The Bodily Self, Commonsense Psychology, and the Springs of Action

1 Modeling Commonsense Psychology

In its most general sense, the term “commonsense psychology” picks out the complex of social abilities and skills possessed by all normal, encultured, non-autistic, and non-brain-damaged human beings. These are the skills and abilities that allow us to navigate the social world. Taken in this very general sense, commonsense psychology is an explanandum rather than an explanans. We would expect it to be the sort of thing of which a theoretical account is given, rather than something that can itself do theoretical and explanatory work.

The expression “commonsense psychology” is used more determinately to characterize what is in effect a particular conceptual framework deemed to govern our social understanding and social skills, where this conceptual framework can be thought of as an account of what underlies the general abilities and skills just identified. Here are two useful characterizations of this second way of thinking about commonsense psychology:

It has become a standard assumption in philosophy and psychology that normal adult human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire which they deploy to explain, predict and describe the actions of one another and, perhaps, members of closely related species also. As is usual, we shall speak of this rich, conceptual repertoire as “folk psychology” and of its deployment as “folk psychological practice.” The conceptual repertoire constituting folk psychology includes, predominantly, the concepts of belief and desire and their kin—intention, hope, fear, and the rest—the so-called propositional attitudes. (Davies and Stone 1995, 2)

Human beings are social creatures. And they are reflective creatures. As such they continually engage in a host of cognitive practices that help them get along in their social world. In particular, they attempt to understand, explain and predict their own and others’ psychological states and overt behaviour; and they do so by making use of an array of ordinary psychological notions concerning various internal mental states, both occurrent and dispositional. Let us then consider folk psychology to consist, at a minimum, of (a) a set of attributive, explanatory and predictive practices, and (b) a set of notions or concepts used in those practices. (Von Eckardt 1994, 300)

The general idea here is that our skills in social understanding and social coordination are underpinned by the conceptual framework of propositional attitude psychology. We can make sense of other people and coordinate our behavior with theirs in virtue of our ability to apply the concepts of belief, desire, and so forth.

This general characterization leaves unanswered questions about how the conceptual framework of propositional attitude psychology is applied in practice. This brings us to a third way of thinking about commonsense psychology. This is where we find the much-discussed distinction between theory theorists and simulation theorists. A number of influential philosophers and psychologists accept the view that social understanding and social coordination rest on an implicitly known, and essentially theory-like, body of generalizations connecting propositional attitude states with overt behavior and with each other.¹ Paul Churchland is of course one of these, as are David Lewis, Frank Jackson, and Jerry Fodor. On this view (the so-called theory theory), social understanding involves subsuming observed behavior and what is known of a person’s mental states under these generalizations in order to understand why they are behaving in a certain way and how they will behave in the future.

The theory theory has been challenged within both philosophy and psychology by the simulationist approach to commonsense psychology.² Simulationists hold that we explain and predict other agents by projecting ourselves into their situation and then using our own mind as a model of theirs. Suppose that we have a reasonable sense of the beliefs and desires that it would be appropriate to attribute to someone else in a particular situation, so that we understand both how she views the situation and what she wants to achieve in it. And suppose that we want to find out how she will behave. Instead of using generalizations about how mental states typically feed into behavior to predict how that person will behave, the simulationist thinks that we use our own decision-making processes to run a simulation of what would happen if we ourselves had those beliefs and desires. We do this by running our decision-making processes off-line, so that instead of generating an action directly they generate a description of an action or an intention to act in a certain way. We then use this description to predict the behavior of the person in question.

Table 10.1

1	The complex of skills and abilities that underlie our capacities for social understanding and social coordination.
2	A particular conceptual framework for explaining social understanding and social coordination in which the propositional attitudes are central.
3	A particular account of how the conceptual framework in (2) is applied in the service of explanation and/or prediction.

We can, therefore, distinguish three ways of construing commonsense psychology, as in table 10.1. The basic issue for this essay is the relation between the first construal of commonsense psychology and the second. To mark the distinction between the first and second construals, I will not treat the expressions “commonsense psychology” and “folk psychology” as synonyms. Instead, I will reserve “folk psychology” for the second construal. Our question, then, is: What exactly is the domain of folk psychology? To what extent does social understanding and social coordination depend on the conceptual framework of the propositional attitudes?

Here are two conceptions of the domain of folk psychology—or, more accurately, the two ends of a spectrum of conceptions of the domain of folk psychology. At one end lies the narrow construal, according to which folk psychology is engaged only on those occasions when we explicitly and consciously deploy propositional attitude concepts in the services of explanation and/or prediction. At the other end of the spectrum lies the broad construal, which makes all social understanding and social coordination depend on attributing mental states and deploying those attributed states to explain and predict behavior.

The dominant conception of the domain of folk psychology among contemporary philosophers of mind is broad rather than narrow. Philosophers of mind tend to operate with a clear-cut distinction between understanding behavior in intentional terms, as rationalized by propositional attitudes, on the one hand, and understanding it as nonintentional, on the other. The standard examples in philosophy of mind textbooks of behaviors that are not to be understood in intentional terms are behaviors that are either reflexive or are not properly attributable to the agent. So one might distinguish, for example, between an arm-raising that is intentional, comprehensible as issuing from a particular nexus of beliefs and desires, and one that is the result of a reflex response, or of someone else lifting my arm for me.

The classical statement of this way of thinking about action is at the beginning of Donald Davidson’s paper “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”:

Whenever someone does something for a reason, therefore, he can be characterized as (a) having some sort of pro attitude toward actions of a certain kind, and (b) believing (or knowing, perceiving, noticing, remembering) that his action is of that kind. Under (a) are to be included desires, wantings, urges, promptings, and a great variety of moral views, aesthetic principles, economic prejudices, social conventions, and public and private goals and values in so far as these can be interpreted as attitudes of an agent directed towards actions of a certain kind. (Davidson 1963, 685–686)

The way in which this view is developed typically leaves no room for “thinking behavior” that is not (causally) generated by beliefs and desires. To the extent, then, that the activities of social coordination are thinking activities, the broad construal of folk psychology follows immediately. And indeed Davidson immediately follows the quoted passage by saying, “Giving the reason why an agent did something is often a matter of naming the pro attitude (a) or the related belief (b) or both” (Davidson 1963, 686).

This discussion suggests two independent but related strategies, therefore, for putting pressure on the broad construal of folk psychology. The first strategy is to challenge the basic claim that only the propositional attitudes can serve as the springs of (intentional) action. The second strategy is to challenge the claim that social understanding and social coordination can be achieved only through the conceptual framework of the propositional attitudes. The following explores these two strategies in turn.

2 Neural Representation, Microfeatures, and the Propositional Attitudes

Critical explorations of the role of propositional attitudes in psychological explanation would do well to begin with the writings of Paul and Patricia Churchland. I want to begin, not with Paul Churchland’s “official” arguments for eliminative materialism (which seem typically to be pitched at level of the third construal of commonsense psychology, since they aim to show that folk psychology is a poor and nonpredictive theory), but rather with an illuminating passage in “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes” (Churchland 1981). Churchland is (implicitly) criticizing the idea that we can think of what a person believes in terms of the sentences to which that person would assent, so that we can use those sentences to characterize the content of what he believes, where this is, of course, simply a special case of the general principle that propositional attitudes have contents that can be specified by means of “that” clauses, where the complement of a “that” clause is a declarative sentence. He writes:

A declarative sentence to which a speaker would give confident assent is merely a one-dimensional projection—through the compound lens of Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas onto the idiosyncratic surface of the speaker’s language—of a four- or five-dimensional “solid” that is an element in his true kinematical state. … Being projections of that inner reality, such sentences do carry significant information regarding it and are thus fit to function as elements in a communication system. On the other hand, being sub-dimensional projections, they reflect but a narrow part of the reality projected. They are therefore unfit to represent the deeper reality in all its kinematically, dynamically, and even normatively relevant respects. (Churchland 1981, 129)

Churchland’s point here is not that propositional attitude psychology is an impoverished theory, nor that it cannot be reduced to neuroscience, nor that it is limited in its explanatory scope (which are his official arguments against propositional attitude psychology). Rather, he objects that commonsense psychology rests on an untenable model of representation.

Cognition is, Churchland thinks, a form of information processing, and the representations over which that processing takes place are distributed in something like the way that representations are distributed over a large number of units and weights in an artificial neural network:

The basic idea is that the brain represents the world by means of very high-dimensional activation vectors, that is, by a pattern of activation levels across a very large population of neurons. And the brain performs computations on those representations by effecting various complex vector-to-vector transformations from one neural population to another. This happens when an activation vector from one neural population is projected through a large matrix of synaptic connections to produce a new activation vector across a second population of nonlinear neurons. Mathematically, the process is a process of multiplying a vector by a matrix and pushing the result through a nonlinear filter. (Churchland and Churchland 1998, 41)

Churchland is betting, in effect, that a complete account of neural computation will be defined over complex patterns of activation across large populations of neurons. This means that neural representations will have a huge number of degrees of freedom. There will be as many dimensions of variation in a neural representation as there are neurons whose activation values can vary independently. In mathematical terms, we need to consider neural representations as n-place vectors, where n is the number of neurons.

Philosophical discussion of the ramifications of the distributed nature of neural representations has tended to focus on the issue of whether mental representations are structured (see, e.g., the papers collected in Macdonald and Macdonald 1995). But there is a much more direct line of argument from the distributed nature of neural representation to eliminativism. Here is the possibility Churchland envisages:

Suppose that research into the structure and activity of the brain, both fine-grained and global, finally does yield a new kinematics and correlative dynamics for what is now thought of as cognitive activity. The theory is uniform for all terrestrial brains, not just human brains, and it makes suitable conceptual contact with both evolutionary biology and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. It ascribes to us, at any given time, a set or configuration of complex states, which are specified within the theory as figurative “solids” within a four- or five-dimensional phase-space. The laws of the theory govern the interaction, motion and transformation of these “solid” states within that space, and also their relations to whatever sensory and motor transducers the system possesses. (Churchland 1981, 129)

Churchland’s basic claim is that this conceptual framework of solids within multidimensional phase space is incommensurable with the familiar framework of the propositional attitudes.

To see his point, suppose that we identify a locus of representational content at a very low level in neural network models. That is to say, suppose that we identify particular units, or small groups of units, as carrying out particular representational functions and tasks. This would be to make something like the “natural assumption” that Churchland sketches out in the following passage:

If we are to assign specific semantic or representational contents to collective units of this kind, a natural first assumption is that any unit must in some way inherit its overall content from the individual and more basic representational significance of each of its many constituting elements, namely, the activation level of each of its many neurons. After all, it is these individual neurons that are the recipients of information from the environment: either directly, through their interaction with ambient light, heat and various mechanical and chemical impingements; or indirectly, through their many synaptic connections with neurons earlier in the processing hierarchy. (Churchland and Churchland 1998, 83)

We can think of these units or groups of units as the representational primitives of the network—the place where we need to start if we are to build up to an account of the representational character of the network as a whole.³ It is natural to think that these representational primitives will be representing what are often called microfeatures of the environment. That is to say, they code features that are much more fine-grained than those encoded within the vocabulary that we employ to specify the content of propositional attitudes. These microfeatures are, to use the familiar jargon, subsymbolic.

This opens up a path for pursuing the first of the two strategies identified earlier. One way of challenging the basic claim that only the propositional attitudes can serve as the springs of (intentional) action would be to show that there are cases where the representations serving as the “springs of action” represent features of the environment that cannot be assimilated to those features represented in propositional attitude psychology. The remainder of this section points toward some relevant experimental findings and research programs. I will focus on five areas.

Two Visual Systems

Psychologists and neuroscientists agree that there are (at least) two different ways of thinking about how our perceptions of the environment feed into action. There is considerable controversy about precisely how we are to understand both the function and the neuroanatomy of these two pathways, but a definite consensus that some sort of distinction needs to be made between “vision for action” and “vision for identification.”⁴ Neuropsychological dissociations are an important source of evidence. Researchers have reported a double dissociation between the capacity to act on objects and the capacity to name them. Patients with optic ataxia are able to identify objects but are severely impaired in tasks that involve reaching objects or working out their orientation, while patients with various types of agnosia have the reverse impairment: they can act on objects but are often completely unable to identify them.

Relatedly, neuroanatomical evidence points toward a distinction between two visual pathways leading from the visual cortex—the dorsal pathway projecting to the posterior parietal cortex and the ventral pathway leading to the inferotemporal cortex. The functional distinction between the dorsal and ventral pathways was originally construed in terms of the distinction between “where” and “what,” with the dorsal stream primarily involved in computing distance and location and the ventral stream specialized for the type of color and form processing that feeds into object identification (Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982). Subsequent investigation suggested that the dorsal pathway is also involved in computing the “how” of action (Milner and Goodale 1995).

The “two visual systems” hypothesis offers an interesting example of how behavior can be explained in terms of the representation of microfeatures. One of the striking pieces of experimental data that has emerged from investigation of the differences between vision for action and vision for identification is that the two systems can come into conflict. We see this, for example, in work that has been done on visual illusions, where the illusions have a much greater effect on perceptual reports than on action performance. The Ebbinghaus size contrast illusion is a case in point.

Figure 10.1 The Ebbinghaus size contrast illusion.

As the diagram in figure 10.1 indicates, a circle surrounded by other circles will appear smaller if the surrounding circles are enlarged. When (normal) subjects are presented with two circles of the same size, one of which is surrounded by small circles and the other surrounded by large circles, they will reliably judge the one surrounded by small circles to be larger than the one surrounded by large circles. Yet the illusion does not carry over to action. When subjects are asked to reach out as if they were going to pick up the circles, their grip aperture is constant for the two circles (Aglioti, DeSouza, and Goodale 1995). Similar effects have been observed with Müller-Lyer and Ponzo illusions. The dissociations between behavior and report in these visual illusions suggest that we respond to properties such as graspability that are a function of the size of the object and yet are clearly distinct from the object’s perceived size. These are microfeatures that it is difficult to assimilate within the conceptual framework of commonsense psychology. It is a key tenet of commonsense psychology, for example, that we act on objects in virtue of how they appear to us, so that it is because an object looks a certain size to us that we make the appropriate hand movements for grasping it.⁵ Yet the experimental evidence suggests that things cannot be as simple as this. If subjects acted on how objects appear to them (more strictly: on how they report objects appearing to them) then they would act differently in the two cases. Instead, it looks as if subjects are sensitive to properties of objects that are correlated with actual size but are independent of perceived size in a way that operates outside the realm of conscious awareness.

The Dimensional-Action System

The neuroscience of vision points to links between perception and action that are based on the representation of microfeatures and that shortcut anything that might plausibly be described as “central processing.” Intriguing recent results in perceptual psychology provide further examples of such microfeature-based perception–action links.

Traditional information processing accounts make a sharp distinction between perceptual processing and post-perceptual processing and see all motor processing and response selection as falling clearly on the post-perceptual side of the divide. Whereas perceptual processing is widely held to involve the separate processing of microfeatures (with shape, form, color, and so on all being processed in neurally distinct areas), post-perceptual processing is thought to take place downstream of the “binding” of those microfeatures to form representations of objects. Yet some intriguing recent experimental evidence has led theorists to postulate highly specialized perception–action links that are explicitly tied to the perception of microfeatures (Cohen and Feintuch 2002). As with the dissociations discussed in the previous section, the experimental evidence seems to show that we can act on isolated features of objects in complete independence of other features of those objects. Researchers have known for a long time that there are regions of the mammalian visual system perceptually sensitive simply to color or to shape, but it has always been thought that we can only act on the world by somehow combining these separately processed features into representations of objects—into representations that operate at the symbolic level of commonsense psychology, rather than at the subsymbolic level of microfeatures.⁶ This assumption appears to be called into question by research into the dimensional action system.

One representative set of experiments was carried out with the so-called flanker task interference paradigm. Subjects are instructed to make differential responses to types of object presented at the center of a display while ignoring peripheral distractors flanking the target object. In the experiments reported by Cohen and Shoup (1997) the targets and responses were as follows. The first response was to be made to the appearance either of a red vertical line or of a blue right diagonal line, while the second was to be made to the appearance either of a green vertical line or of a blue left diagonal line. So, if the target object had a vertical orientation the appropriate response could only be made on the basis of color, while if it was blue the appropriate response could only be made on the basis of orientation. The distractors were lines of varying colors and orientations.

Figure 10.2 The flanker task interference paradigm. Short dashes = blue; solid lines = red; long dashes = yellow.

Strikingly, interference effects were observed only when the relevant responses for target and distractor were on the same dimension. So, for example, there would be an interference effect if a red vertical line were flanked by differently colored vertical lines, but not if it were flanked by red diagonal lines. Similarly, there would be interference if a blue left diagonal were flanked by other diagonal lines, but not if it were flanked by differently colored vertical lines. The conclusion drawn is that there are distinct processing channels linking the detection of individual microfeatures (a particular orientation, or a particular color) with particular responses. These processing channels operate without any “binding” of the relevant microfeatures.

In this case it is not the microfeatures themselves that is surprising, or the fact that we are able to act on perceived color and perceived shape. What is surprising, and difficult to assimilate within the conceptual framework of propositional attitude psychology, is that there seem to be perception–action links triggered by representations of microfeatures that are independent of representations of objects, or indeed of representations of other microfeatures.

The Ecological Approach to Perception and Action

J. J. Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and action (Gibson 1966, 1979) is best known for the claim that the line between perception and cognition is far less sharply defined than it is standardly taken to be. We have ways of perceiving the world that have direct implications for action. Frequently what we perceive are the possibilities that the environment “affords” for action, so that we can act on how we perceive the world to be, without having to form or exploit beliefs and other propositional attitudes. An affordance is a resource or support that the environment offers a particular creature (the possibility of shelter, for example, or the availability of food). These affordances are objective features of the environment that are supposed to be directly perceived in the patterns of light in what Gibson terms the optic flow. Gibsonian psychologists describe organisms as “resonating to” or “directly sensitive to” the affordances in the distal environment.

To get from this basic claim about affordances to a direct challenge to the hegemony of the propositional attitudes, we need to consider the general account of the workings of perception that underlies Gibsonian claims about the direct perception of affordances. One of Gibson’s major contributions to the study of vision is the proposal to reconstrue the visual field as a constantly moving and constantly reconfiguring set of illuminated surfaces and concomitant solid visual angles, rather than in terms of empty space containing bounded objects (figures on a ground). We do not, he thinks, ever see empty space surrounding discrete objects. What we see is a complex and gapless structure of surfaces. Some of these surfaces are surfaces of objects, while others are not (the various surfaces in the sky, for example). To each surface there corresponds a solid visual angle with its base at the face of the visible surface and its apex at the point of observation. We can, for simplicity’s sake, think of these solid angles as cones, although of course their shape will vary with the visible outline of the surface in question. As the observer moves through the environment, the solid angles change, as one surface moves in front of another (relative to the perceiver) or as the observer approaches or moves away from the surface. This is the optic flow.

The ecological analysis of visual perception gives us an example of how representation in terms of microfeatures might work in practice. There is a fundamental mismatch between a characterization of the distal environment in terms of objects and properties (of the sort that might feature in specifications of propositional attitudes) and a characterization of the distal environment in terms of optic flow. Gibson’s perspective on perception rests on the perception of microfeatures that resist assimilation to macrofeatures. These microfeatures include, for example:

texture gradients (the decrease with distance of discriminable fineness of detail)
the focus of expansion (the aiming point of locomotion that is also the vanishing point of optic flow)
visual solid angles

Gibsonian accounts of perception attempt to show how behavior is controlled by perceptual sensitivity toward these microfeatures, which are properties of the global optic array, rather than of individual objects. Within its sphere of applicability, Gibsonian psychology certainly seems to provide an account of the “springs of action” that supports the narrow view of folk psychology by offering explanations of behavior that resist assimilation to the concepts and categories of propositional attitude psychology.

Dynamic Touch and Rotational Inertia

Perceptual psychologists working within a broadly Gibsonian tradition on the phenomenon of dynamic touch have provided good examples of behaviors that can be shown to involve responding to microfeatures of the environment that resist assimilation within the conceptual framework of commonsense psychology. It is well known that people can make accurate assessments of the spatial properties of objects by manipulating those objects. So, for example, people are remarkably accurate at detecting the length of objects by grasping those objects at a single point and moving the object around (without running their fingers over the whole object). One can get a feel for the phenomenon by picking up a pen, closing one’s eyes, and rotating the pen with one’s fingers—or taking a slightly larger object, such as a ruler, and rotating it around one’s wrist.

Dynamic touch is a puzzling phenomenon, because the haptic system has no access to any direct perceptual information about the length of the pen or the ruler. The physiological underpinnings of dynamic touch are mechanoreceptors that provide information about the stretching, contraction, and twisting of muscles and tendons. Very little work is done by receptors on the surface of the skin, even at the point where contact is made with the object. Clearly there is some mechanical property (or properties) of objects that is reliably correlated with changes in the mechanoreceptors. The obvious candidates are weight and rotational force (torque), but neither of these can do the job. Perceived length is independent of both weight and torque, as can easily be appreciated by manipulating a pen and a pencil of the same length but different weights, and by manipulating both of them with different twisting forces. The key mechanical property must remain invariant through changes in torque and weight.

It turns out (Turvey 1996; Carello and Turvey 2004) that the relevant physical invariant is what is known as the inertia ellipsoid. The inertia ellipsoid is, roughly speaking, a way of characterizing an object that measures the object’s resistance to being rotated. It is derived from the object’s principal moments of inertia, where a principal moment of inertia quantifies an object’s resistance to rotation around one of its axes of symmetry. An object’s moment of inertia will vary according to the distribution of its mass, with higher concentrations of mass away from the object’s center of gravity yielding a higher moment of inertia. So, for example, suppose we hang a weight from a metal rod. The further away the attachment point is from the rod’s center of gravity, the greater the moment of inertia—and the more force will be required to rotate it. Once we know an object’s axes of symmetry and its principal moments of inertia, we can characterize its overall resistance to being rotated in terms of an ellipse whose center is the intersection of the three axes of symmetry and whose surface is obtained from the reciprocal of the square roots of the principal moments of inertia.

It is a robust finding that an object’s rotational inertia, as given by the inertia ellipsoid, is the invariant underlying perceived length. Nor is length the only quantity that can be detected by perceived touch. People can make reliable estimates of an object’s weight from picking up the object. Amazeen and Turvey (1996) have established that perceived heaviness is also a function of rotational inertia, both when perceived heaviness accurately tracks and object’s weight and when (as in the size-weight illusion) it leads to misleading estimates.⁷

This sensitivity to rotational inertia is a further example of the type of microfeatural sensitivity suggested by the Gibsonian approach to perception and action. We act on the world in virtue of our perceptual attunement to properties of objects and of the optic array that are fundamentally alien to the conceptual framework of commonsense psychology. The inertial ellipsoid is a mathematical object that stands to our commonsense thinking about objects and their dynamic and kinematic properties in something like the relation that the rules of transformational grammar stand to our everyday use of English. Subtle experimental work is required to identify rotational inertia as the relevant parameter in our haptic sensitivity to the spatial properties of objects.

The Influence of Situation in Social Psychology

The “springs of action” have been investigated by social psychologists as well as cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. The research has been two pronged, investigating both why people behave the way they do and how we interpret that behavior. Two features of this research are particularly salient in the present context. The first has to do with the genesis of behavior. An overwhelming body of evidence highlights the importance of the situation in determining behavior. Situational changes that might seem at first sight to be insignificant have been shown to have a serious impact on behavior. The second feature is that subjects systematically underestimate the significance of the situation, making what has come to be known as the “fundamental attribution error” of overestimating the significance of character traits and personality in explaining and predicting behavior.

In one famous set of experiments (Darley and Batson 1973), groups of students at a Princeton theological seminary were sent from one building to another as part of an experiment putatively on religious education. Their task in the second building was to give a talk, with one group giving a talk on the Good Samaritan and another on jobs in seminaries. On the way over they passed an experimenter slumped in a doorway and moaning. Overall, 40 percent of the subjects stopped to offer some sort of assistance. What is striking, though, is the drastic difference between subjects who were told that they were running late (only 10 percent offered assistance) and subjects who were told that they had time to spare (where the figure was 63 percent). This discrepancy did not seem to be correlated with any other differences between the participants.

Other experiments have found what seem prima facie to be even more trivial situational factors having a large impact on behavior. Mathews and Canon (1975) explored the influence of ambient noise, showing that subjects are five times less likely to help an apparently injured man who has dropped some books when there is a power mower running nearby than when ambient noise is at normal levels. Isen and Levin (1972) found an another striking effect, discovering that people who had just found a dime were twenty-two times more likely to help a woman who had dropped some papers than people who had not found a dime. Experiments such as these have been carried out many times, and the powerful influence of situational factors has proved to be robust.

This experimental tradition poses numerous interesting philosophical problems, particularly with respect to the role that character plays in ethical theory (Doris 2002). For present purposes, what is interesting is the perspective that situationist social psychology casts on the genesis of behavior. It looks very much as if features of situations that do not in any sense count as commonsense psychological reasons for action can play a large role in determining how people behave. At least in the experimental paradigms it seems fundamentally inappropriate to seek explanations in terms of propositional attitudes that act as reasons for action. An important element in the springs of action seems to be relatively low-level features of the situation—what might, in fact, be termed situational microfeatures.

4 Social Understanding and Social Coordination without Propositional Attitudes?

The computational considerations just canvassed suggest that many aspects of social coordination and interaction might be accomplished by forms of social understanding that do not make use of the attribution of folk-psychological states—forms of social understanding that allow coordinated activity and social interaction without any metarepresentational interpretation of the other participants in the social transaction. But do we have any understanding of how this might take place? This section explores some areas of social coordination and interaction that it does seem to be possible to understand in non-folk-psychological terms.

Perception of emotion is a good place to start. The form and level of one’s participation in social interactions is frequently a function of one’s assessment of the emotional states of other participants. This is most clear when the interaction is a competitive one—a zero-sum game, for example (taking a game in the technical sense as a strategic interaction among players). It may be to my advantage, for example, to press ahead to take advantage of another participant’s dilatoriness—or to retreat and retrench when I notice the aggressiveness of one of the competitors. But something similar holds for cooperative interactions. My own commitment to a shared project is likely to be at least partly determined by my sense of the extent to which my partners value the shared goal. And the exact form of my participation in the shared activity will be tailored to how I read my partners’ varying and changing levels of enthusiasm. I need to be sensitive to whether and when my partners are bullish, bearish, frustrated, or enthusiastic. Without this we will not be able to work together effectively.

The various types of emotion perception implicated in social interactions have three important features. First, they are highly diachronic. Social interactions are extended processes in which the relevant affective valences are constantly changing. Successfully negotiating such interactions is not in any sense a matter of identifying relatively long-term dispositional states or character traits (the raw materials of propositional attitude psychology). The affective indices are in constant flux. Think, for example, of the emotional dynamics of a team game or a committee meeting. This makes folk-psychological attributions, whether derived through a process of simulation or through the application of a theory, particularly inapposite. The processes by which folk-psychological attributions are reached are too unwieldy to permit of rapid real-time monitoring and revision. Second, in many social interactions the actual content of the relevant affective and emotional states will be apparent from the context. Participants need to be sensitive not to what is represented but rather to the fine details of the attitudes taken to what can be presumed to be shared representational contents. The third point is the least obvious, but perhaps the most important. What matters in social interactions and coordinated activities is that the participants succeed in acting with due sensitivity to the affective and emotional states of other participants. There is no need for those affective and emotional states to be explicitly identified and attributed. These forms of social understanding do not require forming judgments about the emotional states of the other participants.

This last point needs to be emphasized. The simple claim that emotion perception is frequently subliminal and a matter of pattern recognition should be uncontroversial. It is clear that in many cases we directly perceive emotional states. This in itself does not count against the broad conception of folk psychology. Directly perceived emotional states can easily serve as inputs to the processes of simulation, or as the raw material to which the generalizations of theoretical folk psychology are applied. But my claim, rather, is that that we frequently act on the perception of emotional and affective states without explicitly identifying them. We regulate our own behavior as a function of our sensitivity to the emotional and affective states of those with whom we are interacting without at any point making explicit the identifications on which our behavior rests. Sensitivity to emotional states feeds directly into action without any attribution of emotional states. This is incompatible with the broad construal of the domain of folk psychology, for the essence of the broad construal is that social understanding requires categorizing the behavior of others in the concepts of folk psychology, in order to bring to bear either the mechanisms of simulation or the appropriate tacitly known theory.

Still, we have been considering types of social understanding that are all highly circumscribed. The issue is often not what other participants will do but how they will do it, since we may well know that other participants are constrained to act within narrowly prescribed limits. These are often not situations in which issues of explanation and prediction arise in the sort of ways for which one might think that folk-psychological forms of social understanding would be required. Moreover, the fact that many social interactions involve an element of “affect attunement” that is achieved without recourse to folk psychology hardly shows that no element of those interactions is controlled folk psychologically. Even someone sympathetic to the general line that many basic forms of social interaction fall outside the domain of folk psychology might pose the question of whether the type of deflationary account I have been offering really counts against the broad construal of the domain of folk psychology.

Let me start with the question of what happens in interpersonal situations that are not circumscribed by shared goals or a relatively small number of clearly defined possible outcomes. Those favoring the broad construal of the domain of folk psychology will suggest that, as soon as we move beyond highly circumscribed collaborative enterprises such as games or fixing an airplane, we enter a realm of interpersonal interaction that can be successfully negotiated only by fitting the behavior of other participants into the conceptual framework of folk psychology. In fact, however, it is far from clear that this is the case. The well-studied game-theoretical problem of how to behave in an indefinitely iterated prisoner’s dilemma is a case in point, and one that has plausibly been argued to have wide application.

A prisoner’s dilemma is any strategic interaction in which the dominant strategy for each player leads inevitably to a suboptimal outcome for all players. A dominant strategy for a given player is one that is more advantageous to that player than any other possible strategy, whatever the other players might do (it dominates any possible counterstrategy).⁸ Although some authors have tried to argue otherwise, it is hard to see how it can be anything but rational to follow the dominant strategy in a one-off strategic interaction that obeys the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma. But what about social interactions that have the same logic but are repeated?

Repeated interactions create the possibility of one player rewarding another for not having implicated him (or whatever the relevant noncooperative activity might be). Surely this will change what it is rational to do. In fact, however, it only does so in a limited range of situations. The well-known backward induction argument suggests that the rational course of action where one is certain in advance how many strategic interactions there will be will be to defect on the first play.⁹ It is only when it is not known how many plays there will be that scope opens up for cooperative play. And this is where we rejoin the question of the domain of folk psychology. Suppose that we find ourselves, as we frequently do, in social situations that have the structure of an indefinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma. The issue may simply be how hard one pulls one’s weight in the department.¹⁰ It will be to my advantage to skip the examination meeting, provided that my colleagues do my work for me. But how will that affect their behavior when we next need to wine and dine a visiting speaker? Will I find myself dining tête-à-tête and footing the bill on my own?

It is natural to have two thoughts at this point. The first is that before I decide whether or not to skip the examination meeting I had better think about the potential consequences of future interactions. The second is that I can only do this by making a complex set of predictions about what my colleagues will do, based on my assessment of their preference orderings and their beliefs about the probability of each of us defecting as opposed to cooperating, and then factor in my own beliefs about how what will happen in future depends on whether or not I come to the examination meeting—and so on. This, of course, would be an application of the general explanatory framework of folk psychology (again on the simplification that utilities and probability assignments are regimentations of desires and beliefs). The broad construal of the domain of folk psychology is committed to saying that this is the way decision making proceeds in strategic situations of these kinds—simply because these strategic situations depend on social understanding and, according to the broad construal, all social understanding more complex than simple sensitivity to the emotional and effective states of others has to be a matter of folk-psychological explanation and prediction.

Even if we can make sense of the idea that strategic interaction involves these kinds of complicated multilayered predictions involving expectations about the expectations that other people are expected to have, one might wonder whether there is a simpler way of determining how to behave in that sort of situation. Game theorists have directed considerable attention to the idea that social interactions with the form of indefinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemmas might best be modeled through simple heuristic strategies in which, to put it crudely, one bases one’s plays not on how one expects others to behave but rather on how they have behaved in the past. The best known of these heuristic strategies is tit-for-tat, which is composed of the following two rules:

Always cooperate in the first round.
In any subsequent round do what your opponent did in the previous round.

The tit-for-tat strategy is very simple to apply, and does not involve any complicated folk-psychological attributions or explanations/predictions. All that is required is an understanding of the two basic options available to each player, and an ability to recognize which one of those strategies has been applied by other players in a given case. The very simplicity of the strategy explains why theorists have found it such a potentially powerful explanatory tool in explaining such phenomena as the evolutionary emergence of altruistic behavior (see Axelrod 1984 for an accessible introduction and Maynard Smith 1982 and Skyrms 1996 for more detailed discussion).

Of course, I am not suggesting that we should model extended social interactions in terms of tit-for-tat. Tit-for-tat has only a limited applicability to practical decision making, simply because, in a situation in which two players are each playing tit-for-tat, a single defection will rule out the possibility of any further cooperation. This is clearly undesirable, particularly given the possibility in any moderately complicated social interaction that what appears to be a defection is not really a defection (suppose, for example, that my colleague misses the examination meeting because his car broke down). So any plausible version of the tit-for-tat strategy will have to build in some mechanisms for following apparent defections with cooperation, in order both to identify where external factors have influenced the situation and to allow players the possibility of building bridges back toward cooperation even after genuine defection.

The important point is that strategies such as tit-for-tat do not involve any exploitation of the categories of folk psychology. They can be followed without the attribution of folk-psychological states to those with whom one is interacting. In fact, a stronger conclusion is warranted. Such strategies do not involve any processes of explanation or prediction at all. It is clear that no prediction is required, given that what I do in any particular situation is determined by how I interpret what the other player did in the previous encounter. It may seem that this introduction of the notion of interpretation allows folk-psychological notions of explanation to get a grip, but this would be a mistake. To apply tit-for-tat, or some descendant thereof, all I need to do is to work out whether the behavior of another player should best be characterized as a cooperation or a defection—and indeed to work out which previous behaviors are relevant to the ongoing situation. This will often be achievable without going into the details of why that player behaved as he or she did. Of course, sometimes it will be necessary to explore issues of motivation before an action can be characterized as a defection or a cooperation—and sometimes it will be very important to do this, given that identifying an action as a defection is no light matter. But much of the time, one might well get by perfectly well without going deeply at all into why another agent behaved as he or she did.

From a game-theoretical point of view, therefore, there is nothing mysterious about the idea that one can act effectively in complicated social interactions without bringing to bear the explanatory and predictive apparatus of folk psychology. Within game theory, construed as a normative theory of rational behavior, it can make perfectly good sense to adopt strategies that are, in an important sense, folk-psychologically “blind.” The real question is the extent to which the normative theory applies descriptively. How frequently do we employ heuristically simple strategies in social interactions, taking our cue from very simple understandings of what other people have done—rather than from complicated attributions of folk-psychological states? The general considerations canvassed in the previous section seem to suggest that it’s likely that we do. At the very least, this brief trip into game theory gives us a way of interpreting in non-folk-psychological terms a large class of social interactions that are not circumscribed by shared goals or a relatively small number of clearly defined possible outcomes.

To take stock, I have made a case for two claims:

(I) The form and level of one’s participation in many social interactions is often a function of one’s assessment of the emotional states of other participants in a way that feeds directly into action without any attribution of emotional states. This frequently occurs in social interactions circumscribed by shared goals or a relatively small number of clearly defined possible outcomes. Many such activities are controlled without anything that looks like a folk-psychological attribution at all.

(II) We can participate effectively in social interactions that are not so circumscribed without making use of the predictive and explanatory apparatus of folk psychology.

But what about social interactions that do not fall under either (I) or (II)? Ex hypothesi these social interactions require explaining and predicting the behavior of others. Have we now arrived within the domain of folk psychology? As matters are generally understood by philosophers we must have arrived there, simply because it is pleonastic that explanation and prediction proceed in folk-psychological terms.

There is an important class of social interactions, however, in which it is true both that they involve predicting and/or explaining the actions of other participants and that the relevant predictions and explanations do not seem to proceed via the attribution of folk-psychological states. These are situations involving stereotypical routines and behavior patterns. Let us start with two very simple examples. Whenever one goes into a shop or a restaurant, for example, it is obvious that the situation can only be effectively negotiated if one has certain beliefs about why people are doing what they are doing and about how they will continue to behave. I can’t effectively order dinner without interpreting the behavior of the person who approaches me with a pad in his hand, or buy some meat for dinner without interpreting the person standing behind the counter. But do I need to attribute folk-psychological states to these people in order to interpret them? Must these beliefs about what people are doing involve second-order beliefs about their psychological states? Surely not. Ordering meals in restaurants and buying meat in butcher’s shops are such routine situations that all one needs to do is to identify the person approaching the table as a waiter, or the person standing behind the counter as a butcher. That is all the interpretation required. These are both cases in which simply identifying social roles provides enough leverage on the situation to allow one to predict the behavior of other participants and to understand why they are behaving as they are. There is no need to make any folk-psychological attributions. There is no need to think about what the waiter might desire or the butcher believe—any more than they need to think about what I believe or desire. The point is not that the routine is cognitively transparent—that it is easy to work out what the other participants are thinking. Rather, it is that we don’t need to have any thoughts about what is going on in their minds at all. The social interaction takes care of itself once the social roles have been identified (and I’ve decided what I want to eat).

The basic lesson to be drawn from highly stereotypical social interactions such as these is that explanation and prediction need not require the attribution of folk-psychological states. It would be too strong even to say that identifying someone as a waiter is identifying him as someone with a typical set of desires and beliefs about how best to achieve those desires. Identifying someone as a waiter is not a matter of understanding him in folk-psychological terms at all. It is understanding him as a person who typically behaves in certain ways within a network of social practices that typically unfold in certain ways. The point is that this is a case in which our understanding of individuals and their behavior is parasitic on our understanding of the social practices in which their behavior takes place. Nor, of course, is this understanding of social practices a matter of mastery of a primitive theory. We learn through experience that certain social cues are correlated with certain behavior patterns on the part of others and certain expectations from those same individuals as to how we ourselves should behave. Sometimes we have these correlations pointed out to us explicitly—more often we pick them up by monitoring the reactions of others when we fail to conform properly to the “script” for the situation.

This dimension of social understanding involves a type of reasoning clearly different from how folk-psychological reasoning is understood according to either the theory theory or the simulation theory. For proponents of the theory theory, social understanding involves what is essentially subsumptive reasoning. Folk psychology is a matter of subsuming patterns of behavior under generalizations and deducing the relevant consequences. For proponents of the simulation theory, in contrast, folk-psychological reasoning is a matter of running one’s own decision-making processes off-line and feeding appropriate propositional attitude inputs into them for the person one is interpreting. For social understanding that involves exploiting one’s knowledge of social routines and stereotypes, however, the principal modes of reasoning are similarity based and analogy based. Social understanding becomes a matter of matching perceived social situations to prototypical social situations and working by analogy from partial similarities. We do not store general principles about how social situations work, but rather have a general template for particular types of situation with parameters than can be adjusted to allow for differences in detail across the members of a particular social category. Researchers in artificial intelligence have called these social templates frames.¹¹

The frame-based approach has obvious applicability to scenarios such as that in the restaurant. But is it natural to ask how much of our everyday social interaction can be modeled in this way? How much of our social understanding is a function of our mastery of social roles, frames and routines? The tentative hypothesis with which I would like to end is: rather more than we think. It would be odd, given the element of repetition in all our social lives, if we had to start ab initio each time we participate in a repeated social interaction—if we operated with general principles that need to be tailored to meet the demands of specific situations, with all the difficulties of relevance that such tailoring involves.

But what happens when we find ourselves in unfamiliar social situations? What happens when none of our frames can be brought to bear; when we have no obvious contextual cues that will allow us to get a handle on the likely behavior patterns of the other people with whom we are engaging; when the interaction is open ended and the potential payoffs and trade-offs too unclear for it to count as an instance of a type of prisoner’s dilemma strategic interaction? Again, let me offer a tentative suggestion. Perhaps it is here that we arrive at the proper domain of folk psychology. The social world is often transparent, easily comprehensible in terms of frames, social roles, and social routines. Other agents can be predicted in terms of their participation in those routines and roles, while their emotional and affective states can simply be read off from their facial expression and the “tenor” of their behavior. When the social world is in this way “ready-to-hand,” to borrow from Heidegger’s characterization of the practical understanding of tools, we have no use for the reflective apparatus of folk psychology. We do not need to bring to bear the machinery of folk-psychological attribution to navigate through the social world, to accommodate ourselves to the needs and requirements of other people and to succeed in coordinated activities. But sometimes the social world becomes opaque. We find ourselves in social interactions where it is not obvious what is going on; which cannot easily be assimilated to prototypical social situations; where we cannot work out what to do simply on the basis of previous interactions with the other participants. And it is at this point that we find ourselves in need of the type of metarepresentational thinking characteristic of folk psychology—not as a mainstay of our social understanding, but rather as the last resort to which we turn when all the standard mechanisms of social understanding and interpersonal accommodation break down.

10 The Bodily Self, Commonsense Psychology, and the Springs of Action