Action-based versus cognitivist perspectives on socio-cognitive development: culture, language and social experience within the two paradigms

Abstract

Contemporary research on mindreading or theory of mind has resulted in three major findings: (1) There is a difference in the age of passing of the elicited-response false belief task and its spontaneous-response version; 15-month-olds pass the latter while the former is passed only by 4-year-olds (in the West). (2) Linguistic and social factors influence the development of the ability to mindread in many ways. (3) There are cultures with folk psychologies significantly different from the Western one, and children from such cultures tend to show different timetables of mindreading development. The traditional accounts of the data are nativism, rational constructivism, and two-systems theory. In this paper, we offer criticism of these traditional cognitivist accounts and explore an alternative, action-based framework. We argue that even though they all seem to explain the above empirical data, there are other, theoretical reasons why their explanations are untenable. Specifically, we discuss the problem of foundationalism and the related problem of innateness. Finally, we explore an alternative, action-based framework that avoids these theoretical limitations and offer an interpretation of the empirical data from that perspective.

Turning away from epistemic violence by capturing a lived experience of the other

“…Accordingly, the content of such concepts is constructed through interaction and is grounded in the modalities of the experience. This is why capturing the lived experience, context, and subjectivity unfolds as the key task of psychological research (Mirski & Gut, 2018). A shift in the description of how concepts emerge in our thinking and cognitive system entails a shift in the description of the cognition of the other.…”

“…To gain a deeper insight into the other’s lived experience, their reflective thinking needs to be captured, for example, in the storytelling process. Yet, the potential of the narrative approach cannot be fully exploited unless Cartesian cognitivism is discarded (Mirski & Gut, 2018).…”

Is coding a relevant metaphor for building AI?

“…However, this has not always been the case. Rather, the problem of emergence has been pushed onto biology, and various "core knowledge" accounts have been proposed: infants are supposed to be born with innate theories of physics, biology, or mind (for more criticism, see Allen & Bickhard 2013;Mirski & Gut 2018). But if encodingism blocks emergence in ontogeny, there is no reason why it would not do so in phylogeny too.…”

Thinking through others’ emotions: Incorporating the role of emotional state inference in thinking through other minds

“…must also be pre-programed: there is no modifying the hyperprior probabilities (they are innate, as are all of the spaces over which all of the probabilities are distributed)there is no normative learning, no development, no socialization, and no enculturation, the last of which we discussed in this commentary. For a related discussion of problems with such foundationalism in cross-cultural research, see Mirski and Gut (2018). For an anticipatory framework that does address issues of normativity, see, for example, Bickhard (2009) and Campbell (2015) including in the context of culture and language (e.g., Bickhard 1992;.…”