The practice of mind: Theory, simulation or primary interaction?

Abstract

Theory of mind explanations of how we know other minds are limited in several ways. First, they construe intersubjective relations too narrowly in terms of the specialized cognitive abilities of explaining and predicting another person’s mental states and behaviours. Second, they sometimes draw conclusions about second-person interac-tion from experiments designed to test third-person observation of another’s behav-iour. As a result, the larger claims that are sometimes made for theory of mind, namely that theory of mind is our primary and pervasive means for understanding other persons, go beyond both the phenomenological and the scientific evidence. I argue that the interpretation of ‘primary intersubjectivity ’ as merely precursory to the-ory of mind is inadequate. Rather, primary intersubjectivity, understood as a set of embodied practices and capabilities, is not only primary in a developmental sense, but is the primary way we continue to understand others in second-person interactions. In psychology, philosophy of mind and, more recently, in the neurosciences, studies of how one person understands and interrelates with another person have been conducted under the heading of ‘theory of mind’. Discussions of theory of mind are dominated by two main approaches: theory theory and simulation theory. The major tenets of theory theory are based on well-designed scientific experiments that show that children develop an understanding of other minds around the age of four. One version of theory theory claims that this understanding is based on an innately specified, domain specific mechanism designed for ‘reading ’ other minds (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1991). An alternative version claims that the child attains this ability through a course of develop-ment in which the child tests and learns from the social environment (Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997). Common to both versions of theory theory is the idea that children attain their understanding of other minds by implicitly employing a theoretical stance. This stance involves postulating the existence of mental states in others and using such postulations to explain and predict another person’s behaviour. In the earliest level of development, the four- to five-year-old child’s theory of mind involves ‘first-order

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