Introduction to debates on embodied social cognition

Abstract

Social cognition, very basically, is our ability to understand and interact with others. In all sorts of everyday situations, we observe, understand, and interact in complex social situations. Following politics, gossiping, playing sports, engaging in pretend play, and driving on a busy freeway are just a few instances of social cognition. The study of social cognition seeks to explain the cognitive architecture of our minds and psychological processes that make it possible for us to engage in social cognition. For much of the past two decades, there has been a two-party debate about social cognition between the Theory Theory (TT) and the Simulation Theory (ST). Theory theorists argue that we explain and predict behavior by employing folk psychological theories about how mental states inform behavior. With our folk psychological theories, we infer from a target’s behavior what his or her mental states probably are. And from these inferences, plus the psychological principles in the theory connecting mental states to behavior, we predict the target’ sb ehavior (Carruthers and Smith 1996; Davies and Stone 1995a; Gopnik and Wellman 1992; Nichols and Stich 2003). In its most general form, the TT holds that mindreading is an information-rich process. The process of understanding others’ mental states relies on a rich body of folk psychological information. Simulation theorists, in contrast, argue that we explain and predict a target’s behavior by using our own minds as a model, putting ourselves in another’s shoes, so to speak, and imagining what our mental states would be and how we would behave if we were in the target’s situation. More specifically, we retrodictively simulate to figure out what the target’s mental states could have been to cause the observed behavior, then we take the target’s mental states in the form of pretend beliefs and pretend desires as input, run them through our own decision-making mechanism, and take the resulting conclusion and attribute it to the target (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002; Davies and Stone 1995b; Goldman 2006; Gordon 1986; Nichols and Stich 2003). In contrast with the TT, the ST posits an information-poor process.