Hi, my name is Liang Zhou Koh.
I am a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Toronto,
and today I want to talk to you about how mindreading works.
There are two major ways of explaining how we track the mental states of others
and use this to predict and explain their actions:
Theory Theory and Simulation Theory.
To get a basic idea of these theories,
consider the following example:
Suppose you want to find out how a new model of
airplane might behave under certain wind conditions.
How may you do so without flying an actual airplane?
One way to go about this would be to sit down with the measurements of the plane
and a textbook on aerodynamic theory and work out the answer.
Alternatively, you can build a model of the plane, run a
simulation, and observe how it behaves in a wind tunnel.
The debate between theory-theorists and simulation-theorists concerns
which of these two approaches best describe how mindreading works.
Theory-theorists argue that we mindread by drawing on a tacit body of information
about the mind, in other words, a theory of mind (like a textbook).
This theory of mind contains information about how mental states are
connected to sensory stimuli, observable behaviour and other mental states.
This is how mindreading works according to Theory Theory:
Suppose you saw your roommate Jane preparing to bake a cake but is now getting
ready to head out after discovering that she has run out of eggs at home.
With the help of your theory of mind, you can then
infer from these observations, some of Jane’s beliefs and goals.
You can then use the principle that people generally act
in ways which, by the light of their beliefs, allow them to
achieve their goals, to explain why she is heading out and
to predict that she will be heading to the grocery store.
Simulation-theorists, on the other hand, argue that
mindreading does not depend on any theory of mind.
Instead, we figure out how other people will think and act
by using our own mind as a model to simulate their mental states.
Mindreading, according to Simulation Theory, goes like this:
You begin by imaginatively projecting yourself into Jane’s
situation and adopting her point of view on the world.
This will allow you to simulate the beliefs and goals she has.
You can then feed these pretend, or imaginary, mental states
into your own decision-making system
to figure out how someone with those beliefs and goals will act.
Which of these accounts got it right?
There have been many compelling arguments offered for, and against each of them.
In this video, we will approach this debate by looking at
some issues revolving around the development of mindreading.
As findings from false belief tasks suggest, children below the age of 4 find
it hard to grasp the perspective of someone whose beliefs differ from their own.
These children tend to commit egocentric errors and expect other people
to act in ways that makes sense given their own beliefs about the world.
Simulation-theorists argue that their theory
has a straightforward explanation for this.
Recall that, on their account, we generate predictions about how others will act
by feeding simulated beliefs and desires into our own decision-making system.
When we engage in mindreading by simulation, there is therefore a danger
that our own genuine beliefs and desires may be confused with these pretend states.
The errors that young children make, simulation-theorists argue,
are due to an underdeveloped capacity to “quarantine” their
own mental states when predicting the actions of others.
Theory-theorists, on their part, have offered many
alternative explanations for these empirical results.
According to defenders of what is known as
the “child as little scientist” version of Theory Theory,
we develop our theory of mind through a process of hypothesis testing and revising.
Children are like little scientists,
who formulate hypotheses to predict and explain what they observe
and revise these hypotheses when they generate the wrong predictions.
On this view, children under the age of 4 fail the false belief tasks
because they have not acquired a fully-fledged theory of mind.
On the other hand, theory-theorists who argue that our theory of mind is innate
rather than learned, would argue that younger children’s understanding of belief
may be masked by performance factors
due to limits in their executive functions or language abilities.
Research on mindreading in infancy
provides us with another lens to look at these theories through.
Findings that infants as young as 15 months old show implicit signs of
false belief understanding have been cited in support of Simulation Theory.
Suppose these results do show that infants are mindreaders.
Simulation-theorists argue that the theorising model is too complex to explain
how infants mindread, since it requires them to reason using mental state concepts.
It is more plausible to see infants as simply imagining
how the world is like from a different perspective.
Recall, however, the idea that children under
the age of 4 tend to commit egocentric errors
due to their underdeveloped capacity to “quarantine”
their genuine mental states when mindreading.
We may wonder why infants’ performance in implicit false
belief tasks is not equally susceptible to these errors.
On the other hand, proponents of the “child as little scientist”
version of Theory Theory, who argue that we only develop
a full-blown theory of mind around the age of 4,
seem to have the most difficulty explaining how infants mindread.
However, there may be important differences in how
we pass implicit and explicit false belief tasks.
It may be possible that we have two separate systems for mindreading -
an early-emerging, but fast and limited one
and a later-emerging but flexible and more powerful one.
Such a two-systems view may help theory-theorists explain why infants
may be sensitive to false beliefs in others without a fully-fledged theory of mind.
As our brief discussion indicates, the debate between Theory Theory
and Simulation Theory is a rich and complex one.
There are significant areas of disagreement not only between both
of these theories, but also within each theoretical camp.
There is also an emerging consensus that mindreading is a multifaceted phenomenon
that cannot be fully explained by either theory or simulation alone.
We may need a hybrid account that incorporates elements of both theories
to explain how mindreading works.
How to best understand the respective roles played by theorising and mental simulation
as well as their relative importance, however,
are key questions that remain unanswered.