The Expressive Culture of Sound Communication among Humans and Other Beings

This chapter is divided into four parts, addressed in turn to four questions: (1) How might phenomenological methods inform field research and ethnographic studies of people making music? (2) How do concepts from phenomenology, especially direct social perception, direct perception empathy, and embodiment, inform research on the expressive culture of same-species beings, both human and nonhuman, communicating with each other by means of sound? (3) How might phenomenology contribute to our understanding of cross-species sonic communication? (4) What might be gained (and lost) when ethnomusicologists reorient their research from the study of people making music to eco-ethnomusicology, the study of beings making sound?

Exploring the Effect of Virtual Robot Acceleration on Perceived Competitiveness/ Cooperativeness, Animacy, and Intelligence

Prior research has indicated that perception of acceleration may be a direct process. This direct process may be conceptually linked to the ecological approach to visual perception and a further extension of direct social perception. The present study examines the effects of perception of acceleration in virtual reality on participants’ perceived attributes (perceived intelligence and animacy) of a virtual human-like robot agent and perceived agent competitive/cooperativeness. Perceptual judgments were collected after experiencing one of the five different conditions dependent on the participant’s acceleration: mirrored acceleration, faster acceleration, slowed acceleration, varied acceleration resulting in a win, and varied acceleration resulting in a loss. Participants experienced each condition twice in a counterbalanced fashion. The focus of the experiment was to determine whether different accelerations influenced perceptual judgments of the observers. Results suggest that faster acceleration was perceived as more competitive and slower acceleration was reported as low in animacy and perceived intelligence.

Direct Social Perception

In this chapter I further develop interaction theory and the concept of primary intersubjectivity by providing evidence for our ability to directly perceive intentions and emotions. Intentions and emotions can be understood at least in part as composed of perceivable patterns of contextualized embodied behaviors. I argue that perception is “smart” and in no need of inferential or simulational supplementation in most instances of social interaction. I consider that even some theory theorists have acknowledged the role of perception but not without giving up the idea of a subpersonal processing that amounts to an inferential mindreading. I also consider recent predictive processing accounts and argue for an embodied-enactive interpretation of such processes. Finally, I consider concerns about direct social perception raised by research in social psychology.

Social Understanding and the Problem of “Other Mind”

The article discusses the main developments in the theory of social understanding. This new interdisciplinary area of research emerged at the end of the 20th century as a synthesis of a number of directions – analytical epistemology, philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience. Most philosophers and scientists believe that the core of social understanding is the ability to understand the mental states of other people. Studies of this ability have been called ≪theory of mind≫. This traditional problem of epistemology has now ceased to be the subject of “armchair philosophy” and turned into a field in which philosophy began to interact with the empirical cognitive sciences. Discussions about cognitive mechanisms that provide social understanding are dominated by two main approaches: theory-theory and simulation theory, as well as various options for their integration. The article also discusses an alternative interactive approach to social understanding research. Its supporters believe that people in real interactions with each other rarely use theorizing or mental simulation, but use direct social perception and various forms of embodied social practice.

Direct Social Perception

Defenders of a view called “direct social perception” (DSP) argue that our social-cognitive capacities rest on our ability to directly perceive others’ mental states—their emotions, desires, intentions, etc.—embodied in their expressive, goal-directed behavior. DSP thus challenges the widespread assumption that mental states are intracranial phenomena, perceptually inaccessible to everyone but their owner. In this chapter, I consider a version of DSP that draws upon phenomenology, 4E cognition, and empirical work in cognitive science. I first examine DSP in its historical context, focusing on its development in the hands of phenomenologists like Husserl, Scheler, and Merleau-Ponty. I then consider some supporting arguments and empirical evidence—particularly work suggesting that embodied expressions of emotions (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, etc.) may constitute part of the emotion itself. I conclude by defending DSP against several objections.

Ornamental Feathers without Mentalism: A Radical Enactive View on Neanderthal Body Adornment

Evidence of feather extraction from scavenging birds by late Neanderthal populations, supposedly for ornamental reasons, has been recently used to bolster the case for Neanderthal symbolism and cognitive equivalence with modern humans. This argument resonates with the idea that the production and long-term maintenance of body ornaments necessarily require a cluster of abilities defined here as the material symbolism package. This implies the construction of abstract meanings, which are then mentally imposed to artifacts and socially shared through full-blown mindreading, assisted by a meta-representational language. However, a set of radical enactive abilities, mainly direct social perception and situated concepts, is sufficient to explain the emergence of ornamental feathers without necessarily involving the material symbolism package. The embodied social structure created by body ornaments, augmented through behavioral-contextual narratives, suffices to explain even the long-term maintenance of this practice without mentalism. Costly neurocentric assumptions conceiving the material symbolism package as a homuncular adaptation are eschewed by applying a non-symbolic interpretation of feathers as cognitive scaffolds. It will be concluded that the presence of body adornment traditions in the Neanderthal archaeological record does not warrant the cognitive equivalence with modern humans, for it does not constrain a meta-representational level of meaning.