Mitchell Herschbach: Research

Dissertation

Beyond Folk Psychology? Toward an Enriched Account of Social Understanding [Long Abstract]

The dominant account of human social understanding is that it involves interpreting other people’s mental states. This “folk psychological” account has recently come under attack by philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition. They recognize that we sometimes reflectively attribute mental states, but claim that the folk psychological picture does not accurately describe or explain unreflective aspects of human social understanding. I argue that even if we accept the phenomenologists’ descriptions of our personal-level experience, this still leaves a significant role for the folk psychological reasoning and mental state representations at the subpersonal level. This engagement with the phenomenologists points toward an enriched account of human social understanding, and issues for future philosophical and empirical research.

Committee: William Bechtel (chair), Paul Churchland, Rick Grush, Gedeon Deák, Rafael Núñez

Publications

False-Belief Understanding and the Phenomenological Critics of Folk Psychology [PDF]
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15 (2008), 33-56.

The dominant account of human social understanding is that we possess a "folk psychology," that we understand and can interact with other people because we appreciate their mental states. Recently, however, philosophers from the phenomenological tradition have called into question the scope of the folk psychological account and argued for the importance of "online," non-mentalistic forms of social understanding. In this paper I critically evaluate the arguments of these phenomenological critics, arguing that folk psychology plays a larger role in human social understanding than the critics suggest. First, I use standard false-belief tasks to spell out the commitments of the folk psychological picture. Next, I explicate the critics' account in terms of Michael Wheeler's distinction between online and offline intelligence. I then demonstrate the challenge that false-belief understanding—a paradigm case of mental state understanding—poses to the critics' online, non-mentalistic account. Recent research on false-belief understanding illustrates that mental state understanding comes in both online and offline forms. This challenges the critics' claim that our online social understanding does not require folk psychology.

Folk Psychological and Phenomenological Accounts of Social Perception [preprint PDF] [published version]
Philosophical Explorations, 11 (2008), 223-235.

Theory theory and simulation theory share the assumption that mental states are unobservable, and that mental state attribution requires an extra psychological step beyond perception. Phenomenologists deny this, contending that we can directly perceive people's mental states. Here I evaluate objections to theory theory and simulation theory as accounts of everyday social perception offered by Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher. I agree that their phenomenological claims have bite at the personal level, distinguishing direct social perception from conscious theorizing and simulation. Their appeals to phenomenology and other arguments do not, however, rule out theory theory or simulation theory as accounts of the subpersonal processes underlying social perception. While I here remain uncommitted about the plausibility of subpersonal theorizing and simulation, I argue that phenomenologists must do more in order to reject these accounts.

Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher respond to my article in "The (in)visibility of others: a reply to Herschbach."

The Concept of Simulation in Control-Theoretic Accounts of Motor Control and Action Perception. [PDF]
(2008) In V. Sloutsky, B. Love, and K. McRae (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 315-320). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Control theory is a popular theoretical framework for explaining cognitive domains such as motor control and "mindreading." Such accounts frequently characterize their "internal models" as "simulating" things outside the brain. But in what sense are these "simulations"? Do they involve the kind of "replication" simulation (R-simulation) found in the simulation theory of mindreading (Goldman, 2006)? I will argue that some but not all control-theoretic appeals to "simulation" involve R-simulation. To do so, I examine in detail a recent computational model of motor control and action perception based in control theory (Oztop et al., 2005). I argue that the architecture does not use R-simulation during motor control, but does during action perception. A novel result of this analysis is that the forward model--the control-theoretic mechanism most often described as performing simulation--is not well characterized in terms of R-simulation. I conclude with some lessons for research on the mechanisms of mindreading.

Philosophy of the Cognitive Sciences (with William Bechtel). [preprint PDF]
Forthcoming in Fritz Allhoff (Ed.), Philosophies of the Sciences. Albany: SUNY Press.

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary research endeavor focusing on human cognitive phenomena such as memory, language use, and reasoning. It emerged in the second half of the 20th century and is charting new directions at the beginning of the 21st century. This chapter begins by identifying the disciplines that contribute to cognitive science and reviewing the history of the interdisciplinary engagements that characterize it. The second section examines the role that mechanistic explanation plays in cognitive science, while the third focuses on the importance of mental representations in specifically cognitive explanations. The fourth section considers the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science and explores how multiple disciplines can contribute to explanations that exceed what any single discipline might accomplish. The conclusion sketches some recent developments in cognitive science and their implications for philosophers.

Future Research Plans

My main research interests lie in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science. My work thus far has focused on the nature of human social understanding, and how phenomenological descriptions can be integrated into mechanistic explanations of cognitive phenomena. In my dissertation I develop an enriched account of human social understanding, defending the importance of folk psychology against criticisms raised by philosophers drawing on the phenomenological tradition. I have already published several papers based on my dissertation, and have several projects planned that develop different themes from my dissertation.

Simulation Theory

In my dissertation I defend subpersonal-level versions of theory theory and simulation theory against criticisms from phenomenologists. Some of my near term research plans focus on simulation theory—for example, how it should be defined, the relation between simulation and other concepts in the philosophical and empirical literature, and what counts as neural evidence of simulation. Currently I have two papers planned that address the application of simulation theory to neural motor control mechanisms.

In the first, “‘Simulation’ in Control Theory and Simulation Theory,” I explore the relation between control theory and simulation theory. Control theory is a popular theoretical framework for explaining cognitive domains such as motor control and folk psychology; it posits “internal models” described as “simulating” things outside the brain. But in what sense are these “simulations”? Do they involve the kind of “replication” simulation (R-simulation) found in simulation theory? I argue that some but not all applications of control theory involve R-simulation. To do so, I examine in detail a control-theoretic model of motor control and goal understanding. I argue that in this model, motor control is not driven by R-simulation, but that R-simulation does play a role in goal understanding. The most surprising aspect of my analysis is the claim that forward models, the motor mechanisms most often described as performing “simulation,” do not perform R-simulation. This challenges the standard view that using one’s own motor mechanisms for understanding other people’s goals is an application of simulation theory (R-simulation).

A second paper I have planned on this topic concerns the relation between simulation theory and neural “mirroring.” Many recent accounts of how we understand others’ actions appeal to “mirror” neurons or systems—that is, brain areas which fire during both self-action and when observing others’ actions. Neural mirroring is usually interpreted in terms of simulation theory rather than theory theory, such that we understand other people’s actions by simulating them in our own motor mechanisms. Through an analysis of motor-based models of goal understanding, I call into question this claim that all mirroring is simulation. I argue that some of the mirroring mechanisms in existing motor-based models of goal understanding are best characterized in terms of theorizing than simulation. This has implications for theoretical interpretations of neural mirroring, and for how theory theory and simulation theory should be distinguished.

Online Use of Folk Psychology

Another major aspect of my dissertation project is the notion of “online” folk psychological reasoning: the use of mental state attribution to guide unreflective social interaction, rather than reflective, “offline” judgments about people with whom we are not currently interacting. Most of the empirical research on folk psychology has used offline tasks—often where an experimenter narrates a story about a fictional character, and participants must explain or predict the protagonist’s behavior. Psychologists are only beginning to investigate the online use of folk psychology, where participants must make mental state attributions to guide immediate interaction (verbal or nonverbal) with another person. This area is ripe for philosophical investigation, as new experimental tasks are devised and theoretical proposals are developed.

I am particularly interested in online belief attribution. One issue I plan to explore is whether or not there is a unitary phenomenon of belief attribution. There is clear experimental research of a developmental dissociation between online and offline belief attribution: 1- to 1.5-year-old children demonstrate understanding of others’ beliefs on online tasks, but cannot pass offline belief attribution tasks until several years later. This and other evidence suggests that we have separate cognitive systems for online and offline belief attribution. I plan to analyze whether a single concept of belief is at play in the various experimental tasks used in these studies. I believe different concepts of “belief” are indeed at play. Accordingly, I will develop a taxonomy of the cognitive processes involved in these online and offline tasks, identifying differences between these “belief” concepts.

Explanation in Cognitive Science

From the perspective of philosophy of science, I am interested in the nature of explanation in the cognitive sciences. In my dissertation I adopt a mechanistic approach to explanation, and show how phenomenological claims can fit within this mechanistic framework. Many phenomenologists, however, have proposed that cognitive science should abandon its focus on internal mechanisms, and instead adopt an “enactive” approach to explanation. Enactivism emphasizes the dynamic interactions between brain, body, and environment. Enactivists argue that with this shift in focus, social understanding can be explained in terms of the dynamic interactions between social agents, without the need for complicated neural mechanisms (e.g., ones enabling mental state attribution), or without appealing to neural mechanisms at all.

I am interested in enactivism both as a development of ideas from the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as a competing explanatory account in the cognitive sciences. One project from the latter perspective will be to compare the mechanistic and enactivist approaches, focusing on their explanations of social understanding. I will examine enactive accounts of social understanding and the evidence offered in favor of them, so as to evaluate when phenomena require genuinely social-level explanations—that is, when appealing to neural mechanisms internal to a single agent is inadequate to explain the phenomena of interest. While allowing that some phenomena will require explanations that move up to the level of interacting social agents, I will argue that enactivism wrongly dismisses the importance of internal mechanisms. I will thus defend the mechanistic approach as a superior multi-level approach to explanation in the cognitive sciences.

Critique of Phenomenological Accounts of Social Understanding

In the longer term, I envision developing this work into a book-length critique of phenomenological accounts of human social understanding. The analysis of neural mirroring mechanisms and the critique of enactivism mentioned above will be crucial additions to the work completed in my dissertation. Mirroring is increasingly appealed to by phenomenologists in constructing alternative accounts of social understanding that purportedly do not involve folk psychology. I will show how my enriched folk psychological account can accommodate mirroring phenomena. More generally, it will be important to show that such phenomena can be explained within a mechanistic approach to explanation in the cognitive sciences, and do not require an alternative such as enactivism.