of social engagement in autism.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 28: 117–126. Hobson, R.P. and Lee, A. 1999. “Imitation and identification in autism.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 40: 649–659. Hobson, R.P. and Meyer, J.A. 2005. “Interpersonal foundations for the self: The case of autism.” Developmental Science 8: 481–491. Hornick, R. and Gunnar, M. 1988. “A descriptive analysis of infant social referencing.” Child Development 59: 626–634. Kanner, L. 1943. “Autistic disturbances of affective contact.” Nervous Child 2: 217–250. Kasari, C., Sigman, M., Mundy, P., and Yirmiya, N. 1990. “Affect sharing in the context of joint attention interactions of normal, autistic, and mentally retarded children.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 20: 87–100. Landis J.R. and Koch G.G. 1977. “The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data.” Biometrics 33: 159–174. Lee, A. and Hobson, R.P. 1998. “On developing self-concepts: A controlled study of children and adolescents with autism.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 39: 1131–1141. Lord, C., Risi, S., Lambrecht, L., Cook, E.H., Leventhal, B., DiLavore, P.C. and Rutter, M. 2000. “The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule – Generic: A standard measure of social and communication deficits associated with the spectrum of autism.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 30: 205–223. Meyer, J. A. and Hobson, R.P. 2004. “Orientation in relation to self and other: The case of autism.” Interaction Studies 5: 221–244. Mundy, P. 2003. “The neural basis of social impairments in autism: The role of the dorsal medial-frontal cortex and anterior cingulate system.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 44: 793–809. Mundy, P., Kasari, C. and Sigman, M. 1992. “Nonverbal communication, affective sharing, and intersubjectivity.” Infant Behavior and Development 15: 377–381. Mundy, P. and Neal, R. 2001. “Neural plasticity, joint attention, and a transactional social-orienting model of autism.” International Review of Mental Retardation 23: 139–168. Mundy, P., Sigman, M.D., Ungerer, J. and Sherman, T. 1986. “Defining the social deficits of autism: The contribution of non- verbal communication measures.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines 27: 657–669. Perner, J. 1990. Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Rakoczy, H., Tomasello, M., and Striano, T. 2005. “On tools and toys: How children learn to act on and pretend with ‘virgin objects’.” Developmental Science 8: 57–73. Rheingold, H., Hay, D. and West, M. 1976. “Sharing in the second year of life.” Child Development 83: 898–913. Rogers, S.J. 2006. “Imitation difficulties in autism.” Paper presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research, June 1 – 3, Montreal, Canada. Seibert, J.M., Hogan, A.E., and Mundy, P.C. 1982. “Assessing interactional competencies: The Early Social Communication Scales.” Infant Mental Health Journal 3: 244–245. Sorce, J.F., Emde, R.N., Campos, J. & Klinnert, M.D. (1985). “Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds.” Developmental Psychology 21: 195–200.

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chapter 5

Coming to agreement Object use by infants and adults Cintia Rodríguez and Christiane Moro According to the “naturalistic view of the object” children give meaning to objects in a natural, direct, and spontaneous manner, without the need of others. The myth underlying the spontaneity of subject-object encounter is that, in contrast to the widely assumed opacity of “social” reality within modern psychological theory, there exists an alternative reality of “non-social physical” that is literal and transparent. We challenge this by adopting a pragmatic approach to objects. In everyday life, objects are situated in communicative contexts and used for doing things. During their first year of life, children achieve triadic interactions (baby-object-adult) involving very different degrees of agreement with adults concerning an object’s use and meaning by means of diverse semiotic systems in contexts of joint communicative action.

1.

Introduction

The ways in which the subject approaches the object constitutes one of the major themes in early cognitive development – in one way or in another the whole Geneva School was devoted to this issue. Despite this and the growing recent influence of Vygotsky, the “naturalistic view of the object” is predominant in studies of infant cognitive development. This naturalistic view implies that the child relates to the object in a natural, direct, and spontaneous way, often eliminating not only any action and use by the child upon the object, but also any adult-baby joint communicative action on the world (Rodríguez 2007). According to this viewpoint, the child is supposed to promote his early cognitive development through his encounters with an obvious and transparent reality which can be accessed without the need for any educational guidance through semiotic mediation, in order for him to share different degrees of meaning with the people surrounding him. The myth underlying this spontaneous encounter between the subject and the world is the existence of a literal, obvious, transparent, “non-social ­ physical” reality, which declares itself nakedly, as opposed to the opacity of the “social” ­reality that

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exists only through communicative and conventional channels. This dichotomy between the opacity of the social and the immediacy of the meaning of objects has had a profound impact on research into early typically and atypically developing children. In this chapter we challenge this “naturalistic” view, and focus instead on a pragmatic and semiotic approach to objects. Objects are used for doing things in everyday life; these meanings and functions are socially established and are linked to the use we make of them. From the beginning of their lives, children are coopted by the people around them as co-protagonists of their activities when doing things with objects. Adults communicate with children through and about objects used in everyday contexts. They achieve different levels of agreement about the meaning of things being used in such contexts. As a consequence, children become involved. They are not in contact with any “syntactic” formal object, however, but with a pragmatic one, involving shared uses in communicative contexts where people do things with them as part of the social world. In the first section of this chapter we will challenge the widely established opposition in the theory of mind literature between the referential opacity of the mental world versus the self-evidence of so-called “physical reality”. Then we will question the solitary nature of the encounter between the child and the world and the “spontaneous” categorizations resulting therein. We will refer to the permanence of objects determined by their social function (before they have names). This permanence through use is already in place by the end of the first year of life and is presented by adults to children from the outset. Before objects are permanent to children they are regarded and used as permanent by adults. Then we will consider some voices arguing against the passivity in which babies are placed in laboratories and we will confront this with how the classical theories (Piaget, Wallon, Vygotsky) conceived subjects always as active, as always transforming their surroundings and hence as a key factor in development. In the next section we will consider the difference between what is meant in the literature by joint attention and our view of joint action, which implies a pragmatic and semiotic perspective where objects are an integral part of baby-adult communication. In the last section we present five observations of children (from 2- to 12-months-old) in contexts of triadic interaction with adults around the same object, and consider the different levels of agreement they reach within this 10 month interval between the first and last set of observations. As an essential tool of analysis, we have identified the different semiotic systems that are involved. Thanks to these, different levels of adult-child agreement about objects, events and situations in the world can be established about the meanings and the uses that can arise.



Coming to agreement

2.

The social nature of objects

2.1

Referential opacity of the social versus the evident physical reality

This dichotomy can be illustrated by an (extreme) excellent and well-known example that has contributed much to the persistence of this naturalistic and oversimplified view of the object. This example is provided during the 1980s and 1990s by traditional theories of mind that characterize mental states by their referential opacity as opposed to the evidence, transparency and literality of physical reality. The so-called “physical reality” is evident, transparent and literal (Leslie 1987). For instance, according to Baron-Cohen, “Belief, knowledge, desire, and pretence are all opaque mental states. That is, they suspend normal truth-conditions governing the propositions they prefix […] In contrast, ‘I saw a mouse’ is true only if I did indeed see one. Thus, perception is transparent, not opaque” (Baron-Cohen 1993: 65, emphasis added). As Costall and Dreier (2006: 4) point out: …the Theory of Mind approach, which has been dominant within developmental psychology for the last decade, has largely removed the issue of children’s use of objects from the research agenda, not only because of its emphasis upon ‘mind’, but also because of its explicit separation of children’s understanding of other people from their understanding of things.

The vast influence of the theory of mind perspective when trying to explain what is missing in children with autism is well known. Autistic children have difficulties in pretend play, in true and false belief and in communication, whereas such impairment “will not fundamentally affect [their] apprehension of physical artifacts, including representational artifacts such as photographs or maps” (Leslie and Roth 1993: 92, emphasis in original). According to this view, autistic children should have no difficulties in their dealings with objects. In other words, the “literal” reality of objects that is assumed to be directly evident is unproblematic. Since the 1980s, this position has been extremely influential regarding views about what should be looked at in early stages of development. Although we cannot develop this here, we would like to stress that this view of the “good ­relation” . We would like to refer here to the claim made by Jeremy Carpendale and Charlie Lewis (2004) in relation to children’s developing understanding of mind. They consider that “the development of children’s social understanding occurs within triadic interaction involving the child’s experience of the world as well as communicative interaction with others about their experience and beliefs” (2004: 79). There is maybe only a small, subtle difference in what we say: We consider that not only “social understanding”, but development (included what is called cognitive development) occurs within triadic interaction, following Vygotsky’s well known maxim: The path going from the child to the world, goes through another person.

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of autistic children with objects is contradicted by Williams, Kendell-Scott and Costall’s (2005) findings concerning the difficulty autistic children show with regard to using everyday objects in a conventional way (see also, Arango, Chávez, and Lasprilla 2003; Pardos and Rodríguez 2005; Moore 2004).

2.2 Early cognitive development: The kingdom of spontaneity The naturalistic view of the object in early cognitive development is not only the result of the impact of the classical theory of mind perspective, but is also characteristic of the enormous influence of the mainstream cognitive approaches that have typically ignored the world when trying to explain the mind. We encourage readers to have a careful look at the different sections included in recent infant development textbooks. Almost invariably one will find a section devoted to “social development”, clearly differentiated from another section dedicated to “cognitive development”. Now we invite the reader to concentrate on the “cognitive development” and see what it says about the relation between the child and the objects presented (or represented). In research, babies are frequently situated in a context (usually the laboratory) on their own, with no other people to interact with, thus implicitly eliminating social interaction as a cause of any cognitive development. In this solitary context their (active) actions on the world are neglected in favour of their (passive) reactions to the stimuli presented to them. When any characteristic of the object is included, most of the time it is merely shape or color (e.g., Bremner et al. 2005). In such contexts, the child becomes “a big solitary looking eye” who does not transform anything in the world but only reacts on his own towards what is being presented. A good example of this is Spelke’s nativist approach, according to which infants, from a very early age, have object permanence and representations of objects as coherent wholes without any social intervention, and without any action by the child. Her comment that “newborn infants also may have a functional system of object representation” (Spelke 1998: 185) seems an extremely vague and general statement. Mandler (2000, 2004b), for instance, adds something to this early representation of objects when she says that there is more than one kind of object categorization. She distinguishes two types: perceptual categorization and conceptual categorization. The latter is based not on what objects look like, but on what “objects do” (2000: 3), and “meaning accrues from what things do, not what they look like” (2004a: 168). Both perceptual and conceptual categories serve different functions: “Infants, just like adults, make their inductive generalizations on the basis of kind, not on the basis of perceptual similarity” (2004a: 199), and



Coming to agreement

when discussing the classification of animals by infants, she notes that “these data are at least partly culturally determined” (2004a: 204). Adding this pragmatic level seems to us essential. Nevertheless, it is extremely surprising to find Mandler go on to conclude with the further claim, especially in a chapter in a book entitled The Development of the Mediated Mind, dedicated to Katherine Nelson. In contrast to other chapters in this book, there was no mention here of the influence of sociocultural context. That is because infants are to some extent shielded from such influence by their lack of language…by and large, the early development of the ability to…categorize objects and to learn the important basics of language such as that it is used for communication, are all governed by universal factors common to infants in all cultures. It is when the foundations have been laid down and the naming practices of the culture begin to teach the infant which details are important that more cultural influence can be seen.  (Mandler 2004b: 27–28, emphases added)

But how is it that the baby is “shielded” from the influence of other people precisely at a time when they are most vulnerable, and completely dependent on them for every aspect of their existence? Our own findings about how children start using everyday objects in a conventional way by the end of the first year stress the cultural and social aspects. If children start to understand objects as “sign of their [public] use”, it is because adults deploy an intense semiotic activity when using the objects with, or in the presence of, children. Thanks to this, children come to “categorize” them according to their social and public use (as adults do). The mediation through signs (not all signs are linguistic) with the object itself is the central tool of adult-child communication allowing the child to appropriate, over an extended process, these public meanings of use (Rodríguez and Moro 1998, 1999; Moro and Rodríguez 2005). It is possible that later concepts have their roots in this kind of canonical uses