The biocultural emergence of mindreading: integrating cognitive archaeology and human development

Abstract

According to the thesis of natural mindreading (NMRT), mindreading-i.e., the capacity to attribute mental states to predict and explain behavior-is an intrinsic component of the human biological endowment, thus being innately specified by natural selection within particular neurocognitive structures. In this article, we challenge the NMRT as a phylogenetic and ontogenetic account of the development of the socio-cognitive capacities of our species. In detail, we argue that basic capacities of social cognition (e.g., the traces of early systems of bodily ornamentation within the archeological record, and infants' selective attention at others' beliefs in spontaneous-response false belief tasks) do not involve meta-representational mindreading but are better explained by appealing to situated embodied capacities acquired in social interaction. While we acknowledge that more flexible capacities of social cognition (e.g., those implied by the use of political emblems in industrialized societies, or by 4-year-olds' success in elicitedresponse false belief tasks) involve genuine mindreading, we argue that this ability is elicited and scaffolded by linguistic communication. We conclude that mindreading has emerged as the outcome of a highly derivative long-term constructivist process of biocultural becoming that led to a relatively recent restructuring of the human mind in multiple worldly locations at different times. In particular, we conjecture that humans gradually converged on establishing linguistic practices allowing the understanding of others' actions in terms of mental reasons. These practices were bequeathed to further generations, and continue nowadays to scaffold the acquisition of mindreading in early childhood.

Imitation: Neither instinct nor gadget, but a cultural starting point?

“…R1 above), and do not embrace the extended mind for day-to-day scientific use (see sect. R2), I find great value in the ideas that mindreading is culturally inherited via narrative practice and analogical mapping Fenici & Garofoli;Hutto 2007). Furthermore, I was educated by McNamara & Neha's evidence of how "teaching and learning environments vary across cultures to provide children with context-specific opportunities to develop the cognitive abilities needed to thrive as adults."…”

“…Although we praise the constructivist lean assumed by the author, we intend to argue that the CGT does not completely free itself from a variety of problematic neo-Darwinian assumptions. Despite the fact that many accounts in social anthropology (Ingold 2007), cognitive archaeology (Iliopoulos & Garofoli 2016;Knappett 2005;Malafouris 2013), postphenomenology (Ihde 1990;Ihde & Malafouris 2018;Verbeek 2005), and enactive cognition (Fenici & Garofoli 2017;Hutto 2008;Hutto & Myin 2013) have extensively opposed these assumptions over time, the author has not considered such criticisms in the current formulation of the CGT. Within this commentary, we intend to bring to the fore (and suggest) possible solutions to these critical issues that also affect the CGT.…”

“…However, language is not an isolated cognitive function, because it is constitutive of and simultaneously constituted by other cognitive gadgets. To mention one, many scholars defending a constructivist perspective believe that meta-representational mindreading is realized through linguistic practices (Fenici 2017;Fenici & Garofoli 2017;Gallagher & Hutto 2008;Hutto 2008). Mindreading in turn allows language to bend on itself, and bootstrap meta-linguistic awareness: namely, the ability to understand the abstract regularities behind the organization of language (Taylor 2012).…”

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

“…Language is necessary for representations that are embedded in linguistic social interaction, and facilitates those that benefit from linguistic input. For the development of folk psychology both linguistic and social interaction are naturally necessary (see Fenici 2017;Fenici and Garofoli 2017;Hutto 2008).…”

How the Cycladic Islanders Found Their Marbles: Material Engagement, Social Cognition and the Emergence of Keros

“…Further, the emergent social complexity of the past 10,000 years are not amenable to evolutionary analysis and resist teleological explanations which move from brains to culture in a linear expansion of social material complexity from symbolic thought (cf. Fenici & Garofoli 2017; Garofoli 2017). Traditionally, the study of social cognition has emphasized neurocentric models and profit-maximizing calculations made by individuals from a third-person perspective 2 .…”