Mentalistic View Research Articles

Exposure to behavioral regularities in everyday life predicts infants' acquisition of mental state vocabulary.

There are two broad views of children's theory of mind. The mentalist view is that it emerges in infancy and is possibly innate. The minimalist view is that it emerges more gradually in childhood and is heavily dependent on learning. According to minimalism, children initially understand behaviors rather than mental states, and they are assisted in doing so by recognizing repeating patterns in behavior. The regularities in behavior allow them to predict future behaviors, succeed on theory-of-mind tasks, acquire mental state words, and eventually, understand the mental states underlying behavior. The present study provided the first clear evidence for the plausibility of this view by fitting head cameras to 54 infants aged 6 to 25 months, and recording their view of the world in their daily lives. At 6 and 12 months, infants viewed an average of 146.5 repeated behaviors per hour, a rate consistent with approximately 560,000 repetitions in their first year, and with repetitions correlating with children's acquisition of mental state words, even after controlling for their general vocabulary and a range of variables indexing social interaction. We also recorded infants' view of people searching or searching for and retrieving objects. These were 92 times less common and did not correlate with mental state vocabulary. Overall, the findings indicate that repeated behaviors provide a rich source of information for children that would readily allow them to recognize patterns in behavior and help them acquire mental state words, providing the first clear evidence for this claim of minimalism. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Six- to 25-month-olds wore head cameras to record home life from infants' point-of-view and help adjudicate between nativist and minimalist views of theory-of-mind (ToM). Nativists say ToM is too early developing to enable learning, whereas minimalists say infants learn to predict behaviors from behavior patterns in environment. Consistent with minimalism, infants had an incredibly rich exposure (146.5/h, >560,000 in first year) to repeated behaviors (e.g., drinking from a cup repeatedly). Consistent with minimalism, more repeated behaviors correlated with infants' mental state vocabulary, even after controlling for gender, age, searches witnessed and non-mental state vocabulary.

Infants attribute false beliefs to a toy crane.

The mentalistic view of early theory of mind posits that infants possess a robust and sophisticated understanding of false belief that is masked by the demands of traditional explicit tasks. Much of the evidence supporting this mentalistic view comes from infants' looking time at events that violate their expectations about the beliefs of a human agent. We conducted a replication of the violation-of-expectation procedure, except that the human agent was replaced by an inanimate agent. Infants watched a toy crane repeatedly move toward a box containing an object. In the absence of the crane, the object changed location. When the crane returned, 16-month-old infants looked longer when it turned toward the object's new location, consistent with the attribution of a false belief to the crane. These results suggest that infants spontaneously attribute false beliefs to inanimate agents. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/qqEPPhd9FDo.

Probing the depth of infants' theory of mind: disunity in performance across paradigms.

There is currently a hot debate in the literature regarding whether or not infants have a true theory of mind (ToM) understanding. According to the mentalistic view, infants possess the same false belief understanding that older children have but their competence is masked by task demands. On the other hand, others have proposed that preverbal infants are incapable of mental state attribution and simply respond to superficial features of the events in spontaneous-responses tasks. In the current study, we aimed to clarify the nature of infants' performance in tasks designed to assess implicit theory of mind (ToM) by adopting a within-subject design that involved testing 18-month-old infants on two batteries of tasks measuring the same four ToM constructs (intention, desire, true belief, and false belief). One battery included tasks based on the violation-of- expectation (VOE) procedure, whereas the other set of tasks was based on the interactive, helping procedure. Replication of the original findings varied across tasks, due to methodological changes and the use of a within-subject design. Convergent validity was examined by comparing performance on VOE and interactive tasks that are considered to be measures of the same theory of mind concept. The results revealed no significant relations between performance on the pairs of tasks for any of the four ToM constructs measured. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of current conflicting accounts of infants' performance on implicit ToM tasks. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3vqfe_zdhA&feature=youtu.be.

Rethinking the Relationship between Social Experience and False-Belief Understanding: A Mentalistic Account.

It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until at least age four, as evidenced by children’s performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants appear to demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with alternative, non-elicited-response measures has led some researchers to conclude that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in the 1st year of life. This mentalistic view has been criticized for failing to offer an explanation for the well-established positive associations between social factors and preschoolers’ performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks. In this paper, we address this criticism by offering an account that reconciles these associations with the mentalistic claim that false-belief understanding emerges in infancy. We propose that rather than facilitating the emergence of the capacity to represent beliefs, social factors facilitate the use of this ability via effects on attention, inference, retrieval, and response production. Our account predicts that the relationship between social factors and false-belief understanding should not be specific to preschoolers’ performance in elicited-response tasks: this relationship should be apparent across the lifespan in a variety of paradigms. We review an accumulating body of evidence that supports this prediction.

A historiographic study of psychiatric treatments in Brazil: mentalism and organicism from 1830 to 1859.

Our aim is to investigate two major tendencies in nineteenth-century Brazilian alienism: mentalism and organicism, by conducting a descriptive study of original Brazilian documents on medical health treatments in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s. Primary sources of Brazilian alienism were theses, memoirs, official reports, and documents written by clinicians and asylum directors. We analysed early mental treatment in Brazilian lunatic asylums, exploring the relative contributions of two main theoretical orientations: moral treatment (based on Pinel and Esquirol) and 'medical-organicist therapeutic orientation'. Intertextuality was used to assess reports of medical organicist treatment in Brazil. We concluded that contemporaneous textual sources indicate that mid-nineteenth-century alienism in Brazil was predominantly influenced by organicism exported from European countries. Pinel's mentalist view, nevertheless, remained the reference point for clinical issues associated with the doctor-patient relationship.

Social cognitive abilities in infancy: Is mindreading the best explanation?

I discuss three arguments that have been advanced in support of the epistemic mentalist view, i.e., the view that infants' social cognitive abilities (SCAs) manifest a capacity to attribute beliefs. The argument from implicitness holds that SCAs already reflect the possession of an “implicit” and “rudimentary” capacity to attribute representational states. Against it, I note that SCAs are significantly limited, and have likely evolved to respond to contextual information in situated interaction with others. I challenge the argument from parsimony by claiming that parsimony per se favors neither a mentalist nor a behavior-reading account. Finally, I argue that early SCAs do not develop continuously into four-year-olds' belief attribution abilities. Accordingly, the argument from developmental continuity is empirically inadequate. Careful analysis of both the empirical data and the theoretical assumptions leading to the epistemic mentalist view is needed in order to improve our understanding of SCAs in early infancy.

De binaire kracht van Te Winkels tempussysteem

The present paper argues for a further exploration of a proposal to analyze the Dutch tense system in terms of binary oppositions rather than ternary, as in the standard approach advocated by Reichenbach (1947). The binary approach was first proposed by Te Winkel (1857; 1866). In a modernized version, the binary system turns out to evade a lot of problems haunting Reichenbachs system which is based on (naïve) physics. Te Winkel takes an interesting mentalistic view that prevents the present from being identified with the floating point of speech. The present is taken as a domain harbouring it. The future tense is robbed from its deictic nature in favour of a more neutral form of posteriority. As to anteriority, the question arises of whether Dutch tense forms with hebben (have) express aspectual information or purely tense information. It will be argued that given a binary approach there is no need for grammatical aspect in languages having developed a tense opposition between imperfect and perfect.

Gesture and Speech

The role of gesture in Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of the origin of language is portrayed in its historical context and in view of recent research to allow a balanced appraisal of his contribution to the debate. Written in the mid-1960s, his Gesture and Speech offers a vivid contrast to Chomsky’s contemporary mentalist view of language that espoused Cartesian rationalism with its barriers between man and beast, and between body and mind. On the contrary, Leroi-Gourhan takes an integrated approach to human evolution: gesture (conceived of as ‘material action’) and speech are seen as twin products of an embodied mind that engendered our technical and social achievements. His explanation of the evolutionary association between the hand and the face provides a biological basis for cognitive as well as communicative aspects of gesture, with culture emerging as an extension of our zoological foundation. He asserts that the liberating of the hand from locomotion led to the liberating of the face from prehension, thus creating the duality of instrument and symbol whereby human beings physically and mentally grasp the world in which they live.

Mentalism, information, and consciousness

The target article addresses important empirical issues, but adopts a nonanalytic stance toward consciousness and presents the mentalistic view as a very radical position that rules out informational description of anything other than conscious mental states. A better mentalistic strategy is to show how the structure of some informational states is both constitutive of consciousness and necessary for psychological functions.

Wittgwnsteino Mėlynasis sąsiuvinis : pakeliui į filosofinius tyrinėjimus

"The Blue Book" does not belong to the greatest masterpieces of Wittgenstein. Its impact is not compared to that of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" or "Philosophical Investigations". Nevertheless, it is still a masterpiece of thought. Dictated to several pupils of Wittgenstein, it was not intended to be a work for philosophical connoisseurs. It was not even intended to be a separate book. And, we may say, it is not. It marks Wittgenstein's new way of thinking from the old way of thinking. The central question of "The Blue Book" is "What is the meaning of a word?". We therefore take a closer look at the ideas that preceded it, namely, the "Tractatus" view of meaning. The "Tractatus" claims that the meaning of a word is the object it stands for. The notion of Erläuterung or elucidation plays the central role in explaining the meaning of a word. We interpret the concepts of Erläuterung and eluci- dation as "making lucid" or "purifying" the meaning of a word. Our conclusion is that the notion of object is too obscure to provide a satisfying answer to the question "What is the meaning of a word?". In "The Blue Book" Wittgenstein tries out new strategies answering that question, and a new set of concepts comes into play. First of all, Wittgenstein "removes the idea that words of the ostensive definition predicate something of the defined". Secondly, Wittgenstein fights against a mentalistic view of language, according to which the meaning of a word is some image in the head of the speaker. Wittgenstein's own answer to the central question is that the meaning of a word is its use. Hence the new conception of thinking as "operating with signs". In order to get a clear view of this activity, Wittgenstein proposes to investigate "primitive ways of speaking", thus introducing his famous notion of "language-games". The aim of "language-games" is to provide a non-reductionist simplicity of coping with linguistic phenomena. Wittgenstein criticizes scientific methodology for its reductionist simplification of natural phenome- na. Investigating the phenomenon of pain, Wittgenstein concludes that in the "games" in the expression "I have pain", "I" does not denote a particular body. It is the expression of pain itself. This is how Wittgenstein paves the way to his "Philosophical Investigations", leaving behind the conception of "meaning as object" of the "Tractatus".

The Evolution of Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice

JOHN E. GEDO: The Evolution of Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice, Other Press, New York, 1999, 262 pp., $25.00 (pbk), ISBN 1-892746-27-1. This interesting and controversial book is in an unusual format. What Dr. Gedo has done here is to review briefly sixty books that have come out over the past twenty-three years that he considers in order to acquaint the reader with recent developments in psychoanalysis and as a way of supporting his convictions. In the introduction, he summarizes his own point of view, which basically maintains that psychoanalysis is a natural science and therefore must be based on, and consistent with, current findings from the neurosciences. This, he says, rules out Freud's metapsychology entirely He works clinically with a hierarchical view of mental functions and considers the concept of self-organization central. For Gedo, psychoanalytic treatment attempts to correct dyspraxic patterns of behavior and to fill in apraxic deficits (p. xi). He believes that we must go beyond interpretation in psychoanalysis and rests his work heavily on what he describes as known about the biology of the mind. Gedo has elaborated on all these themes in his many previous publications, and does not dwell on his own views in as great a detail here. Most of the books summarized by Gedo are indeed significant, and I have reviewed many of them myself in various journals. So, as usual, Gedo is au courant in the field of psychoanalysis. His book is attractively printed, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in current issues in psychoanalytic theory and practice. The reviews are quite brief and condensed, and the beginner may have some difficulty in following them, but nothing prevents that beginner from going back to any original text Gedo is summarizing. The central issue of the book is stated in one of the two summary chapters at the end. Gedo argues that the evolution of psychoanalysis can either be conceived of as the story of a discipline breaking up into irreconcilable fragments, or as the emergence of a new paradigm that transcends the disputed theories of an earlier time. This new paradigm, he repeatedly insists, is a biological or natural-science view of psychoanalysis in which all descriptions and discussions of mental functions must take into account the somatic substrate and what is known about it. Otherwise, one is forced into what Gedo calls a rationalist or a mentalist view, in which various theories conflict and are not capable of being tested and weighed. He often calls this latter stance the hermeneutic viewpoint, and there is considerable polemic in the book against it. He concludes, evidence from the cognate disciplines has invalidated all previous psychoanalytic hypotheses about early childhood on the grounds that these have been excessively adultomorphic, and pathomorphic (p. …

The epistemological illusion

AbstractI argue against the mentalist view that commonsense psychology (CSP) is about the intrinsic properties of the mind, and in particular against the notion that the evidence privately or publicly available to the CS psychologists confirms the mentalist view. I suggest that the internal phenomenology of mental attitudes merely provides access to a body of procedural knowledge, and that the propositional forms of the attitudes normally summarize extensive units of procedural knowledge.

Feelings are “patterns in the weave of our life”1– not a basis for a feminist epistemology

Feelings (or “emotions”) have frequently been debated in feminist theory. A large part of this discussion can be considered to aim at a “rehabilitation of the emotions”. However, when feminist theorists make epistemological claims concerning “emotions”, i.e. what philosophy of mind calls “mental states”, we run a grave risk of ending up in subjectivism and thus of reiterating the “private access fallacy” of traditional epistemology. Starting from the feeling of shame (a paradigm for a socially constructed feeling), this article makes a Wittgensteinian reading of “emotions” which offers an alternative to the atomistic, mentalistic and episodical view of mainstream philosophy of mind. Wittgenstein's thrust against foundationalism, his conceptual remarks about “inner experiences”, his anti‐behaviourism and his emphasis on the primacy of action, are all concordant with the social constructionism of the slogan “The personal is political”.

A mentalistic view of “Pain and behavior”

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