Theories of understanding others: the need for a new account and the guiding role of the person model theory

What would be an adequate theory of social understanding? In the last decade, the philosophical debate has focused on Theory Theory, Simulation Theory and Interaction Theory as the three possible candidates. In the following, we look carefully at each of these and describe its main advantages and disadvantages. Based on this critical analysis, we formulate the need for a new account of social understanding. We propose the Person Model Theory as an independent new account which has greater explanatory power compared to the existing theorie

A Role for the prefrontal cortex in supporting singular demonstrative reference

One of the most pressing questions concerning singular demonstrative mental contents is what makes their content singular: that is to say, what makes it the case that individual objects are the representata of these mental states. Many philosophers have required sophisticated intellectual capacities for singular content to be possible, such as the possession of an elaborate scheme of space and time. A more recent reaction to this strategy proposes to account for singular content solely on the basis of empirical models of visual processing. We believe both sides make good points, and offer an intermediate way of looking into singular content. Our suggestion is that singular content may be traced to psychological capacities to form flexible, abstract representations in the prefrontal cortex. This allows them to be sustained for increasingly longer periods of time and extrapolated beyond the context of perception, thus going beyond lowlevel sensory representations while also falling short of more sophisticated intellectual abilities

Understanding others : the person model theory

According to Interaction Theory (IT), neither Theory Theory (TT) nor Simulation Theory (ST) give an adequate account of how we understand others. Their shared defect, it is claimed, is that both focus on third-person observation of the other, and neglect the role of social interaction. While interaction theory is made to account for the latter, it has problems doing justice to explicit attributions of propositional attitudes, especially from an observational stance. The latter received a new explanation by the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH) which focuses on story-based explanations and tends to underestimate the relevance of nonlinguistic intuitive understanding. In this paper, I first try to do justice to what is plausible about each of the four approaches by accepting that each account introduces one plausible epistemic strategy for understanding others, which leads us to a multiplicity view about the epistemic strategies for understanding others. But it will then be argued that an adequate theory of understanding others needs further adjustment and correction because we need to account for the fact that we usually understand others on the basis of specific background knowledge that becomes more enriched during our life; I thus propose Person Model Theory (PMT) as a fruitful alternative. On my account, understanding turns on developing “person models” of ourselves, of other individuals, and of groups. These person models are the basis on which we register and evaluate persons as having mental as well as physical properties. I argue that person models can be either implicitly represented or explicitly available. This is accounted for by describing two kinds of person model, corresponding to the two ways of understanding others; very early in life we develop implicit person schemata, where a person schema is an implicitly-represented unity of sensory-motor abilities and basic mental phenomena related to one human being (or a group of humans); and we also develop person images, where a person image is a unity of explicitly-registered mental and physical phenomena related to one human being (or a group). I argue that the person model theory has more explanatory power than the other candidates

A multiplicity view for social cognition : defending a coherent framework ; a reply to Lisa Quadt

Lisa Quadt’s commentary focuses on my theory about the multiple epistemic strategies humans use to receive information about one other’s mental phenomena. She develops a principle worry about the theory’s underlying metaphysical foundations, arguing that I am committed to an incoherent metaphysical framework. In this reply, I show that I am not committed to the position she attributes to me and I outline an alternative framework that is my actual background view. I illustrate this framework by discussing emotions and argue that emotions are individuated as integrated patterns of characteristic features. This enables me to combine a representational account of emotions with a theory of direct perception of basic emotions as well as with an understanding of some emotions relying on theory-based inferences. Thus, I have a coherent metaphysics. Finally, I show that the alternative suggested by Quadt has its own problems

I move, therefore I am: A new theoretical framework to investigate agency and ownership

The neurocognitive structure of the acting self has recently been widely studied, yet is still perplexing and remains an often confounded issue in cognitive neuroscience, psychopathology and philosophy. We provide a new systematic account of two of its main features, the sense of agency and the sense of ownership, demonstrating that although both features appear as phenomenally uniform, they each in fact are complex crossmodal phenomena of largely heterogeneous functional and representational levels. These levels can be arranged within a gradually evolving, onto- and phylogenetically plausible framework which proceeds from basic non-conceptual sensorimotor processes to more complex conceptual and meta-representational processes of agency and ownership, respectively. In particular, three fundamental levels of agency and ownership processing have to be distinguished: The level of feeling, thinking and social interaction. This naturalistic account will not only allow to “ground the self in action”, but also provide an empirically testable taxonomy for cognitive neuroscience and a new tool for disentangling agency and ownership disturbances in psychopathology

The Embodied Self, the Pattern Theory of Self, and the Predictive Mind

Do we have to presuppose a self to account for human self-consciousness? If so, how should we characterize the self? These questions are discussed in the context of two alternatives, i.e., the no-self position held by Metzinger (2003, 2009) and the claim that the only self we have to presuppose is a narrative self (Dennett, 1992; Schechtman, 2007; Hardcastle, 2008) which is primarily an abstract entity. In contrast to these theories, I argue that we have to presuppose an embodied self, although this is not a metaphysical substance, nor an entity for which stable necessary and jointly sufficient conditions can be given. Self-consciousness results from an integration of an embodied, basic affective flow with an intentional object (the self as agent or as center of imagination or thought), where this integration remains anchored in an embodied self. This embodied self is a flexible and variable entity, which we can account for only with a pattern theory of the self (in line with Gallagher, 2013). Furthermore, I outline how this pattern theory of the self fits into the predictive coding framework, which also answers the open question whether self-representation is prior to world-representation or the other way around. The principal organization of a mechanism of building up a self-model is such that both types of representations are always activated and developed in parallel. Modeling oneself is a process which is always activated when one interacts with the world – much as a shadow is present when a person walks in the sun

Reconceptualizing second-person interaction

Over the last couple of decades, most neuroscientific research on social cognition has been dominated by a third-person paradigm in which participating subjects are not actively engaging with other agents but merely observe them. Recently this paradigm has been challenged by researchers who promote a second-person approach to social cognition, and emphasize the importance of dynamic, real-time interactions with others. The present article's contribution to this debate is twofold. First, we critically analyze the second-person challenge to social neuroscience, and assess the various ways in which the distinction between second- versus third-person modes of social cognition has been articulated. Second, we put forward an alternative conceptualization of this distinction—one that gives pride of place to the notion of reciprocity. We discuss the implications of our proposal for neuroscientific studies on social cognition