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Relevance of wide cognition for social intelligence. Key trends

Authors: Łukasz Afeltowicz, Nicolaus Copernicus University; Anna Borghi, University of Bologna &

Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian Research Council, Rome; Stephen Butterfill,

University of Warwick; Robert Clowes, New University of Lisbon; Adam Gies, The New School

University; Victor Loughlin, University of Antwerp; Marek McGann, Mary Immaculate College ~

University of Limerick; Jakub Ryszard Matyja, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy

of Sciences (Warsaw); Marcin Miłkowski, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of

Sciences (Warsaw, project coordinator); Roger O’Shea, University of Limerick; Aleksandra

Przegalińska, University of Warsaw; Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi, University of Warsaw; Zuzanna

Rucińska, University of Hertfordshire; Fredrik Stjernberg, Linköping University; Luca Tummolini,

Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR); Michael

Wheeler, University of Stirling; Witold Wachowski, Centre for Philosophical Research (Warsaw); Tad

Zawidzki (George Washington University).

Cover page design: © Jacek Seweryn Podgórski, 2013

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Contents

Executive Summary

1. Wide Accounts of Cognition and Intelligence

1.1. Embodied and Grounded Cognition

1.2. Embedded and Situated Cognition

1.3. Extended Cognition

1.4. Enactive Cognition

1.5. Distributed Cognition

1.6. Interrelations

2. Applications in Research on Social Intelligence

2.1 Embodied Joint Action

2.2 Cognitive artifacts and ICT (Cloud-Tech, E-Memory and Virtual Identities)

2.2.1 E-Memory and Cloud Tech

2.2.2 Virtual Reality and avatars

2.3 Social Cognition and Culture

2.3.1. Mindreading

2.3.2. Two Case Studies: Imitation and Pretence

2.4 Social emotions

3. Challenges

4. Dangers

5. Summary

6. References

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Executive Summary

Wide cognition approaches in cognitive sciences are relevant for studying social

intelligence, and they afford new ways of integrating interdisciplinary research. They offer

novel predictions and explanations by transcending methodological individualism.

Traditional cognitive science was methodologically individualist, and framed intelligent

behavior in terms of processing of internal representations of individuals. Embodied and

grounded cognition, the extended and scaffolded mind, enactivism and distributed cognition

all challenge the traditional approach in different ways. Social intelligence is accounted for in

terms of embodied interactions supported and extended by actively built cognitive niches.

Despite the variety of approaches we jointly dub “wide cognition”, they offer a new coherent

picture of cognition, as well make it possible to integrate and unify interdisciplinary

research.

In this white paper, we introduce basic frameworks of wide cognition and illustrate it with

promising developments in research on pathologies, child development, and mind reading.

Wide cognition offers novel predictions relevant for the study of social phenomena.

At the same time, owing to the multi-disciplinary nature of the approaches presented herein,

there is a danger of duplicating effort and disintegration of the field. For this reason, more

effort is needed to fully leverage the potential of the unification that is inherent in wide

cognition. Integrating different approaches of wide cognition will yield additional benefits

for the study of social intelligence, but that means that larger interdisciplinary networking

and research programs are needed in this field.

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1. Wide Accounts of Cognition and Intelligence

By wide cognition we mean extended, embodied, enacted, embedded, and distributed

cognition, which are related but distinct concepts.

In contradistinction to traditional frameworks of cognitive science, they do not explain

cognitive phenomena solely with manipulation of (language-like) internal representations

but stress the fact that (1) minds can extend into the environment; (2) agents are cognitive

insofar as they are embodied; (3) their cognitive scaffolding is enacted, or constructed, in an

active fashion; (4) cognitive phenomena are always interactions with the environment; (5)

and that cognitive acts are not always but sometimes paradigmatically distributed among

multiple agents. There is a growing body of research that is directly relevant for

understanding social intelligence, in particular in its reliance on environmental design,

bodily interaction, shared cognitive and symbolic tools, and complex schemas of

collaboration.

In the Western tradition, cognition was understood as an internal process carried out in

proprietary representational language, fed by sensory apparatus, largely performed over

internal representations and finally used to produce action (Hurley, 2001). Mind was

considered quintessentially a private realm. Most traditional theorizing of the mind gives

credit for our cognitive abilities almost exclusively to the goings-on in our brains. This

outlook has been significantly challenged in recent years in both theoretical and empirical

research.

1.1. Embodied and Grounded Cognition

The claim of the embodied cognition (EC) is that the physical body of an agent is

constitutively relevant for cognition; in other words, cognitive processing involves more

than the brain. Core cognition, which essentially involves perception and action, depends

deeply on the features of the physical body.

In the last years, EC has become more and more widespread in all areas of cognitive science

– from neuroscience to cognitive psychology to cognitive linguistics to philosophy to

computer science and robotics. It is starting to penetrate also reflection on art, anthropology

and on gender issues. As recently stated by Lakoff (2012), “It may be hard to think back to a

time before the idea of embodied cognition, [but I was raised in that generation].” (p. 1). In a

recent paper on the future of psychology, Dendre Gentner (2010) has shown how embodied

cognition is challenging the classical approaches to knowledge representation and cognition

in general.

This success has led in the last 10-15 years to an impressive burst of experimental evidence

for the role of the body in cognition, in particular in psychology and neuroscience (for

reviews, see Barsalou, 2008; Fischer & Zwaan, 2008; Jirak et al., 2010; Toni et al., 2008;

Willems & Hagoort, 2007). Recent special issues have been published by the journals

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Frontiers in Psychology (edited by Borghi & Pecher, 2011) and Topics in Cognitive Science

(edited by Davis & Markman, 2012). But this success has not always lead to terminological

precision. The term EC has been used in a variety of contexts and with different connotations

(see Goldman & De Vignemont, 2009), and more moderate and more radical embodied

positions are present. The unifying aspect of EC theories is the opposition to classical

propositional views, which held that cognition is defined exclusively in terms of

manipulation of amodal, abstract, and arbitrary codes. In contrast, according to EC theorists

cognition is constrained and enabled by our sensorimotor systems, by the specific

characteristics of our own brain-body system.

Some authors (e.g., Barsalou, 2008; Pezzulo et al., 2011) reduce the stress put on the role of

the body, and prefer to use the more general term “grounded cognition”, to emphasize the

fact that cognition is grounded not only in bodily states, but also in situations, situated

simulations, and so forth. On the neural side, some recent discoveries have given great

impetus to EC: it is the case, for example, of studies on how objects are represented in the

modal areas of the brain (see Martin, 2007, for a review), and of studies on the canonical and

mirror neuron systems (Arbib 2005, Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004).

Many research lines have been promoted. We do not pretend to be exhaustive, but among

the most important we would list the research areas on affordances (Gibson 1979, Chemero

2009), i.e., agent-related properties of the environment that offer the agent opportunities to

act, operationalised as motor activity elicited during observation of objects. There is also

research on the grounding of the concepts and language in perception, action, and emotional

systems; on intersubjectivity (also thanks to the renewed interest in the mirror neuron

system); on the sense of our own body, of the peripersonal space, and so forth.

An important part of EC is dynamical account of cognition (Kelso 1995), which has been also

applied to the study of social phenomena such as language (Rączaszek-Leonardi & Kelso

2008). One of the spectacular results in dynamical approaches was to find motor-based

explanations of apparently ‘cognitive’ deficits in infants. Piaget (1952) famously posited a

logical-symbolic deficit as the explanation of the error infants were making when choosing a

toy from an old location: Infants who have successfully uncovered a toy at location “A”

continue to reach to that location even after they watch the toy hidden in a nearby location

“B.” As it turns out, the phenomenon can be understood by the coupled dynamics of the

ordinary processes of goal-directed actions: looking, planning, reaching, and remembering

(Thelen et al. 2001).

Obviously EC has not been free from attacks and criticisms, and on some occasions debates

have been hot. For example, in a famous paper, Mahon and Caramazza (2008) have argued

that nobody questions the involvement of the motor system in conceptual and language

processing, but this involvement would be only epiphenomenal, and the process of

comprehension would not necessarily imply the motor system involvement. In contrast,

proponents of EC (at least in its strong version) argue that the involvement of motor system

is constitutive of the comprehension process. In recent years, some mixed approaches have

emerged that try to combine a propositional and an embodied approach (e.g., Dove 2009;

Chatterije 2010; Louwerse 2011). Among the most debated issues is the issue of

representation, i.e., whether representational and anti-representational, enactivist

approaches can coexist (e.g., Gallese & Sinigaglia 2011; Van Elk et al., 2010; Chemero 2009).

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Another important issue concerns the way in which abstract concepts and words without a

perceptual object as referent (e.g., truth) are represented. There are several embodied

accounts of linguistic abstraction (for reviews, see Pecher, Boot & Dantzig 2011 and Wiemer-

Hastings & Barsalou 2005), and notwithstanding all differences, they share the focus on the

connection between abstract words and sensorimotor processing.

1.2. Embedded and Situated Cognition

The situated and embedded approach to cognition holds that cognition should be

cashed out in terms of the interaction of the agent and its immediate surrounding. The

extra-bodily context constraints and enables cognition.

Many lines of inquiry offer support to embedded mind (and by extension situated cognition).

In this short section, I will identify only two (see Clark 2008, and Robbins and Aydede 2009,

for further examples). Behaviour-based robotics (BBR), as pioneered by Rodney Brooks

(1991), demonstrated that it was possible to build robots capable of performing simple tasks

despite those robots having no detailed, internal knowledge of the environments in which

they were operating. Such robots were designed to be “set up to be set off” by certain features

of their local surroundings, bypassing the need for complex, internal cognitive machinery.

The work of Brooks and many others showed that basic cognitive functions could be causally

dependent on movement and structures in the local environment (see Steels and Brooks

(eds), 1995, for an overview of these and related issues). As such, BBR arguably supports the

claims made by embedded mind and situated cognition.

Further evidence comes from work on what is called animate vision (Ballard, 1991). The

human eye only has high resolution in a small region near the optical axis (the fovea) yet

nonetheless encompasses a large field of view. This discrepancy between high resolution at

the centre and low resolution at the peripheries is compensated for by the fact that the eye is

in constant motion and mechanisms of gaze fixation ensure that the fovea can automatically

target whatever is of interest. Ballard (1991) argues that our ability to seamlessly fixate on

objects of interest simplifies our access to the environment since for many basic physical

tasks we do not need to build elaborate internal models of our local environment. Instead,

we just need to register or sense those aspects of the environment we deem immediately

relevant to the task in hand.

This is nicely illustrated in Ballard et al. (1997). Subjects were asked to copy coloured blocks

from one area into another on a computer screen. By tracking eye movements, it became

apparent that subjects were utilizing “minimal memory strategies” in order to complete the

task. That is, rather than construct internal models of the colour and location of the blocks

that needed to be copied and then using working memory in order to perform the task,

subjects instead used repeated eye saccades and accessed the colour and location

information only when and where it was required. Ballard et al. (1997, p. 739) conclude that

subjects were deploying “just-in-time” representations, that is, subjects were leaving

important information out in the world and only accessing it on a “just-in-time” or

immediate need-to-know basis.

Two things seem to follow from this. First, this supports the claim that the eye functions as a

deictic or pointing device which enables subjects to fulfill “do-it-where-I-am-looking”

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strategies (ibid., p. 725). Second, the eye has a determinate computational role since its

“pointing movements bind objects in the world to cognitive programs” (ibid., p. 726). Deictic

computation offers support for claims about embedded mind and situated cognition. The

Ballard et al study demonstrates that subjects do not build detailed internal representations

of their local environments in order to fulfill physical tasks. Rather subjects exploit features

of their bodies and features of their environment in order to minimize reliance on internal

processing and accomplish computation ‘on the cheap’. There are thus demonstrable

complex causal dependencies between the subject and their environment for the completion

of certain tasks.

1.3. Extended Cognition

The extended mind is the idea that cognitive processes are not necessarily brain-bound and

can incorporate external resources such a tools, language, and external systems in order to

enhance or augment cognitive processes. The difference of this approach from situated

cognition is the emphasis that parts of what were traditionally considered the environment

should properly be understood as part of the agent’s mind.

Take the example from Andy Clark, one of the godfather’s of the idea of the extended mind

and extended cognition, reflecting on how the tools in his environment and his interactions

with them contribute towards the task of authoring a book chapter:

As I construct this chapter, for example, I am continually creating, putting aside, and

reorganizing chunks of text. I have files (both paper and online) which contain all

kinds of hints and fragments, stored up over a long period of time, which may be

germane to the discussion. As I (literally, physically) move these things about,

interacting first with one and then another and making new notes, annotations, and

plans, the intellectual shape of the chapter grows and solidifies. It is a shape that does

not spring fully developed from inner cogitations. Instead, it is the produce of a

sustained and iterated sequence of interactions between by brain and a variety of

external props. In these cases, I am willing to say, a good deal of actual thinking

involves loops and circuits that run outside the head and through the local

environment. (Clark, 1997, pp. 206-207)

Recent research in philosophy and cognitive science has endorsed Clark’s view and

emphasised the way artefacts and our manipulation of them can play as important a role in

cognition as anything that goes on inside our heads. This approach has been applied in a

variety of settings such as the cockpit of aeroplanes (Hutchins, 1995b), Jacobean theatre

(Tribble, 2005). The general idea is expressed in (Tribble and Sutton 2011): “’Mind’ is skilful

activity rather than a stock of knowledge: the analysis of mind must therefore be

fundamentally historical in character, because changing cultural artifacts, norms, and

institutions are not external but partly constitute it.” (p. 94).

To take the example of Jacobean Theatre, many renaissance scholars have expressed their

admiration for the prodigious feats of memory of the actors on Shakespeare’s stage. These

actors would often have a live repertoire of dozens of plays and would regularly learn a new

one each week followed by its performance while learning another. Tribble argues that the

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memory load was considerably ameliorated by factors we tend to think of as external to the

subject and her memory capacities: the use and physical layout of the stage itself, set

patterns of entrances and exits, complex mnemonic strategies, and “parts” – written short

summaries of cues for the actors, which would allow the physical structure of the theatre

itself to remember for the actors. The general setting of the theatre production was also

“forgiving” in a special sense: certain minor slips of memory would never be noticed by the

public. “Remembering” the lines is a matter of producing something that contributes to the

production of the play in a fruitful way, not exclusively of getting the words exactly right.

These factors together indicate that the division between “internal” and “external” aspects of

memory is somewhat misguided.

This kind of use of the environment to memorize has parallels with the method known as the

“loci method” and has been investigated in ecological psychology to contrast traditional lab

experiments on memory with the real-life use of mnemonic methods (Neisser 1976). The

extended mind approach stresses that such methods and uses of material environment are as

much a part of human memory as anything that goes on inside the brain. Such use of the

environment is hence to be seen as a fully cognitive activity, and shows the existence of a

category that is neither fully internal nor fully external. Sutton characterizes the various uses

of mnemonic strategies in the following way: “They are cognitive even though they are not, in

a straightforwardly ancestral way, natural and biological; and they are extended even though

they are not literally external” (Sutton 2010, p. 209).

But if cognition needs to be understood as spread out over brains, instruments and their

social organisation, what of the mind itself? Might that too be spread and distributed beyond

the classically understood bounds of skin and skull? Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998)

suggested that rather than necessarily being a private inner realm, the mind might also

stretch beyond bodily boundaries to incorporate a motley of artefacts, tools, and perhaps

even the brains of other persons.

According to the thesis of the extended mind, artefacts and instruments could – if used in

the right ways - be considered actual parts of our minds. Whether artefacts could be

profitably so considered would largely turn on their properties and the conditions of their

use. Three criteria were originally proposed to help demarcate which artefacts might count.

These were: constancy (we consult an artefact regularly and unthinkingly when appropriate),

facility (we use it with ease), trust and prior endorsement (we automatically trust

information retrieved from such resources). New generations of mobile information

technologies such as smart phones, tablets and cloud applications, and new patterns of use

suggest that an ever more tools might meet these criteria. But should widely socially

distributed technologies really count as proper parts of our minds?

Sterelny (2010) suggested an extra criterion: entrenchment and personalisation, which

holds that only those technologies that we as individuals customise to our own patterns of

usage should count as proper parts of our minds. It is not clear that this really helps us to

decide how to treat web-resources (such as Open Street Maps) that individuals might

customise for themselves while the technology itself simultaneously relies on the aggregation

of information provided by millions of users in order to work. Much seems to hang here on

our intuitions about whether shared resources should ever count as parts of individual minds

and thus raise important questions about social ontology: Can minds have proper parts

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resources that are socially shared, or also count as part of other minds? What are the

implications of cognitively incorporating resources which are owned or run in the interests of

others? Under the control of external agencies? Or simply products of widely distributed

systems that the social web has made possible?

The practical implications of these ideas turn on exactly how and under what circumstances

external resources might integrate with internal or biological ones. What properties of

cognitive technologies might make them integrable? What properties of cognitive

technologies might make them integrable? Theorists differ in how they answer this question.

Some have endorsed an extended functionalist approach (Clark, 2008; Wheeler, 2010)

whereby it is the functional or causal role of the technology that makes it part of someone’s

mind. Others insist that it is the bodily manipulation of such technologies that integrates

them into a cognitive routine (Menary, 2006, 2010). A related but importantly distinct

approach is the complementarity framework (Menary, 2010a; Sutton, 2010) proposes that

we tend to integrate tools and artefacts into our cognitive processes when they provide

resources which complement our existing biological systems. Much research has been

carried out into the implications of these ideas around memory (Michaelian & Sutton, 2013)

but much further research is needed to understand which properties of external artefacts,

contexts of use, or cultures of usage imply that cognitive technologies really do complement

our mental processes. Popular discussion of related themes has suggested that the practical

implications of the cognitive integration of internet resources might be distracting and

decentring (Carr, 2010) rather than genuinely cognitively enhancing. Further work into the

properties of the sorts of hybrid systems human beings form with our technologies is

required to give a principled answer to this sort of challenge.

Such questions imply that research on extended cognition has important ethical (as well as

legal and political) implications that have so far scarcely been explored. One example of such

questions: If our minds really do incorporate as proper parts technologies owned by others,

might deprivation of them count as a sort of enforced cognitive impairment? Such questions

might have very important implications for our usage, design and governance of cognitive

technologies in the future.

1.4. Enactive Cognition

The enactive approach to cognitive science recognises a crucial inter-dependency between

an autonomous agent and the world it inhabits. Cognitive activity is wholly defined neither

by the agents nor their environment, but it emerges from their interaction.

This core observation lies at the heart of the enactive approach, and forms the basis for the

mode of analysis and understanding central to enactive thinking (Di Paolo, De Jaegher &

Rohde, 2010; McGann, De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2013; Thompson, 2007). For enactive

theorists, cognition is founded in a system's autonomous organisation (Di Paolo, 2005;

Thompson, 2005, 2007; Varela, 1979, 1997; Weber & Varela, 2002), which is to say that the

operation of the system's own components give rise to and support their own organisation.

This continual process of self-production provides the drive for the system's interaction with

its environment. Such self-determinant activity, emergent from the system's organisation, is

seen by some as the hallmark of agency and normativity for the enactive approach (Bickhard

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& Terveen 1995; Weber & Varela, 2002; see also Barandiaran, Di Paolo & Rohde, 2009).

Other enactivists have contested whether the notion of normativity does indeed emerge from

merely biological basis; others claim that normativity appeals essentially to social practices

(Hutto & Satne, pending, Heras-Escribano et al. 2013). In addition, the necessity of

autopoiesis to be at the centre of enactivist approaches to mind has recently weakened; the

label has been applied more liberally. In particular, some accounts that ignore or downplay

autopoiesis but share the original theory’s emphasis on environmentally-situated bodily

coupling in place of internal representation were considered enactive as well (O Regan o

2001; Hutto & Myin 2013). However, for the purposes of brevity we will discuss the classical

approach to enactivism in this section.

Enactive autonomous systems are perforce embodied and instantiated in the physical and

social processes that make up their network identity (Di Paolo & Thompson, forthcoming,

Kyselo & Di Paolo, 2013). In order to maintain themselves autonomous agents must

coordinate their activity with their environment. Opportunities must be taken and

constraints or demands met, such that the system maintains its organisation, which will

inevitably be precarious, facing constant potential dissolution (Di Paolo, 2005; 2009). In

doing so, the relevant aspects of the environment are effectively incorporated into the on-

going actions and dynamics of the system. This coordination of the agent with its

environment is termed sense-making (Di Paolo et al., 2010; Thompson & Stapleton, 2009).

The concept of cognitive activity as sense-making challenges internalist modes of thought

and commits enactive theorists to a “wide” conception of cognition. To understand the mind

we must understand not just the agent, but the value-driven, normative interactions between

the agent and its environment.

Social interaction is a special case of such engagement with the environment, in which the

agent's activity is not simply coordinated with a physical world but with another agent.

Sense-making in such situations is not simply coordinated but negotiated, a process termed

participatory sense-making (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007). Where effective social

coordination is achieved, participatory sense-making produces meaning and cognitive

activity that is shared across the participants, and must be understood as much in terms of

the conversation or interaction as a whole as the combined activities of the individuals

involved.

From an enactive perspective, then, the cognitive system is not a fully-formed, stable thing,

but a collection of tendencies that dynamically interact with the environment. Cognitive

activity is somewhat like a dance, or a handshake – something that only exists during its

enactment, not something that is kept stored or continually present, and then activated or

switched on as required. Viewing cognition as such a dynamic, almost ephemeral thing,

means that enactive research tends to draw heavily on the tools of dynamical systems theory,

and emphasise the manner in which behaviour is structured by skills (stable, reliable

patterns of goal-directed behaviour) – examining change over time, the processes of

emergence, transformation and disappearance, rather than attempting to catalogue or

categorise specific cognitive functions, or identify specific contents of cognition that might be

examined.

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1.5. Distributed Cognition

Distributed cognition approach (DCog) does not focus on cognition as a property of an

individual organism/agent. Rather, it describes larger cognitive systems which may

encompass multiple individual agents and artefacts.

This approach distinguishes DCog from other approaches labeled here as ‘wide cognition’,

which treat an individual organism as a main unit of analysis, describing, for example, the

way an individual is embedded, connected to his/her environment or how his/her body

matters from the perspective of cognitive processes. In the case of DCog, the focus is on

heterogeneous elements (e.g., biological, material, discursive), which take part in sequential

or simultaneous processes of generation, transmission, and transformation of

representational states. DCog identifies those processes with cognition. It is also important

that DCog does not treat cognition as a passive representational process whose primary aim

is to create a model of the external world. Moreover, in DCog representational states are not

understood as mental states or other inner states of any individual agent. Examples of

representational states include meaningful gestures or poses of agents, written or spoken

information, visualizations displayed on screens, lines drawn on navigational chart and the

chart itself, but also non-symbolic cues which modify the behavior of agents (e.g.,

modifications of environment which make some actions more probable than others) (Zhang

& Norman, 1994, p. 87–122).

DCog may be perceived as a test of how far we can proceed in explaining cognition without

taking into account the central nervous system and all those processes which happen inside

the agent’s head. DCog is a response to internalism, which assumed that all important

cognitive processes take place inside the agent and that external factors associated with

cognition (including elements of the human social and material culture) may be taken into

consideration at later stages of research (Salomon, 1997). DCog shows that in many cases,

those excluded factors are responsible for a considerable reduction of complexity of cognitive

problems, which individual agents are faced with. They may also enhance human cognitive

capabilities or reduce the cognitive load.

In order to explain this, one may reflect on various cognitive functions of artifacts. First of

all, artifacts reduce the cognitive load of human memory – they may function as external

memory systems or automate selected actions. Furthermore, they may reduce complexity by

helping to integrate dispersed data, allowing the agent to focus only on the phenomenon’s

selected features or dimensions. As a result, they turn complex issues into more abstract

ones; that is, the agent may solve the problem performing fewer mental or manual

operations. Moreover, artifacts reify (or enact) innovations developed during the process of

evolution of larger, distributed cognitive systems.

Let us consider the example of modern nautical chart, a basic cognitive tool of pre-GPS-era

marine navigation. It is a device developed through decades of practice, which consolidates a

whole array of small local technical innovations introduced by successive generations of

seamen and navigators. It is also an ingenious “analog computer”, which integrates

navigational data and allows for computation-like operations, which take form of manual

manipulation and transformation of two-dimensional graphic representations. It is

important that all navigational operations could be performed without the chart and manual

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manipulations performed thereon (one can imagine marine navigation as purely

mathematical computations), but this kind of approach would be far more complex from the

perspective of a human navigator and transmission of navigation skills would be hindered.

Hutchins (1995a) presents many other examples of analog computational devices.

In order to fully understand cognitive functions of an artifact, one should closely analyze

what part they take in processing of representational states, in particular larger cognitive

systems. DCog does not suppose any precise vision of larger cognitive systems. A particular

distributed system may encompass many individual agents or only one. It may include

material artifacts and symbolic media, but it is not determined what types of material objects

it should include or what their function is. Literature includes such examples of distributed

cognitive systems as teams of nautical navigators, financial brokers’ offices, air-traffic

controllers, teams of surgeons, and crime scene investigation teams. In each case, an

important part of a system consists in human personnel utilizing overlearned problem-

solving heuristics and means of work coordination, but technical equipment (tools, material

external representations, coordinating artifacts) also plays an important role. In distributed

cognitive systems, one cannot distinguish between the core and the periphery. A given object

(biological, material, cultural) will be considered a part of a system only if it fulfills an

important function.

Representatives of DCog stress that a larger cognitive system works in a different manner

and has different properties than individual agents who may be part of the system. In other

words, the effects of actions performed by a larger system is not a sum of the effects of

actions performed by the human and nonhuman “components” of this system. Let us

consider the Chinese room known from Searle’s famous thought experiment as a model of a

distributed cognitive system (Searle, 1980). In this case, an individual system is the human

agent inhabiting the room. The individual does not know Chinese. One cannot attribute the

property “knows Chinese” to the individual, nor to any object gathered in the room (e.g., the

instruction of symbol usage, baskets with symbols). But the room as a whole (agent +

objects) functions as an interlocutor who is of communicating with agents using Chinese.

DCog reinterprets in a radical way many basic categories of cognitive science and

epistemology, including cognition, representation, cognizing agent and its boundaries. For

instance, according to DCog, a process is not cognitive simply because it happens inside an

individual, nor is a process non-cognitive because it happens within the interactions among

many individuals. One can put forward a complaint that DCog abuses epistemological

categories which have a standard and consistent use. Some researchers, including R. Giere

(2004), suggest that claims of DCog can be expressed also in the frame of more traditional

approaches in the field of cognitive science or epistemology. Still, the reduction of complexity

of the cognitive task has to be accounted for, and this is what the traditional framework

usually ignores.

It should be noted that the previous analyses in the field of DCog have usually focused on the

function of human collectives equipped with more or less advanced artifacts performing

routine cognitive functions. Their goal was to solve well structured problems with maximum

reliability and high accountability. DCog is very often associated with actor-network theory

(Latour & Woolgar 1979, Latour 2010, 2011) and with social engineering, understood as

building artificial, stable and reproducible social systems. The majority of the systems known

from the DCog literature are characterized by high redundancy and a kind of “prodigality”

manifested in the fact that they contain a number of control loops compensating for the

errors of the subsystem and ensuring not only confidence in the obtained results, but also the

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possibility that eventual errors will be used for improving the system (it can be noted that the

process of learning in the case of a broader cognitive system is not identical to staff acquiring

knowledge) (see, e.g., Hutchins, 1995b, p. 265-288). However, one can specify DCog systems

that have been designed not for reliability, but for speed or for creativity. Then utilized areas

of application of DCog are design evaluation of digital environments, human-computer

interaction, information visualization processes, human factors in aviation, multimodal

interaction (see: Perry, 2003, p. 193-223; Woods, 2003, p. 37–53; Ross et al., 2007).

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1.6. Interrelations

Real cognitive episodes can be seldom profitably understood in terms of isolated goings-on

in brains alone. Instead, an analysis of how brains, bodies, and equipment are deployed in

wider settings is required.

Even if one can analytically distinguish extended, embodied, situated, enacted, and

distributed approaches, they are not mutually exclusive, and a large body of research exhibits

properties specific for many of the above approaches. For example, a dynamical and

distributed account of linguistic activities may link the ideas of extended cognition and

enactivism (Cowley 2009). Language is then not couched in terms of symbolic processing

but of “languaging”–an ongoing social, distributed activity of multiple agents.

It should be noted that, for example, DCog cannot be automatically incorporated into the 4E

approach (embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted cognition) that takes a biological

organism as its focus. Notably, a biological account of DCog, which relates it to the tradition

of biosemiotics, like in the work of Stephen Cowley, allows for such integration. In other

words, to link DCog with other 4E frameworks, one needs to build a bridge between a more

biological account of cognition and cultural cognition. Below, in section 2.3.1, we describe

mindreading as a multi-faceted phenomenon. One of the ways to frame mindreading is to

understand it in terms of mindshaping (Zawidzki 2013), which has both institutional and

biological underpinnings. In this respect, Zawidzki’s account of mindshaping blends easily

with a more cultural-level based account of minds as artifacts of social institutions

(Castelfranchi 2013).

At the same time, some argued that distributed cognition can usually be subsumed under the

umbrella of extended mind (Dror & Harnad, 2008), although some of research may also be

seen as focusing on joint or shared cognition, in which the whole cognitive system can no

longer be analysed on the level of individual agents (the unit of analysis is different). In such

cases, the distinction between DCog and the extended mind seems to be altogether blurred.

For example, the sociologist Donald MacKenzie (2009) argues that the locus of decision-

making is usually not an individual trader, nor a group of traders working for a single

company, nor even a group of traders working for a single company together with their

computer models, but a group of traders working for a single company with their computer

models and with their competitors. Information about market events, trends and

opportunities is passed from traders at one company to traders from another through

informal contacts and personal networks, and this information then informs decision-

making by all of them. MacKenzie’s work is based on an ethnographic study he undertook

with a hedge fund. Similar results have been obtained by Buenza and Stark (2008).

That it is easy to integrate various wide approaches and blur the boundaries between them is

obviously not a sign of the weakness of wide approaches; rather, it seems that they easily

cluster together, and that they can be further developed to form a more extensive framework.

There are already some attempts to integrate, for example, embodied and extended

approaches (e.g., Clark, 2008; Borghi & Cimatti, 2010; Borghi et al. 2013; Walter, 2013).

Although a great deal of theoretical work has been developed in this area there remains great

scope to extend the analysis beyond the range of scenarios in which these ideas have been

applied.

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2. Applications in Research on Social

Intelligence

2.1 Embodied Joint Action

Joint action may be roughly defined as “any form of social interaction whereby two or

more individuals coordinate their actions in space and time to bring about a change in the

environment” (Sebanz et al. 2006b). The body plays an important role in the cognitive

mechanisms that enable two or more agents to coordinate their actions in performing joint

actions.

The importance of understanding of the principles of joint action is at least twofold. Firstly,

joint action and the mechanisms underlying it may be considered as the cornerstones of

social cognition as such (e.g., Sebanz et al. 2006b). Secondly, embodied approach to joint

action (introduced below) has already proven its therapeutic utility in treatment of children

with autism and affective disorders (e.g., Kim et al. 2008; Koelsch et al. 2010).

Standardly, joint action is characterised in ways that ignore the body. Accordingly, standard

attempts to say what distinguishes joint actions from parallel but merely individual actions

focus on structures of amodal, propositional representation or commitment (e.g. Bratman

1992; Gilbert 1992; Searle 1990; Tomasello et al. 2005). By contrast — and in line with

current embodied turn in cognitive science (see Gibbs 2005 for review) – the body plays a

role in much research on the cognitive mechanisms that enable two or more agents to

coordinate their actions in performing joint actions (recent reviews include Knoblich et al.

2010; Vesper et al. 2010). For instance, coordination in joint action may depend on

interpersonal synergies (Ramenzoni et al. 2011) and may exploit joint affordances

(Richardson et al. 2007). The aim of this white paper is to explore and underline the role of

the body in joint action.

Accordingly, further role for the body in research on joint action depends on motor

representations, which are representations with a bodily, non-propositional format. There is

evidence that in joint action, there can be motor representations concerning not only one’s

own but also one’s partner’s actions (Kourtis et al. 2010 , 2013). As this suggests, in joint

action it is sometimes necessary to inhibit planning or performing another’s action (Sebanz

et al. 2006a). In general, performing one action while observing a complementary action

produces interference (e.g. Kilner et al. 2003). Given this, we might guess that where an

agent is engaged in joint action involving complementary actions and motor representations

concerning the others actions occur, these representations would interfere with the agents

performance and so hinder coordination.

However, it turns out that the opposite is true, at least in some cases. For a variety of joint

16

actions including passing an object, ballistic actions and playing a piano duet, motor

representations concerning another’s actions can facilitate interpersonal coordination

(Kourtis et al. 2013 , p. 9; Loehr and Palmer 2011; Novembre et al. 2013; Vesper et al. 2013;

Vesper et al. 2013). But just here we should be cautious in drawing conclusions linking motor

representation with joint action. Sartori and Cavallo (2011) provide evidence that, in

competitive actions, there are motor representations concerning an opponent's action as well

as for ones own. So is there a distinctive role for motor representation in joint action, or does

motor representation enable interpersonal coordination in ways that are insensitive to

whether the context is competitive or collaborative? That motor representation does play a

distinctive role in joint action is indicated by findings that in joint action there is sometimes

a single outcome which is represented motorically by each agent (Loehr et al. 2013; Ménoret

et al. tted; Tsai et al. 2011). This supports the further hypothesis that when an agent is

involved in joint action, there is sometimes a single planning-like motor process for both her

own and the other agents (or agents) actions. If this is right, it may be necessary to appeal to

motor representation not only in explaining how two or more agents coordinate their

actions, but also in giving an account of what, exactly, joint action is. At this point we face a

challenge. In what ways, if any, should standard characterisations of joint action be modified

in the light of these and other findings about the role of the body in the coordination of joint

action?

2.2 Cognitive artifacts and ICT (Cloud-Tech, E-Memory and

Virtual Identities)

Internet-mediated technologies offer the potential to change the way that knowledge is

represented and the new possibilities for interaction they make possible.

Donald orman defines cognitive artifacts as “artificial devices that maintain, display, or

operate upon information in order to serve a representational function and that affect

human cognitive performance.” ( orman 1990; for a useful overview of perspectives on

cognitive artifacts, see Heersmink 2013). There is little doubt that the new regimes of

internet-mediated technologies offer the potential to change the way that knowledge is

represented and the new possibilities for interaction they make possible.

Although cognitive technologies have been with us for a long time, from at least the

invention of writing they have had, and continue to have important implications for the way

we think, who we think we are, and how we organise our societies. Historically speaking,

cognitive technologies have:

1. Increased and made more various human cognitive capacities and enhanced human

efficiency on many tasks.

2. Affected how people and society go about achieving their goals, indeed arguably

changed what those goals are.

3. Highlighted and transformed how we human beings view ourselves and our goals.

4. Changed the way we cognize both individually and in groups.

5. Given rise to new forms of cognition (such as distributed cognition), perceptions and

mental states that are either distributed across or even embodied in cognitive

technology.

17

Arguably the deployment of these technologies has also caused dramatic shifts in how

human beings think of themselves and have sometimes made possible revolutionary societal

change sometimes annihilating cultural practices that have been central for centuries or even

millennia. Oral Poetry, once one of the central mechanisms for cultural transmission is

effectively annihilated by the development and widespread dissemination of writing. Indeed

even certain forms of cognition such as the ability to memorize, improvise and perform

thousands of lines of poetry is now beyond contemporary cognitive abilities for almost all

living humans.

We are now going through a phase of much change led by development and rapid

innovations in the field of ICT which may be having similarly fundamental implications the

basic media of mind that human beings use. Much of the new technology is Cloud-Tech,

technology that makes use of an ever-present internet to provide data system and services

via mobile networks making possible lightning fast interactivity with vast warehouses of data

behind it. Alongside the interactive possibilities this makes available are also unprecedented

possibilities for surveillance of the individual. This surveillance has obviously problematic

dimensions for the privacy of the individual but can also offer novel cognitive affordances as

the technology becomes ever more closely fitted to our individual cognitive profiles. This

intimate and ever-present nature of much Cloud-Tech – packaged now through our smart

phones and shortly by wearable technologies like Google Glass — means that ICT technology

is bound ever more closely to our organic cognitive faculties. This is likely to be already

having important cognitive implications. It is often easier to consult our gadgetry to

“remember” a fact by Googling than scratching our heads and wracking our brains.

A broad class of the mobile devices we now use on an everyday basis, such as megapixel

cameras, smart-phones, iPods and iPads and wearable devices provide E-Memory

technology, that is to say functions which have broadly similar functions to the memory

architecture of our brains. However the functions do not simply replace our organic

functions but augment, extend and in some circumstances may diminish those cognitive

functions. (We will not discuss in detail the heated question of cognitive enhancement and

diminishment here but it is clearly one of central interest to the future of our societies.)

Rather we concentrate on some particular properties and direct implications of the

widespread usage of the new Cloud-Tech and especially E-Memory.

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2.2.1 E-Memory and Cloud Tech

E-Memory (and Cloud) technologies have been argued to present (Clowes, 2013) the

following collection of novel properties: Totality, Incorporability, Autonomy and

Entanglement. Individually and collectively these properties promise (or threaten) important

cognitive implications as we increasingly adopt and incorporate them into our cognitive

lives. Consideration of them helps us consider how human cognitive potential is likely to

change over the coming years. Let us consider the properties in a little detail:

1. Totality: E-Memory promises to record our everyday activities on a scale and with a

fidelity and completeness that would have been practically unimaginable under

previous regimes of memory technology. Cloud Tech brings to this picture an ever-

present repository of “memory traces” that can be retrieved and brought to bear on

ongoing cognition.

2. Practical Cognitive Incorporability: E-Memory and Cloud-Tech are rapidly

becoming a constant context for many cognitive processes. The devices which present

this technology increasingly possess a transparency-in-use that makes them ready

competitors (or complements) with certain of our internal resources. It is often as

easy, or easier, to rely upon these technologies to carry out certain cognitive tasks

than internal organic resources. They are thus poised for deep and pervasive

integration with our organic cognitive systems.

3. Autonomy: E-Memory repositories increasingly do not merely store data but

actively process it. Thanks to tagging, indexing and AI systems resident on our

devices and in the cloud, we can expect E-Memory systems to not merely store and

retrieve memory-traces and other information, but process, restructure and re-

present them in ways that are independent of, but tightly coupled to, our native

cognitive profile.

4. Entanglement: E-Memory often tracks interactions between people (or people and

organisations). Many of the cloud services we use rely on collective data-storage and

interactions collected from a mass of users. However it is presented back as

narrowcast and tightly coupled to the activities of us as individuals. The data that

composes many E-Memory stores and cloud services is thus inherently two-sided in

relying on the interaction of these collective and individual dimensions.

To focus on E-Memory and totality it is already claimed in some quarters that trends

toward life-logging can already be regarded as important cognitive enhancements that

change the nature of human memory (Bell & Gemmell, 2009) making possible new forms of

self-knowledge and self-understanding. Others have argued that the property of totality, the

19

capacity in some sense to “remember everything” may already be changing and perhaps

undermining certain aspects of our common humanity (Mayer-Schönberger, 2011).

Without prejudging the cognitive and societal implications of such technologies it is difficult

not to treat technologies such as Google Glass as being a departure in the history of human

memory. A wearable technology that can pipe HD video directly from a owner’s viewpoint to

the cloud and then allows that video to be automatically time and location stamped, and in

other ways categorized, is sure to have societal implications. Because of the practical

incorporability of these wearable artefacts there are likely cognitive implications which

are every bit as profound cognitively as the societal effects (really predicted effects) which

have been much in the news in recent times. Mobile Internet available tablets and smart-

phones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous throughout Europe and wearable devices like

(or very different) from Google Glass are sure to follow. Such technologies have caused

concern in some quarters which fear that as we rely ever more on these technologies our

biological resources are placed under threat (Carr, 2010). However there has been so little

real research, either practical or theoretical, into these implications of these technologies

that a proper assessment is currently not possible.

Some of this research needs to focus on the deep philosophical and theoretical implications

of this technology. In fact the philosophy of cognitive science has already developed

significant resources which may help us analyse these developments. As this white paper has

discussed, human beings tend to extend their cognitive powers by incorporating technologies

into themselves. Under some circumstances cognitive technologies can even be considered

proper parts of our minds (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). However there are interesting

theoretical differences about how exactly the particularly cognitive contribution of

technologies should be considered. Technologies like Wikipedia and perhaps Google Search

might be considered a sort of cognitive commons (Dror &Harnard, 2008); that is, a kind of

collective cognitive resources maintained by and contributing to the cognitive abilities of a

mass of users. Other might be so intimate to individual users, so tailored to, and incorporate

in individual cognitive processes that they should be considered as proper parts of individual

human minds.

Theoretical questions about when exactly a technology should be considered part of an

individual’s (or collective’s) mind may start to have very practical implications.

2.2.2 Virtual Reality and avatars

Improvement of human abilities, in the bodily, mental and social dimension, can be

accomplished in several ways. Under the right conditions an avatar in a virtual world can

20

substantially enhance the abilities of the user – the person who owns and operates it.

As William Bainbridge argues in Transhumanist Reader, avatars demonstrate one way in

which enhancement is not merely a matter of increasing the effectiveness of a person in

taking action, but also can mean an altered form of consciousness that expands

opportunities for new social experiences and, in some cases, escape from conventional

system of moral constraints (in More and Vita More 2013: 91).

There already exists a strong body of research showing that virtual beings affect our bodily

and sensorimotor abilities, as well as reshape our body scheme. Many studies of first-person

shooters (see: Ash 2013, Galloway 2006) show that operating an avatar not only equips the

player with new affordances, but also affects his/her memory and speed of volitional

attention switches. Moreover, as Amorim showed in his What is my avatar seeing?: The

coordination of "out-of-body" and "embodied" perspectives for scene recognition across

view, using an avatar for coordination of “out-of-body” and “embodied” perspectives is

extremely helpful in relation to social perception, in order to understand what another

individual sees.

This brings us to the issue of how avatars may affect our sense of identity and social presence

in various ways. Sherry Turkle once said that the roles played by a constructed identity in

virtual role-playing games are a very important aspect of personality development because

they provide the opportunity to express unexplored parts of the Self. As Turkle claimed in

Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in Virtual Reality: Playing in the MUDs,

involvement in the virtual world may invoke “second chances" for adults to resolve their

identity issues as well as other complicated issues related to their involvement in various

kinds of social relations (1994:159). Turkle argued that virtual life could lead to changes in

the understanding of and involvement in social relationships, as well as influence changes in

social practices in the real world.

However, a lot still remains to be done in this area. For instance, De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and

Gallagher (2010: 442) suggest that virtual beings could in the future provide excellent

material for neurophenomenological models of how we connect with others on the social

level. They suggest close analysis of experiences of virtual characters or socialized robots.

They consider it promising for further studies of participatory sense making, as well as the

role of imagination and mirroring behaviours in the social sphere.

One central question is: How and to what extent will the new ICT technologies have novel

cognitive potentialities, and what might we expect from the potentialities they make

available? What role and what degree of agency do we have in the deployment and use of

these technologies? Ultimately perhaps what kinds of human beings will we be when we

21

transfer a big part of our life to Virtual Reality or when the availability and our familiarity

with technologies like Google Glass are as everyday as current use of paper and pencil.

2.3 Social Cognition and Culture

2.3.1. Mindreading

In philosophy, as well as in developmental and comparative psychology, social cognition

has traditionally been understood in terms of “mindreading”. This is a term of art that is

often used interchangeably with “mentalizing” and “theory of mind”.

The guiding concept behind the notions of mindreading, mentalizing, and theory of mind is

that an individual’s success at predicting the behavior of and coordinating with her

conspecifics depends on understanding the unseen psychological causes responsible for their

behavior. On this orthodox conception of human social cognition, differences in the

sophistication of social interaction, e.g., cooperation and coordination, across phylogenetic

and ontogenetic time, can be traced to the sophistication of interactants’ theories of mind.

For example, whereas nonhuman primates are restricted to an understanding of

conspecifics’ goals, perceptions, emotional states, and behavioral dispositions, adult humans

can also attribute beliefs, intentions, and other propositional attitudes, arranged in rational

plans causally responsible for their interactants’ behaviors.

Recently, this orthodox, consensus understanding of social cognition has come under

considerable pressure. For example, Hutto (2008) argues that non-human, human infant,

and even typical, quotidian adult human social cognition does not depend on interactants

understanding the unseen psychological causes of each other’s behavior via sophisticated

theories of mind. Rather, he argues, most social cognition involves an embodied

understanding of perspectives–an ability to track relations between whole organisms and

salient features of the environment,–what Hutto calls “intentional attitudes”. Understanding

of hidden psychological causes, especially propositional attitudes, depends on prior

enculturation in culturally specific narrative practices, and is useful only in making sense of

deviations from or exceptions to typical behavioral patterns.

Hutto’s (2008) alternative to orthodox conceptions of social cognition has a number of

motivations. For Hutto, there is little evidence that the non-linguistic behavior of both non-

humans and humans is caused by propositional attitudes, as these have been understood by

the philosophical tradition: discrete, content-bearing, representational mental states that are

causally responsible for intelligent behavior. Hence, there is little reason to think that

attributing such mental states is necessary for successful coordination. Hutto also raises

problems for how concepts of such states could possibly have arisen, in phylogeny or

ontogeny, prior to the linguistic, narrative practices that make them salient for human

children. Finally, he notes that much successful coordination can be explained by appeal to

the attribution of intentional attitudes, rather than hidden mental states: interactants

succeed by tracking each other’s embodied, perceptually available, whole-organism relations

to salient features of the environment.

This alternative understanding of human social cognition draws on the phenomenological

tradition in philosophy, according to which minded behavior is not typically a matter of

representing facts about the world, and hence, tracking minded behavior should not involve

22

attributing such representational capacities, in the form of mental states like propositional

attitudes (Gallagher and Hutto 2008). One advantage of this perspective is that it

undermines the traditional assimilation of successful social cognition to solving the

apparently intractable, philosophical “other minds” problem, i.e., determining whether one’s

fellows have mental states, and if so, which ones, based only on observable behavior.

However, one does not need to endorse the whole phenomenological program, along with

wholesale anti-representationalism about human cognition, in order to raise problems for

the orthodox, mindreading-centered conception of social cognition.

It is widely recognized that propositional attitudes, like belief and desire, bear very tenuous

relations to observable circumstances and behavior. The reason is holism: even on orthodox

views, particular propositional attitudes lead to behavior only against a background of

indefinitely many other propositional attitudes (Morton 1996; 2003; Bermudez 2003; 2009;

Apperly 2011). For example, a belief that it is raining will issue in umbrella retrieval only

when conjoined with a desire to stay dry that is stronger than competing desires, appropriate

beliefs about the location of an umbrella and the relative costs of retrieving it, etc. This

feature of propositional attitudes raises significant problems for the orthodox conception of

social cognition as dependent on mindreading, and especially for the widely held assumption

that successful navigation of the social world requires attributing propositional attitudes.

The reason is that it raises issues of computational tractability. Most successful social

interactions take place seamlessly and dynamically at relatively short time scales. It seems

unlikely that successful interpreters search the immense space of propositional attitude

attributions compatible with brief, observed bouts of behavior, in time to arrive at

attributions accurate enough to support successful interaction. For this reason, a number of

theorists who share neither Hutto’s general skepticism about representationalism nor his

allegiance to the phenomenological tradition, have recently raised similar worries about the

orthodox conception.

Most prominently, Apperly & Butterfill (2009) and Apperly (2011) have argued for a

distinction between System 1 and System 2 mindreading. The distinction is inspired by

theories of rationality (Stanovich 2011; Evans 2003) and numeracy (Feigenson et al. 2004)

that distinguish between two kinds of cognitive response to similar tasks. One kind of

response is rapid, unconscious, automatic, beyond deliberate control, phylogenetically old,

and available very early in ontogeny. For example, infants and non-human animals are

sensitive to differences in the numerosity of small groups of objects, and can process such

information extremely rapidly to succeed in experimental tasks. Likewise, human adults

come to very rapid, unreflective judgments in reasoning tasks, which often violate norms of

rationality, yet lead to adaptive responses in ecologically plausible contexts. The second kind

of response is slow, conscious, deliberate, reflective, phylogenetically very new (because it is

dependent on enculturation in appropriate cognitive practices), and available only in late

childhood, after formal schooling. For example, older children and adults can also come to

reflective and much more precise judgments about the numerosity of groups of objects of

unlimited size, i.e., by counting. And older children and adults can come to reason in

normatively acceptable ways, when trained in appropriate techniques, and given time to

apply rules reflectively. The first kind of response is thought to be mediated by “System 1”

number cognition and rationality; the second kind by “System 2” number cognition and

rationality. Apperly and Butterfill suggest that there are likewise two systems of

mindreading: System 1 mindreading supports successful social cognition in rapidly evolving,

23

dynamic quotidian contexts, and does not require the attribution of full-blown propositional

attitudes. This kind of mindreading mediates the socio-cognitive feats of non-human

animals, very young infants, and older children and adults engaged in everyday interactions.

System 2 mindreading involves the attribution of propositional attitudes as such, and

includes an appreciation of holism, and thus, the tenuous connection between propositional

attitudes and behavior. This kind of mindreading is available only in late childhood and

adulthood, and unavailable to nonhuman species.

Apperly and Butterfill’s hypothesis is extremely promising because it suggests a plausible

explanation of recent findings in developmental and comparative psychology; however, it

also raises a number of difficult questions. The developmental psychology of social cognition

has recently undergone a revolution with the introduction of non-verbal versions of the false

belief task. The standard false belief task, used to gauge children’s theory of mind

competence for several decades, depends on verbal probes of children’s knowledge about a

target’s mental states. Based on such studies, it was widely held that children do not

understand that interpretive targets can have false beliefs until they reach the age of four.

However, employing looking time as a measure of preverbal infants’ expectations, Onishi

and Baillargeon (2005) showed that infants as young as 15 months of age appear to

anticipate that interpretive targets will act on false beliefs. This result has proven robust: all

find congenial results in infants below two years of age (Baillargeon et al. 2010). On the most

sanguine interpretations of this data, infants master the concepts of belief and other

propositional attitudes long before they can even speak; in fact, many theorists claim this

data shows the concept of belief to be innate, and the delay until age four or later in its fully

competent deployment to be due to performance limitations caused by relatively delayed

maturation of domain general capacities like attention and memory (Leslie 2005). However,

as Apperly (2011) argues, these experiments do not show mastery of the full-blown concept

of belief, of the kind employed in System 2 mindreading. In fact, neither do the long-used,

verbal versions of the false belief task. Children can pass such tests without understanding

that particular propositional attitudes yield behavior only relative to an indefinitely broad

background of other propositional attitudes. And they pass such tests long before

understanding the opacity of propositional attitude attribution: the fact that individuals can

represent and believe the same facts under individually variable modes of presentation

(Apperly 2011). The distinction between System 1 and System 2 mindreading nicely handles

the recent experimental results: very young infants employ System 1 mindreading, as do

some non-human species, as well as adults in everyday, embodied social cognition (Apperly

2011).

While promising, this proposal raises a number of issues. First and foremost, there is the

question of how to characterize System 1 mindreading. System 2 mindreading is the

competence that has long been taken for granted in philosophy and psychology - what

Apperly terms the “normative account” (2011). This is the understanding of full-blown

propositional attitudes as such: concrete, mental causes of behavior, with content,

represented via individually variable modes of presentation, and tenuous, holistically

mediated connections to observable circumstances and behavior. What features of this

theory of mental states are lacking in System 1 mindreading? The best way to answer this is

to determine the minimal competence required for the kinds of socio-cognitive feats of which

very young infants, some nonhuman species, and adults in unreflective, dynamic, quotidian

24

interactions are capable. It is not immediately clear how to characterize this capacity.

Apperly and Butterfill (2013) suggest that such social cognition is mediated by an

understanding of what they term “registrations” - unobservable mental states, with causal

control over behavior and some form of representational content, yet with much more direct

connections to observable circumstances and behavior than full-blown propositional

attitudes, i.e., not holistically constrained by indefinitely broad networks of background

propositional attitudes, and no individually variable modes of presentation. But once one

goes this far, why understand System 1 mindreading as any kind of mindreading at all? Why

assume that infants, non-human primates, and adults in unreflective, dynamic, quotidian

interactions have to represent the hidden causes responsible for behavior? Perhaps Apperly

and Butterfill’s “registrations” can be understood as more like relations between interpretive

targets and worldly states of affairs, rather like Hutto’s intentional attitudes (Zawidzki 2011).

Another important question raised by the hypothesis of two mindreading systems concerns

their evolution. System 1 mindreading is supposed to be phylogenetically old, and largely

shared with some nonhuman species. But given how effective System 1 mindreading can be,

it is unclear why System 2 mindreading - the attribution of full-blown propositional attitudes

as such - would ever have evolved. Why go to all the trouble if our ancestors were already

adept at predicting and coordinating with each other’s behavior using System 1

mindreading? This is especially puzzling if we hypothesize some evolutionary divergence

between our ancestors and other primates even at the System 1 level. It is plausible that,

unlike, say, chimpanzees, humans have System 1 mindreading components devoted to

various forms of joint action, of the kind that support our unique cooperative and

coordinative feats. Such behavior occurs seamlessly and rapidly, in dynamic contexts; so it is

unlikely that it requires careful, reflective, System 2 mindreading. In fact, Butterfill (2013)

suggests that System 1 capacities for joint action may have actually made possible later,

effective System 2 mindreading. Furthermore, Zawidzki (2008; 2013) argues that human

populations are distinguished from our closest non-human relatives by an array of effective

“mindshaping” techniques, aimed at making potential interactants more alike, and hence

easier to interpret. For example, only humans engage in “overimitation” ( ielsen

Tomaselli 2010), that is, copying each other’s fine-grained, apparently non-functional

behaviors. Only humans engage in constant and pervasive pedagogy. Only humans set up

elaborate normative regimes, and linguistic, narrative constructs, and then pressure each

other to conform to them. Such practices tend to make human populations easier to interpret

using relatively simple, System 1 mindreading systems. And this, again, raises the question,

why bother evolving System 2 mindreading?

One possibility explored by Zawidzki (2013), is that System 2 mindreading, i.e., the

attribution of full-blown propositional attitudes as such, evolved to play a justificatory,

rather than a predictive function. That is, rather than help predict the behavior of potential

interactants, for which System 1 mindreading supplemented by mindshaping was sufficient,

attribution of full-blown propositional attitudes evolved as a tool for situating interactants in

a normative space - as committed and entitled to various discursive and non-discursive

moves, given prior such moves. Inspired by Brandom’s (1994) theory of discursive practice,

this idea finds some support in social psychology as well. Bruner (1990) points out that many

everyday uses of propositional attitude attributions are triggered by behavior that deviates

from a canonical cultural pattern, and function to excuse or at least make sense of the

25

behavior, e.g., when a person appears to break some norm, as when one fails to fulfil a

promise, sanctions can be mitigated if one can provide an excuse in terms of what one was

thinking. There is some empirical evidence in favor of this hypothesis: Malle et al. (2007)

showed that, when explaining behavior, adults are much more likely to appeal to reason

explanations, i.e., propositional attitudes, when they are motivated to make the behavior

look good. Without such motivation, they tend to explain behavior in terms of situational

factors, like character traits.

The mindshaping hypothesis, and the role of propositional attitude attribution in justifying

apparently counter-normative behavior to one’s interactants, suggest a very precise sense in

which human social cognition is “wide”: much of the work required to predict our fellows

involves not intracranial socio-cognitive resources, like so-called “theory of mind”, but

rather, external cultural practices aimed at making our likely interactants more familiar and

easy to anticipate. Culture seems to function as a classic example of “epistemic action” (Kirsh

1996; Clark 1997). Rather than tackle the seemingly computationally intractable task of

predicting our conspecifics by building ever more complex, intracranial computational

capacity, natural selection seems to have developed systematic means of structuring the

social environment in ways that make it easier to predict using relatively simple intracranial

resources. The variety of mindshaping techniques employed by a given culture -

overimitation, pedagogy, norm construction and enforcement, the use of linguistic narrative,

e.g., myths, to construct “virtual” models for all to imitate - can all be seen as forms of wide

social cognition, aimed at regimenting the potentially unruly and intractable social

environment. If this hypothesis is on the right track, it suggests that the study of culture and

its effects on cognition must play a central role in the sciences of social cognition.

In fact, over the past fifteen years there have been many new researches exploring the impact

of culture on the development of human cognitive structures. Areas of knowledge that deals

with this subject are cross-cultural psychology, neuroantropology and cultural neuroscience.

What unites the above-mentioned disciplines is the emphasis put on socio-cultural aspects of

human cognitive abilities. This position is sometimes called as bio-cultural constructivism

[or bio-cultural co-constructivism (Baltes, Rosler, Reuter- Lorenz, 2006)] and it states, that

“that brain and culture are in a continuous, interdependent, co-productive transaction and

reciprocal determination” (Baltes, Rosler, Reuter- Lorenz, 2006, pp.3). Basic assumption is

that the structure of the human brain is not programmed a priori, but rather co-shaped by

widely understood sensory stimulation: the socio-cultural experience of the entity, its

environment, etc. Generalizing - the process of ontogenetic development is stimulated

genetically, environmentally and culturally. Consequently, this leads to the abandonment of

radical genetic, neuronal or cultural determinism or environmentalism and highlights the

simultaneous impact of all the above factors on human ontogeny and evolution.

The main challenge that lies in front of the researchers associated with this way of thinking is

the precisely distinction between “software” and “hardware”. In other words: we need to

answer to the question of which aspects of our cognitive determinants are the result of

evolutionary adaptation or cultural adaptation, which of them stem from the experience of

our species, and which are associated with the experience of a individual subject.

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2.3.2. Two Case Studies: Imitation and Pretence

Pretence and imitation play a crucial role in human children’s social development. In both

philosophy and psychology, the current consensus emphasizes the way both abilities

contribute to children’s acquisition of mindreading abilities.

A core limitation of this mindreading-centered approach is that it focuses almost exclusively

on the role of these capacities in learning to interpret behavior, while tending to

systematically underplay social, cultural, and dynamic factors. In particular, both imitation

and pretence are ways of learning culturally specific types of behavior by actively

participating in simple social relationships. Below, we provide a brief overview of how the

mindreading consensus has tended to understand imitation and pretence, explain its

limitations for each kind of ability, and outline more embodied and extended approaches

that offer finer grained accounts of just these cultural, social, and dynamic factors.

Case Study 1: Imitation in Human Phylogeny and Development

Imitation is part of a broad network of social learning strategies that involve acquiring a new

behavior by observing another agent perform it. Generally speaking, imitation is distinct

from other social learning strategies such as mimicry and emulation because it requires an

appreciation of the relationship between means and goals (see Tomasello and Carpenter

2005 for discussion). On the one hand, mimicry involves the rote replication of another

creature’s behavior without an underlying appreciation of its goal. On the other, emulation

learning consists in learning about an environmental affordance by observing the outcome of

another agent’s behavior, but does not include an appreciation of how the agent’s specific

means contribute to bringing it about. In contrast to both mimicry and emulation, imitation

consists in reproducing another agent’s behavior by taking it as a model for how to bring

about a goal.

By the end of their first year of life, human children are sophisticated imitators of adults’

behavior. They are able to learn new behaviors both by faithfully reproducing fine-grained

aspects of an adult’s behavior and by identifying alternative means for bringing about the

same goal. Both aspects are helpfully illustrated by a famous study by Gergely, Bekkering,

and Kiraly (2002). In the study, 14-month-old children each watched a human adult do

something quite unusual—she touched her head to a panel on a table, and it made the panel

light up. Children in one group watched the adult perform this action while her hands were

occupied because she was holding a blanket around herself, while those in a second group

saw the adult perform the same action while her hands were unoccupied. Children in the

first group responded by simply using their hands to turn on the light panel, but those in the

second group carefully matched the adult’s behavior by using their heads to turn on the light.

Gergely and colleagues interpret this finding to show that young children are sensitive to the

contextual constraints under which an adult performs an action and imitate accordingly:

they use their hands when the adult’s hands are occupied because that is a more efficient way

of achieving the same goal, but they use their heads when the adult’s hands were unoccupied,

assuming that this was the point of the action. A complementary finding by Andrew Meltzoff

(1995) further underscores the flexibility of young children’s capacities for imitation. When

18-month-olds observe an adult perform a failed action with a novel artifact, such as failing

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to pull a toy dumbbell apart because her fingers keep slipping off, they will imitate the

behavior by performing a successful version of the action, rather than simply mimicking the

adult’s failed action. This suggests that they are sensitive to the goal-related features of even

unsuccessful actions.

The mindreading-centered approach has exerted an outsized influence on research into the

phylogeny and ontogeny of human imitation. Consider an influential account of the

phylogeny of imitation developed by Michael Tomasello and his Leipzig research team (e.g.,

Tomasello 1999; Tomasello and Carpenter 2005; Tomasello et al. 2008). On their account,

human imitation is different from the social learning strategies of other social species

because it is closely linked to mindreading abilities in two main ways. First, they claim,

human imitators’ sensitivity to both the means and goals of another agent’s behavior reflects

a sophisticated understanding of other people as intentional agents, whose doings are

manifestations of hidden mental states, such as intentions. Second, human imitators have

species-distinctive motivations to identify with conspecifics as intentional agents like

themselves. These two factors combined allow human beings, from an early period of

development, to ‘see through’ the surface aspects of a conspecific’s behavior, identify the

intention behind it, and reproduce it appropriately in light of a tacit appreciation that one is,

like the other person, an intentional agent. In this way, Tomasello and colleagues argue,

imitation is a central driver of the evolution other sophisticated cognitive capacities, most

crucially cultural transmission and innovation. The capacity to replicate behavior faithfully

provides a basis for cultural transmission, while the ability to identify the intentions behind

it as well as alternative means for achieving them is a basis for innovation.

Mindreading-centered accounts of imitation have also had a profound influence on

developmental studies of young human children’s acquisition of abilities for interpreting

other people’s behavior. There are two broadly different ways of working out this idea. The

main difference between them is how each account explains the abilities that underlie

mature adult mindreading. On one account, mature mindreading involves using a ‘Theory of

Mind’, which enables interpreters to explain and predict behavior by drawing on tacit

theoretical generalizations. Andrew Meltzoff’s ‘Like Me’ hypothesis presents early human

imitation as a platform for acquiring a theory of mind (e.g., Meltzoff 2005, 2011). On his

account, imitation leads to later abilities for mindreading because it enables infants and

young children to recognize other people as ‘like me’, which provides a basis for generalizing

from one's own experience as an intentional agent to that of others. For instance, Meltzoff

(2005) claims that his 1995 finding on accidental actions can be explained on the hypothesis

that children generalized from their own experiences of failure and came to appreciate that

the adult was trying to pull the dumbbell apart. On the second kind of account, mature

mindreading is underwritten by capacities for mental simulation, which consists in

imaginatively putting oneself into another’s ‘mental shoes’ and using this identification with

the other person’s point of view to interpret, explain, and predict his or her behavior. Alvin

Goldman (2005, 2006) argues that mental simulation is the common cognitive basis for both

early human imitation and later mindreading. On his account, imitation requires simulating

the intentions behind another’s behavior, and this basic capacity for imaginative

identification is later expanded to include simulating more complex mental states, such as

beliefs and desires. For instance, Goldman explains Meltzoff’s 1995 finding by claiming that

children adopt the adult’s point of view, mentally simulate his repeated efforts, and come to

recognize that his or her intention is to pull the toy dumbbell apart.

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There are two critical limitations to this general mindreading-centered approach to

imitation, one theoretical and one empirical. The theoretical problem is closely connected to

issues about holism and underdetermination: mindreading is cognitively demanding because

many mental states, including intentions, bear only a tenuous connection to behavior. With

respect to imitation studies, the problem is how young children manage to identify the

intention behind a novel behavior that they have never seen before, especially when it

involves the manipulation of a novel artifact, such as a toy dumbbell. In different ways, both

Meltzoff and Goldman try to explain Meltzoff’s 1995 finding by appealing to young children’s

own experiences of failure. But given that the children had neither seen the toy dumbbell

being used before nor ever used it themselves, it is difficult to understand how they could

identify the adult’s intention accurately (Zawidzki 2013, p. 189). Specifically, how did they

know the adult’s intention was to pull the dumbbell apart, rather than to do something else

with it, such as break it? The core problem is that recognizing that an action has failed does

not necessarily provide a basis for positively determining what the agent intended to do.

The second, empirical limitation is that mindreading-centered views of imitation do not

appear to offer adequate resources for explaining a recent set of findings on human

children’s dispositions to overimitate. Overimitation consists in faithfully replicating

arbitrary features of an adult’s behavior, including ineffective means or ones simply causally

irrelevant to its goal (see Lyons 2009 for discussion). For instance, standardly developing

children will imitate arbitrary tapping gestures that do not contribute to opening a box, both

after they have learned through individual trial and error how to open it efficiently without

tapping (Nielsen and Tomaselli 2010) and when they are already familiar with how to open

the box (Marsh et al. 2013). In these cases, children appear to be disposed to replicate fine-

grained aspects of behavior that are not strictly relevant to the goal-related intention behind

the action. Nielsen and Tomaselli (ibid.) explain this by hypothesizing that overimitation is

specialized for cultural initiation because it disposes children to imitate the contingent

features of other people’s culturally specific behaviors.

In terms of alternatives to mindreading-centered approaches, one promising hypothesis is

that infants and young children identify the goals of agent’s actions through a simple

“teleological stance” (e.g., Gergely and Csibra 2003). On this account, infants do not identify

the goal of another agent’s actions by imputing a hidden mental intention. Instead, they

presume that agents act efficiently and use this presumption to identify the way that the

observable features of a behavior contribute as means to an observable outcome. A key

strength of this account is that it avoids the issues related to holism and the

underdetermination of behavior because it does not present young children’s capacities for

understanding goals in terms of a further appreciation of inner psychological causes. A

closely related, and more recent suggestion by Zawidzki (2011, 2013) develops Gergely and

Csibra’s idea about a ‘teleological stance’ in order to better accommodate the findings on

overimitation. On this alternative account, imitation is a mechanism for mindshaping rather

than mindreading. According to Zawidzki, overimitation is best explained on the hypothesis

that young children are intrinsically motivated to match fine-grained features of an adult’s

behavior, thereby coming to conform to culturally specific styles of behaving. This

uniformity, in turn, ultimately makes behavior easier to interpret. On this alternative,

imitation does not require sophisticated mindreading at all, but is jointly underwritten by

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capacities for parsing surface features of a bout of behavior into means and ends and

standing dispositions to treat other agents’ behavior as a model for one’s own.

In sum, the core shortcoming of mindreading-centered approaches is their inability to

explain overimitation and the closely connected problem of how young children succeed in

interpreting and reproducing novel behaviors with unfamiliar artifacts. The alternative

approaches offer simpler mechanisms than mindreading for explaining how imitators

interpret instrumental behaviors and more nuanced accounts for explaining imitators’

dispositions to replicate non-instrumental, culturally specific features of behavior. More

broadly, the core philosophical insight of these alternatives is that mindreading approaches

are too narrow because a great deal of human agents’ behaviors are shared by members of a

group, rather than being manifestations of an individual agent’s distinctive, ‘inner’

psychological motivations. This insight requires a conception of human social cognition as

‘wide’, extended, and embodied, one that closely links capacities for interpreting behaviors

with capacities for producing them and that gives a central role to processes of social

conformity in making behavior interpretable.

Case Study II: Pretence and Social Cognition

Pretending is an activity that adults and children routinely engage in. In developmental and

clinical psychology, it is one of the benchmarks of a healthy social development. For

example, we see underdeveloped spontaneous pretend play in children with Autism

Spectrum Disorder (Baron-Cohen 1995, Currie and Ravenscroft 2002).

In the philosophical tradition, the current consensus holds that pretending is a consequence

of the ability to represent an alternative scenario. In this sense, “pretence is similar to false

belief in that actions stemming from both mental states are directed at situations that do not

actually obtain” (Harris Kavanaugh 1993). On this view, pretence is assumed to be a type

of mental state one is in, where one needs to use symbolic capacities to act as if one thing

(e.g., a banana) was another (e.g., a phone). Hence, on the consensus view, pretence is

simply defined as requiring complex representational capacities, i.e., imagination,

conceptual manipulations or double knowledge of what is real and not real.

A distinguishing feature of this consensus view is that it closely links capacities for pretence

with mindreading, but there is disagreement about explanatory mechanisms that achieve it.

Leslie’s (1987) classic theory of pretence proposes that pretending involves

metarepresenting, that is, representing a representation (e.g., “I pretend that ‘banana is a

phone’”). When engaging in pretence, young children manipulate the concept ‘pretend’ and a

set of propositions that are not true. Leslie also argues that engaging in pretence depends on

the capacity to understand pretence in others, which in turn depends on an ability to

understand another’s mental state. In this way, according to Leslie, pretending requires a

theory of mind. Another popular theory that reflects the consensus view but stands against

Leslie’s metarepresentational model conceives of pretence in terms of behaving-as-if (Harris

1994, 2000, Lillard 1994, Nichols and Stich 2000). For instance, Lillard (1994) holds that

behaving-as-if consists in forming a mental representation of the pretence scenario, which

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must be held in the pretender’s mind and projected onto reality for successful pretence

behavior to occur. According to Harris (1994, 2000), behaving-as-if is a precursor to

simulative abilities because it involves interpreting and producing behavior in light of

projecting an imaginative scenario, and is thereby a precursor to the ability to put oneself in

another’s shoes.

Against both explanatory models that rely on the consensus view of human social cognition,

the Embodied and Enacted Cognition (EEC) account proposes an alternative conception of

human social cognition: it is to be understood in terms of embodied agency and direct

responses to others (Gallagher and Hutto 2008, De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2009, Hutto and

Myin 2013). The most important difference between the consensus view and the EEC view is

that the latter holds that social cognition extends beyond the boundaries of biological

individuals, incorporating environmental factors and dynamically emerging interactions that

are structured by shared norms. The EEC account is a promising alternative to the

traditional cognitivist accounts of mind because it incorporates the social world into the

explanation of individual cognition, which is an improvement to the traditional theories

considering the fact that human beings are social animals from birth (Reddy 2009).

This new approach provides motivation for exploring an alternate account of pretence,

focusing on the role of embodiment, enaction and intersubjectivity at its core. The key

advantages of the EEC account of pretence is that it broadens our understanding of the

possibilities and limitations of imaginative capacities, suggesting that the external world is

actively involved in shaping the imaginative capacities of children: their creativity is to be

understood as a result of active engagement with the world, not passive workings of a mental

mechanism. It follows that a novel approach to explaining lack of engagement in pretence

play of children with ASD may be in order. To explain creativity, usually symbolic

representational capacities are invoked, but it is unlikely that children of 18 months of age

possess such higher-cognitive capacities. In the spirit of ecological validity and Occam’s

razor, EEC can provide a simpler, more basic account of pretence that is in line with current

developmental findings.

The application of EEC to pretend play shows in the following way. It makes use of notions

such as object affordances (the role of play props), social affordances (role of play

participants), and wider social context (role of narratives) in order to explain the

development and shaping of pretence capacities of children and adults. Affordances,

understood possibilities of action, are a dynamically construed relationships between the

object’s properties and the actor’s history of interactions with it. Such interactions suggest

novel possibilities of play. Taking the example of a banana, its physical shape and size can

afford certain ways of playing to the child (a “phone” when held to the ear, a “hat” when

placed on the head, etc.), yet, limit other kinds of play (eg., “human shoe” on account of it

getting squashed). Affordances can explain how one thing (banana) can be treated as another

(phone) without the need to invoke internal capacities like concept-manipulation, and

explain how objects get their new meanings from use, instead of appealing to intentionality

as the mechanism that fixates meanings. Even in pretend play, where seemingly ‘anything

can stand for anything else’, the affordances of the objects suggest what can be played and

how (Rucinska, forthcoming).

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In addition, EEC suggests that social structures surrounding the play, or immediate

(dialogical) interactions with the external world, are key factors in the development of

pretence capacities. For example, caregivers initiate novel actions by directly engaging with

children in play and guiding them in it. A caregiver can show to a child how to hold a banana,

which the child then imitates. Imitation of others’ behaviours is a type of direct

responsiveness to the environment; whether such imitative capacities require further

representational capacities is to be explored in more detail, but to the extent that imitation

does not require complex capacities for symbolic representation, neither would pretence.

However, caregivers can guide play indirectly, as spectators, by responding to child’s play.

Reactions like smiles or gestures reassure and encourage the child what is acceptable as play.

As therapists Waltzlawick and Bavelas (1967) claim, “all behaviour, not only the use of

words, is communication” (p. 73).

The game of charades is an exemplar of how pretend meanings can get created during play,

as opposed to them being decided in advance. The actors adjust their behaviors to

accommodate the understanding of the spectators, and explore their means of depicting the

same thing. Such play might be an example of how ‘meaning is created together’, through the

breakdown and rebuilding of communication (similarly to what De Jaegher and Di Paolo

(2009) call ‘participatory sense-making’). There is a potential in this explanation to

understanding how intersubjective cognition can be shaped.

Finally, engagement in narrative practices may function as indirect, external factor in

shaping symbolic play of older children. Although language users, it may be a mistake to

conceive of their creativity as internally produced. A child’s familiarity with various stories

can re-shape the game and create novel scenarios. For example, a child may be recreating the

routines she has seen or participated in in the game of ‘restaurant’, and enhance it with a

story about a restaurant, using pre-established set of characters and settings (‘waiter’,

‘customer’), but also using other stories to improvise with the script (e.g., ‘sword-fighters’ to

turn cutlery into swords). Narratives may provide the necessary structures of going beyond

what is immediately present, enabling elaboration without relying on internal structures or

internalizing what has been learnt as a set of rules for playing ‘restaurant’.

To sum up, what structures pretence and makes it a cognitive act (instead of mere ‘thrashing

about’) can be explained by the EEC tools such as object affordances, social context and

narrative capacities. They help to understand how one can engage in pretence without

invoking full-blown symbolic capacities and higher cognitive mechanisms such as reasoning,

inferring or supposing, notions as ‘imagination’ in their explanatory models (which

presuppose what is to be explained), altogether avoiding the need to invoke mental

mechanisms in the brain (see ichols and Stich’s (2000) ‘pretence box’), which require

further explanation themselves. In this light, the EEC account of pretence is worth further

investigating, as it also promotes a better understanding of the development of social

cognition in general.

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2.4 Social emotions

A “wide” perspective on emotions urges that emotions are fundamentally social

phenomena.

Dominant theories of emotion in philosophy and cognitive science tend to adopt an

individualistic perspective. Whether modelled as evaluative judgments, appraisal processes,

physiological states of bodily arousal, or something else, emotions are commonly thought of

as private states individuated by their neurobiology, cognitive content, behavioural

expression, or phenomenal character (cf. Damasio 1999; Laird 2007; Nussbaum 2001;

Panskepp 1998; Russell 2009; Schwarz and Clore 1988; Prinz 2004). From this perspective,

the environment is of secondary performance for understanding the inner (i.e., agent-

centric) mechanisms that are the real heart of emotions.

A “wide” perspective on emotions, in contrast, urges that emotions are fundamentally social

phenomena: they are scaffolded and shaped by features of the agent’s social niche, as well as

the various ways the individual—along with other emotional agents—actively modifies and

negotiates this shared niche (cf. Averill 1985; Colombetti and Roberts under review; Krueger

forthcoming; Parkinson et al 2005; Slaby forthcoming; Stephan et al forthcoming).

Accordingly, the role of the environment is seen not merely as providing stimulus inputs and

serving as an arena for behavioural outputs. Rather, the environment—understood broadly

to include not only material features of the agent’s niche, but also sociocultural and

interpersonal aspects as well—plays an active role in shaping emotions on multiple time

scales, including both the moment-to-moment character of emotional episodes, as well as

the long-term development of an individual’s emotional repertoire (cf. Griffiths and

Scarantino 2009). While not looking to entirely jettison a consideration of internal

mechanisms, a wide perspective on emotions thus argues that the larger bodily, social, and

interactive context in which emotions are situated needs to be part of the target

explanandum.

One way to think about the social character of emotions is to emphasize their embodied

character. Here, the idea is that brain alone is not sufficient to generate emotional

experience. Rather, the rest of the (non-neural) body in its biological, physiological,

morphological, and kinematic details makes a non-trivial contribution to the realization of

some emotions. For example, many studies appear to indicate a reciprocal relation between

an emotional experience and its behavioural expression. Subjects induced to adopt an

emotion-specific facial expression or posture report experiencing the corresponding emotion

(Duclos and Laird 2001; Edelman 1984; Flack et al 1999; Marzoli et al forthcoming; see

Laird 2007 for review). Conversely, inhibiting the expression (e.g., suppressing the facial

signature of anger or happiness) diminishes the associated experience (Niedenthal 2007).

Individuals who suffer severe spinal cord injuries and lose the capacity to behaviourally

express emotions report less-intense feelings of high-arousal emotions like fear and anger

(Chwalisz et al 1988; Hoffman 1966; see also Laird 2007, pp.74-76; Mack et al 2005). Still

other studies have found that inhibited facial expressiveness—e.g., following Botox injections

(Davis et al 2010; Havas et al 2010) or due to congenital facial paralysis (Cole and Spalding

2009)—results in diminished emotional phenomenology.

Embodied approaches to emotion emphasize the extent to which emotions depend upon

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extra-neural factors and feedback. Moreover, if the physical expression of anger, say, is

literally a part of the anger itself—that is, part of its physical realization—some emotions, in

virtue of their embodied character, can be said to have a social face. They are partially

constituted by world-directed features perceptually available to other agents. But this

embodied perspective remains a fairly conservative way of thinking about the social

character of emotions. The environment does not enter into this characterization in any

substantive manner.

A stronger (and more genuinely “wide”) way of considering the social nature of emotions is

to look at the different ways the environment actively scaffolds emotional performance and

development on multiple time scales (cf. Griffiths and Scarantion 2009; Parkinson et al

2005). From this perspective, emotions are not pre-formed inner states that only enter the

social arena via behavioural outputs. Rather, the environment is understood to be part of the

very process by which emotions are experienced and expressed.

Consider work on audience effects, which indicate that emotional responses, despite a

constant stimulus, differ with respect to the anticipated recipient of the response. For

example, ten-pin bowlers smile significantly more after producing a positive event (e.g.,

bowling a strike or a spare) when they turn to face their friends than when they are still

facing the pin (Kraut and Johnston 1979). A similar effect has been observed in Spanish

soccer fans who issue authentic (i.e., “Duchenne”) smiles (Ekman 1972) in response to goals

only when facing one another person (Fernandez-Dols and Ruiz-Belda 1997), as well as in

Olympic gold-medal winners who smile almost exclusively when receiving their gold medal

(and not when they are alone prior to the ceremony) (Fernandez-Dols and Ruiz-Belda 1995).

Audience effects have even been observed in young infants (Scanlon Jones et al 1991). Other

work in developmental psychology demonstrates how the repertoire of physical strategies

caregivers use to engage with infants—facial expressions, postural adjustments, exaggerated

gestures and vocalisations, gaze manipulation, etc.—function as real-time scaffolding

supporting the emergence, regulation, and performance of many basic emotions from the

beginning of life (cf. Hobson 2002; Krueger 2013; Murray and Trevarthen 1985; Posner and

Rothbart 1998; Reddy 2008; Rochat 2009; Tronick et al 1978). This research supports the

thesis that certain emotions depend crucially upon the ongoing (i.e., synchronic) feedback

and support of the social-communicative context in which they are situated.

The environment also scaffolds the long-term (i.e., diachronic) development of an

individual’s emotional repertoire. A central part of emotional development involves the

cultivation of various emotional habits—habits which embody various sociocultural factors

(i.e., norms, values, and beliefs governing emotion scripts, displays rules, etc.) relative to

different social contexts and cultural environments (cf. Markus and Kitayama 1991). For

example, consider emotional responses during a wedding ceremony. Myriad material

technologies within this niche (e.g., music, singing, clothing, ritualized aspects of the

ceremony, decorations, food, building structure, etc.) collectively orchestrate the

performance of wedding-appropriate emotions on moment-to-moment basis. But this

orchestration also reflects more enduring cultural values, norms, and practices—what

Parkinson et al (2005) term “ideational factors”—that exert a material impact on the

character of these technologies and the emotions they orchestrate. The affective atmosphere

of a Catholic wedding may differ significantly from a Hindu wedding or a secular ceremony.

Children grow up attending multiple wedding ceremonies and gradually learn what sort of

34

emotions are appropriate within this context and how, exactly, they are to be expressed (or

repressed, as the case may be). This is one example of how culture-specific emotion scripts,

display rules, and material features of the environment converge to shape the child’s

emotional development and enrich their emotional repertoire. Emotional ontogeny reflects

different features of the affective culture in which it develops.

A wide perspective to emotions thus need not deny the importance of the brain or individual

mechanisms. But it does caution against adopting an excessively narrow perspective that

abstracts emotions away from the broader bodily, social, and cultural contexts that play a

critical role in their development and functioning.

3. Challenges

Wide cognition approaches need not, even if sometimes appear to, explain all phenomena

related to social intelligence or mentality broadly conceived. Also, there are a number of

essential open questions that need to be addressed in the future.

Unit of analysis / boundaries of cognition. It is an open question what should be the basic

unit of analysis in the case of distributed cognitive systems: individual agents or groups? Or

maybe the relationships and processes obtaining between the group members? Deciding

such questions in a systematic way is currently not known.

How natural is culture? It remains a challenge to state the exact relationship between what

was traditionally conceived as the biological core of cognition and wide cognition; are

culturally mediated cognitive abilities essentially as natural as biological ones? Traditional

notions of innateness in cognitive science seem to be a source of major confusion (Griffiths

2002, Samuels 2004).

Collective intentionality. A non-controversial account of collective intentionality is needed.

It is clear that the notion is related to the extended mind framework (Tollefsen 2006). There

is also an open question how collective intentionality relates to the idea that minds are social

artifacts (Castelfranchi 2013).

Is distributed cognition a useful concept? The notion of the distributed cognition, though

influential, may be viewed as one of the applications of the concept of the extended mind

(see section 1.6 above); at the same time, all accounts of social cognition presuppose that

cognitive phenomena are distributed among multiple cognitive agents in one way or another.

In this way, there may be no special methodology or theory of distributed cognition: this is

however still unclear.

Time scales. Cognitive phenomena occur at different time scales: traditional cognitive

science presupposed that individual cognitive acts occur at the time of scale of several

hundred milliseconds, though it has been long recognized that social factors – and other

‘bands’ of cognition occur at different time scales ( ewell 1990, Anderson 2002, Papo 2013).

The challenge remains to specify how to investigate cultural and social phenomena so as to

include them all in a unified models of social and cultural cognition. For example, so called

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network goods have value to someone only if other interactive parties also have them. It

makes no sense to own a fax machine if nobody else owns one. This phenomenon can be

studied on different time scales, and it is an open question how to integrate economical

analyses with the psychological research on joint action, and the ethnographical studies

typical of distributed cognition with computational modeling in evolutionary game theory, as

it is also an example of a co-adaptive behavior.

Non-individual factors: constitutive or causal? There is an unsolved controversy regarding

the status of non-individual factors (Adams & Aizawa 2008, Rupert 2009). Is there a way to

decide which ones are constitutive for cognitive capacities, and which simply have causal

influence? Recent debates in philosophy of mind and cognitive science suggest it is helpful to

keep notions of causal dependence and constitution separate (e.g., Menary, 2010b). For it is

one thing to argue that cognitive processes can be causally dependent on the body and its

interaction with an environment and it is another to argue that the body and its interactions

actually constitute or realize cognition. In this regard, Rowlands (2010: pp. 60-61) argues

that embedded mind is the claim that for some cognitive processes, there is a (perhaps

essential) causal dependence between environmental structures and bodily movement. If,

following Robbins and Aydede (2009: p. 3), we think of situated cognition as consisting in

the general claim that cognition can depend on structures in an agent’s environment (for a

review, see Anderson, 2003), then we can think of embedded mind as the targeted working

out of this claim.

Is there a theoretically significant difference between social and artefactual scaffold? It is

currently unclear whether social scaffolding of cognition should be framed in the same terms

as its technological underpinning. Should distributed cognitive phenomena always

presuppose collective intentionality and extend into multiple agents, or maybe only artefacts

allow for extending the mind?

How to study these phenomena? There is no overarching methodological strategy to decide

what is the best way to deal with social cognition, even if it seems plausible that in many

cases, wide approaches are needed.

4. Dangers

Duplication of effort. Social intelligence can be explained and modeled in various

approaches. There is a danger of duplicating effort; for example, social neuroscience may

inadvertently rediscover sociological explanations.

Isolation. Empirical evidence in various theories may rather constrain other theories rather

than screen them off. Theories completely isolated from what is currently known are likely to

be too unconstrained, and simply false. This is why it is essential to strive for integration; at

the same time, integration need not mean inter-theoretic reduction. Rather, other theories

known to be true should constrain the theory under investigation: it should be possible that

all are true at the same time.

Theoretical manifestos without empirical work. In all emerging fields of science, theoretical

manifestos are needed to make assumptions explicit. However, there is a danger of

36

stagnation if these manifestos are not put to work in empirical research. For example,

multiple Artificial Life (ALife) models show that the basic assumption that complex behavior

may result from simple agents is true. These models are examples of stagnation as far as they

do not show anything else; the result is simply trivial.

Conceptual confusion and misunderstanding. In interdisciplinary research, communication

issues are bound to arise, in particular due to different vocabularies used. For this reason,

there is a special role for philosophy of science to explain that some of the confusions are

merely terminological.

5. Summary

Wide approaches to cognition can be fruitfully applied to the study of social intelligence. The

embodied and grounded approach focuses on sensomotor aspects of social interactions and

accentuates their dynamical and time-related profiles, even in the study of phenomena

traditionally conceived of in a contemplative manner, such as imagining or thinking about

abstract entities. The embedded and situated cognition insists that cognitive and social

processes are situated in the environment that cannot be ignored in the study of the social.

In the perspective of the extended cognition, cognitive agents can expand beyond the

boundaries of their heads and bodies to incorporate technical artifacts, social institutions

such as language, and other agents to form collective intentionality. Enactive approaches

stress that cognitive processes emerge out of interaction of agents and their environments in

a dynamical manner. Finally, the study of distributed cognition focuses on cognitive

processes that require multiple cognitive agents to interact in an orchestrated manner so as

to jointly solve cognitive problems.

As such, wide cognition transcends the traditional methodological individualism of cognitive

science, and offers new perspectives on such social phenomena as joint action, cognitive

artifacts, mindreading, imitation and pretence, as well as social emotions, which we covered

in more detail in Section 2. It does not need to be stressed that there are many more

phenomena in the domain of social intelligence that would benefit from the application of

methodologies specific to wide cognition. For example, complex multi-agent interactions are

studied in economics and sociology, where the benefit or loss to one participant depends on

what other participants do. These situations include Prisoners’ Dilemma-type and Stag

Hunt-type games. Examples include uprisings and insurrections, where the risk/reward

trade-off to an individual changes dramatically if lots of others join in the uprising compared

to when they don’t. However, such interactions have been mostly studied mostly in multi-

agent computer simulations (for a general introduction, see Squazzoni 2012), which

generally abstract away from embodied-related aspects of social interactions. These may play

a role in constraining the behavior, just like standard environments tend to do (Wood & Neal

2007).

A wide perspective to does not deny the importance of the brain or individual mechanisms.

But it does caution against adopting an excessively narrow perspective that abstracts

emotions away from the broader bodily, social, and cultural contexts that play a critical role

in their development and functioning.

37

Nevertheless, there remain important challenges to be met. We listed some of them in

sections 3 and 4; but the overall danger is that the potential benefit—that of unifying various

explanations—may be lost if the research focus were limited to a narrow scope of

phenomena. This would still give rise to microtheories, purely theoretical speculation, and

even further disintegration of the field of the study of social intelligence. For this reason, to

leverage the unificationary potential of wide cognition, bigger research projects are needed

that will bring various approaches under a single umbrella.

38

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