Perceiving mental states: Co-presence and constitution

Unisinos Journal of Philosophy, 2017

Recently, several philosophers have called attention to the idea that there are occasions on which we can perceive (at least some) mental states of others. In this paper we consider two recent proposals in this direction: the co-presence thesis (Smith, 2010) and the hybrid model (Krueger & Overgaard, 2012). We will examine the aforementioned alternatives and present some objections against both of them. Then, we will propose a way of integrating both accounts which allows us to avoid such objections. Broadly stated, our idea is that by perceiving other people’s behaviors we also perceive their mental states because behaviors co-present some features of the latter, and that this perception of others’ minds is direct and immediate because behavior is a constitutive part of the mental states in question.

Synthese

The question of how we actually arrive at our knowledge of others’ mental lives is lively debated, and some philosophers defend the idea that mentality is sometimes accessible to perception. In this paper, a distinction is introduced between “mind awareness” and “mental state awareness,” and it is argued that the former at least sometimes belongs to perceptual, rather than cognitive, processing.

In opposition to mainstream theory of mind approaches, some contemporary perceptual accounts of social cognition do not consider the central question of social cognition to be the problem of access to other minds. These perceptual accounts draw heavily on phenomenological philosophy and propose that others' mental states are “directly” given in the perception of the others' expressive behavior. Furthermore, these accounts contend that phenomenological insights into the nature of social perception lead to the dissolution of the access problem. We argue, on the contrary, that the access problem is a genuine problem that must be addressed by any account of social cognition, perceptual or non-perceptual, because we cannot cast the access problem as a false problem without violating certain fundamental intuitions about other minds. We elaborate the fundamental intuitions as three constraints on any theory of social perception: the Immediacy constraint; the Transcendence constraint; and the Accessibility constraint. We conclude with an outline of an account of perceiving other minds that meets the three constraints.

Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 2017

It is a simple truth about the ways in which we speak about others that we can see or hear or feel what others are thinking or feeling. But it is tempting to think that there is a deeper sense in which we cannot really see or hear or feel these things at all. Rather, what is involved must be a matter of inference or interpretation, for instance. In these remarks, I argue against a variety of ways in which that thought, the thought that we cannot really see or hear or feel what others are thinking or feeling, might be developed.

In their compelling article 'Seeing mental states: An experimental strategy for measuring the observability of other minds' Becchio et al. [1] tackle a long-standing and controversial issue, namely the perennial question of whether we can access or even quite literally see other minds. Much of the relevant interdisciplinary literature is built on the premise that one's access to others' minds is indirect and inferential in nature [e.g. [4,5]]. Recent insights from phe-nomenology, however, suggest that in some cases of social interaction we may have an immediate perceptual access to others' minds [e.g. [2,7]]. In other words, theories of 'mind-reading' have often omitted the discussion of perceptual access to mental states due to the assumption that mental states are not expressed in observable bodily behavior. Yet, the phenomenological tradition points towards an experiential difference in the perception of embodied intentionality as compared to non-intentionality. Building upon this insight, it has been argued that this experiential difference might also be related to a 'genuine, non-trivial difference in the informational content of the perception of embodied inten-tionality as compared to non-intentionality' [3]. Furthermore, access to such an informational difference might guide the skilled human observer in reacting to social signals, helping us to skillfully manage social interactions without a constant need for mental state attribution [6]. In our understanding, Becchio et al.'s approach bears strong resemblance to the above described notion in that they argue congently for the observability of mental states. What is more, they actually provide a much needed operational approach to define the degree of observability of mental states. In fact, they present an empirical 4-step procedure that relies on a quantification of the informational utility and validity of kinematic features in order to successfully identify the intention of an actor. Notably, the aim of their approach is to objectively measure to what extent two intentional movements differ in their kinematic features, whether participants are able to differentiate between the intentions and the predictive value of specific motion features. More specifically, step 1 of the procedure proposed DOI of original article: https://doi.

Theory & Psychology, 2016

According to direct perception theory (DPT) people understand each other’s minds by way of perceiving each other’s behavioral engagements in the world. I argue that DPT admits of two interpretations. One interpretation is found in Searle’s social ontology. The other interpretation departs from an enactivist account of social cognition. Both can make sense of what it is to perceive other minds, but in two different ways. The first claims that people can directly perceive states of mind shared in a community. In contrast, the second interpretation allows for direct perception of particular individuals’ states of mind in the context of participation in social practices. The two interpretations are argued to be compatible. People can perceive communal states of mind in another’s responsiveness to action possibilities in social environments, not only the particular other’s states of mind.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2012

Philosophers and psychologists have often maintained that in order to attribute mental states to other people one must have a 'theory of mind'. This theory facilitates our grasp of other people's mental states. Debate has then focussed on the form this theory should take. Recently a new approach has been suggested, which I call the 'Direct Perception approach to social cognition'. This approach maintains that we can directly perceive other people's mental states. It opposes traditional views on two counts: by claiming that mental states are observable and by claiming that we can attribute them to others without the need for a theory of mind. This paper argues that there are two readings of the direct perception claims: a strong and a weak one. The Theory-theory is compatible with the weak version but not the strong one. The paper argues that the strong version of direct perception is untenable, drawing on evidence from the mirror neuron literature and arguments from the philosophy of science and perception to support this claim. It suggests that one traditional 'theory of mind' view, the 'Theory-theory' view, is compatible with the claim that mental states are observable, and concludes that direct perception views do not offer a viable alternative to theory of mind approaches to social cognition.

In this paper we address the epistemological debate between emerging perceptual accounts (PA) of knowing other minds and traditional theory of mind (ToM) approaches to the problem of other minds. We argue that the current formulations of the debate are conceptually misleading and empirically unfounded. Rather, the real contribution of PA is to point out a certain 'immediacy' that characterizes episodes of mindreading. We claim that while the intuition of immediacy should be preserved for explaining the nature and function of some cognitive processes of mindreading, the notion of immediacy should apply for describing a particular epistemic attitude and not a particular type of epistemic access. We draw on Wittgenstein's discussions of one's relation to other minds to elaborate our claims and to move the epistemological discussions beyond stalling debates between ToM and PA.

Mental presence is how phenomenal consciousness exists. The very existence of consciousness is what gives rise to the so-called "hard problem of consciousness". In contrast to problems concerning the contents of conscious phenomena, the problem of their very existence has so far escaped detailed analysis. This paper ventures a new attempt, making use of the distinction between mental presence and the temporal present. Even though mental presence is tied to the temporal present regarding location in and travel through time, it is shown that the distinction can be drawn both intra-and inter-subjectively. The temporal present can be discerned by its autonomous movement and its inter-subjective significance. By virtue of the inter-subjective synchronization of the temporal present, presence as such is not purely subjective. Mental presence might have a root in the capability of performing intersubjective synchronization.