Perception, Evidence, and Our Expressive Knowledge of Others’ Minds

‘How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?’ So asks Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. It is this question, rather than any concern about pretence or deception, which forms the basis for the philosophical problem of other minds. Responses to this problem have tended to cluster around two solutions: either we know others’ minds through perception; or we know others’ minds through a form of inference. In the first part of this chapter I argue that this debate is best understood as concerning the question of whether our knowledge of others’ minds is based on perception or based on evidence. In the second part of the chapter I suggest that our ordinary ways of thinking take our knowledge of others’ minds to be both non-evidential and non-perceptual. A satisfactory resolution to the philosophical problem of other minds thus requires us to take seriously the idea that we have a way of knowing about others’ minds which is both non-evidential and non-perceptual. I suggest that our knowledge of others’ minds which is based on their expressions—our expressive knowledge—may fit this bill.

Other Minds, Facts, and Values

It is deep fact about us that we are social animals. The idea that ‘I’, ‘you’, and ‘we’ are interdependent concepts, and that joint thought and joint projects are central to our lives, is prominent in recent philosophy of mind and action. But the idea is important in ethics as well. Whether my individual life goes well or ill is constitutively intertwined with whether our joint life goes well or ill. If there are facts about the former (which few deny) then there are facts about the latter. So if you and I differ about what we should aim for, what is at stake in the debate is our shared future welfare. The familiar idea of ‘a fact–value distinction’, implying that there is no fact-directed reflection which could help us, presupposes a faulty individualistic account of welfare. It thus misrepresents our position in a seriously unhelpful and disempowering way.

Embodiment and Social Perception

Social Perception Theory (SPT) claims that it is possible, on occasion, to perceive that others are in pain, angry, intend to kick, or desire another helping of ice cream. According to a thesis that I call ‘Embodiment’, at least some mental states extend all the way to the available surface behaviour. The question I pursue in this chapter is whether Embodiment lends support to SPT. According to a view that I label the ‘Support Thesis’, Embodiment does support SPT in specific ways. I argue that—in the context of the mindreading debate, at any rate—the Support Thesis is false. If Embodiment turned out to be false, this would in no obvious way cast doubt on SPT. And if the former turned out to be true, this would not obviously lend any support to the latter.

Perception, Reliability, and Other Minds

It has been suggested that we can come by our knowledge of what others think and feel through perception. The idea has been worked out in different ways by different philosophers. In this chapter I consider the perceptual account proposed by Fred Dretske. In section one I outline Dretske’s account, and highlight a particular feature of it. In section two I set out an adequacy condition for any account that proposes to be an account of our mental life. In section three I consider Dretske’s account in the light of this adequacy condition and argue that Dretske’s account does not meet this condition. I conclude that while Dretske holds that we get our knowledge of other minds in much the same way that we get our knowledge of bodies in the world around us, I argue that the account cannot be extended to give us knowledge of other minds because there is a crucial asymmetry here that must be acknowledged.

Challenging the Two-systems Model of Mindreading

The two-systems model of mindreading advocated by Ian Apperly and Steve Butterfill seeks to find a middle ground between full-blown mindreading and either behaviour-reading or so-called ‘sub-mentalizing’. Minimal mindreading is taken to be efficient, automatic, and to emerge early in human ontogenetic development. Full-blown mindreading is taken to be flexible, less efficient, and to develop later. This chapter raises three challenges for this model. First, it challenges its claim to resolve the developmental puzzle. Secondly, it challenges the claim that the representation of the aspectuality of beliefs falls outside the scope of minimal mindreading. Finally, examination of the contrast between Level-1 and Level-2 visual perspective-taking undermines the sharp dichotomy between automatic and flexible cognitive processes. The alternative picture supported by this chapter is of a single mindreading system that can be used in ways that are more or less effortful as a result of interacting with other cognitive systems, such as working memory and executive control.

Being Pluralist About Understanding Others

Intersubjective interactions are highly complex processes that integrate a variety of contextual aspects—physical, pragmatic, social, cultural, normative, institutional—into which embodied individuals, with varying emotions, intents, desires, and motivations, enter. We elucidate the role of context in different varieties of social understanding. We defend a pluralist approach to social cognition and in that framework consider the limited role of mindreading understood as a form of theoretical inference or simulation, as well as the importance of embodied interaction. We argue that all of these practices need to be considered in order to comprehend the rich effects of context on social cognition. We exemplify the bidirectional influence between social understanding and context specifically by focusing on communicative practices and material engagements.

Knowledge, Belief, and the Asymmetry Thesis

This chapter examines the thesis that there is a deep-lying asymmetry between first- and third-person knowledge, by examining the idea that first-person knowledge is direct. The focus is on the propositional attitudes, in particular that of belief. Whereas philosophers generally take self-knowledge of belief to be direct and essentially different from knowledge of the beliefs of others, experimental psychologists have long challenged the idea that there is an important epistemic asymmetry between first- and third-person knowledge of belief. By drawing on some of the psychological literature, I argue that the psychologists are more nearly right. Although there are some interesting epistemic differences between first- and third-person knowledge of belief, the assumption of a deep-lying epistemic asymmetry is mistaken. In particular, I suggest, inference plays an important role both in the first- and in the third-person case.

The Problem of Other Minds; Some Preliminaries

This chapter aims to develop some thoughts about the nature of the problem of other minds, rather than offer a solution. In section 1, the character of the problem of other minds is contrasted with the character of the problem of self-knowledge. Both concern knowledge of psychological states, but the major difference is that worries about scepticism have dominated consideration of other minds, though have been ignored when considering self-knowledge. In section 2, three candidate ways to formulate the problem are articulated and compared. It is argued that we should not be asking whether we know about other minds, nor asking the completely general question how is it possible to know, but rather be asking how we know about other minds. In section 3, P. F. Strawson’s famous conception of the problem is expounded and criticized as resting on dubious assumptions about meaning. In section 4, it is argued that psychological states involve something being a certain way in the interior of subjects, but paradoxically inspecting the interior of subjects does not, arguably, reveal the presence of the psychological state. It is suggested that knowledge of the presence of these interior features is generated by perception of the subjects from outside when they are viewed as organisms in an environment. Finally, in section 6, an as yet unsolved component in the problem is claimed to be that we lack any understanding of how to generate knowledge as to whether artificial objects, such as robots, can possess psychological states or not.

Enquiries Concerning the Minds of Others

This chapter serves as substantive introduction to the topic of this volume. More specifically, it discusses three central problems relating to our everyday knowledge of other minds. The first is an epistemological problem concerning whether we are capable of knowing anything at all about the mental states of others and, if we are, how we are able to do this. The second is a conceptual problem, concerning our ability to have concepts of mental states that are applicable both to oneself and to others in a way that preserves unity of meaning. As we will see, this conceptual problem arises if we think that a subject typically acquires mental state concepts on the basis of her own experiences. The third problem is explanatory, and it concerns the psychological processes and mechanisms that underpin our ordinary attributions of mental states to others. These three problems are not only central to existing philosophical discussions of our knowledge of other minds, but they are also the primary questions addressed in this volume. As well as outlining the questions, this chapter serves as an introduction to the way in which each of the subsequent chapters chooses to address one or another of them. The chapter concludes with a proposal for how we might consider the answers to each of these problems as related to the others.

Expressions, Looks, and Others’ Minds

We can know some things about each others’ mental lives. The view that some of this knowledge is genuinely perceptual is getting traction. But the idea that we can see any of each other’s mental states themselves—the Simple Perceptual Hypothesis—remains unpopular. Very often the view that we can perceptually know, for example, that James is angry, is thought to depend either on our awareness of James’s expression or on the way James appears—versions of what I call the Expressive Hypothesis. The Expressive Hypothesis is intuitive. But in this chapter I argue that it does not allow us to do away with the thought that we sometimes perceive people’s mental states. I take my arguments to provide some tentative support for the Simple Perceptual Hypothesis.