Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki: MindshapingMIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2013, 320pp., ISBN:9780262019019, Hardcover: $40.00/£27.95

Joe Dewhurst

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Since the early 1990s the philosophical literature on social cognition has been domi-nated by discussions of the relative merits and demerits of theory-theory and simulationtheory (see e.g. Davies and Stone 1995). Instead of getting tangled up in these olddebates, Zawidzki offers a new framework for understanding and investigating socialcognition. He is opposed to the primacy of mindreading, i.e. the idea that socialcognition is primarily about accessing the otherwise private mental states of others.This puts him in similar territory to interaction theorists such as Daniel Hutto andShaun Gallagher, who both argue that our mental states were never really privateto begin with. Like them, Zawidzki focuses more on the social (as opposed to thecognitive) side of social cognition, couching this in terms of what he calls the“mindshaping-as-linchpin hypothesis” (xv).1 This review will aim to elucidate andassess the strengths and practical applications of this hypothesis for the study ofsocial cognition.

Before going any further, a few introductory words on mindreading andmindshaping are in order. In social cognition, mindreading has traditionally referredto the process of identifying and attributing the mental states of others, regardless ofwhether this is accomplished by a tacit theory of how minds work (theory-theory) or bysimulating what another mind might be doing (simulation theory). Both theory-theoryand simulation theory share an assumption that mindreading of some sort is centralto social cognition. Zawidzki calls this assumption the mindreading-as-linchpinhypothesis, and destabilising it is one of his primary objectives. He sets out todo this by introducing an alternative to mindreading, “mindshaping”, that he thinksshould take centre stage in our understanding of social cognition.

So what is mindshaping? Zawidzki uses the term to refer to any behaviour ormechanism that aims to modify a target mind so as to match more closely with a givenmodel (31). The mechanism, target, model, and “relevant respects” of match desired allvary across multiple dimensions (35), encompassing “a variety of forms, including

Phenom Cogn SciDOI 10.1007/s11097-014-9362-2

1Unless otherwise noted, all references will be to Zawidzki (2013).

J. Dewhurst (*)University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UKe-mail: joseph.e.dewhurst@gmail.com

imitation, pedagogy, norm cognition and enforcement, and language based regulativeframeworks, like self- and group-constituting narratives” (29). Consider imitation: herethe mechanism “is a neural process in the imitator”; the target “is the imitator’s ownmind”; the model “is an expert whom the imitator copies”; and the relevantrespects of the match are the desired behaviours that the imitator seeks to copy(32). The definition is purposefully broad, and Zawidzki recognises that there is arisk that the phenomena it encompasses might not share any interesting properties.Establishing that this is not the case, and that mindshaping is worthy of furtherstudy, is an important goal of the book (20).

After a brief preface introducing his approach and giving an outline of the book,Zawidzki proceeds with a more detailed overview of his argument (chapter 1), beforegoing on to elaborate on both mindshaping (chapter 2) and mindreading (chapter 3).These initial chapters serve as a lengthy run up to the main section of the book,preparing the ground by providing us with some initial reasons to question mindreadingaccounts and to favour Zawidzki’s own mindshaping account. The following chaptersbuild on this by linking the mindshaping-as-linchpin hypothesis with evolutionary anddevelopmental accounts of co-operation (chapter 4), language (chapter 5), andmindreading (chapter 6). Finally, Zawidzki attempts to make room for mindreadingto serve as a conformative, rather than epistemic, mechanism (chapter 7), thus recon-ciling his account with our obvious propensity to attribute mental states, both toourselves and to one another.

In the preface we find an interesting methodological point that shapes how weshould approach the rest of the book. Zawidzki writes:

The distinction between themindreading- andmindshaping-focused understandingsof human social cognition cannot be captured in terms of simple empirical tests.No crucial experiment can vindicate one understanding at the expense of theother. (xii, emphasis added)

We should not expect to (and do not) find any empirical argument for the superiorityof the mindshaping-as-linchpin hypothesis. Zawidzki openly admits that themindreading-as-linchpin hypothesis is able to account for most, if not all, of theavailable evidence. What he presents instead is an alternative conceptual frameworkthat he thinks “brings greater simplicity and unity” and that he hopes will be “sugges-tive of new research” (xiii).

In chapter 1 Zawidzki does a good job of clarifying the conceptual landscapeby breaking down what he calls “the human sociocognitive syndrome” (i.e., socialcognition) into “four broadly related capacities: sophisticated mindreading, sophis-ticated mindshaping, pervasive cooperation, and structurally complex and flexiblesymbolic communication” (1). He goes on to argue that many researchers tend toplace an emphasis on mindreading by simply assuming that it is the mostfundamental of these capacities (this is the often implicit mindreading-as-linchpinassumption). This seems to be an accurate assessment, especially considering therecent focus on demonstrating the capacity for mindreading in younger andyounger children (e.g. Onishi and Baillargeon 2005). His purpose in this book is simplyto reverse this emphasis by arguing that it is at least plausible that mindshaping mighthave come first (both phylo- and onto-genetically).

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Chapter 2 clarifies and expands the initial definition of mindshaping. We learn thatmindshaping consists of a relationship between four relata: a “target” mind, a “mech-anism” for shaping that mind, a “model” that the shaping aims at, and the “relevantrespects” in which the target is meant to match the model (31). These four dimensionsallow for a wide range of different instances of mindshaping, which raises the worrymentioned earlier, namely that this category might just be too broad to capture anyinteresting features of social cognition. However, Zawidzki does a good job of allevi-ating this concern by spending some time exploring several different examples ofmindshaping, and arguing persuasively that they do share some interesting features.In humans, for example, mindshaping often involves socially distributed mechanisms,and relatedly, often aims at social conformity. This can be seen not only in pedagogy,where many members of a group will be responsible, formally or informally, foreducating children, but also in norm enforcement, where a society as a whole enforcescertain norms by rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad. Pedagogy also servesas a tool for norm enforcement, by instilling certain norms at a young and impression-able age, and norm enforcement aids pedagogy, by shaping minds that are respectful totheir elders, and thus receptive to teaching. It becomes clear how the varieties ofmindshaping can be seen as a set of cohesive and mutually reinforcing phenomena.

So why should we think that mindshaping might be more fundamental thanmindreading? Zawidzki devotes chapter 3 to elaborating a critique of the mindreading-as-linchpin hypothesis, based around the problems of computational intractability andunderdetermination. Given limited behavioural evidence it seems difficult, if not impos-sible, to accurately determine which of a wide range of possible mental states anotherpersonmight be in—there are just too many different factors at play. Therefore Zawidzkiargues that we should be suspicious of the claim that mindreading alone is the basis forsocial cognition. He goes on to briefly consider (and dismiss) a couple of proposedsolutions to this problem. The first is the idea that a domain-specific theory of mindmodule could overcome computational intractability, which Zawidzki argues overlooksthe universal scope of mindreading. The second is the idea that a set of “fast and frugal”heuristics could bypass the problem entirely. Zawidzki is more sympathetic to thissuggestion, but argues that it would require “extreme homogeneity” (79) in order towork. He then proposes that a good way of achieving this kind of homogeneity inthe social domain is via mindshaping, i.e. proactively engineering the socialenvironment in order to make it more homogenous, and thus easier to understand.The chapter closes with a dichotomy between complex, intractable mindreading(favoured by the mindreading-as-linchpin hypothesis) and simple, trivial mindreadingthat first requires homogenisation via mindshaping (favoured by the mind-shaping-as-linchpin hypothesis).

The bulk of the book (chapters 4–6) is concerned with presenting an account of theevolutionary and developmental origins of mindshaping, and then comparing this withthe kind of account usually given for mindreading. This begins in chapter 4 with anoverview of two competing hypotheses in evolutionary psychology, the Machiavellianintelligence hypothesis (MIH) and the co-operative foraging hypothesis (CFH).Zawidzki considers the former to be a “natural ally” of the mindreading-as-linchpinhypothesis (100), whilst the latter has the potential to be more closely aligned withmindshaping. He develops several lines of argument against MIH before proposing thatthe mechanisms involved in CFH could serve as the initial impetus for basic social

Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki: Mindshaping

cognition, followed by a period of intense social selection pressure leading to full-blown mindshaping and genuine cooperation. The remainder of the chapter is devotedto further developing this evolutionary account, drawing on a range of experimentaland archaeological evidence in order to support a modified version of the CFH that putsthe emphasis on mindshaping.

Towards the middle of chapter 5 we get to what I think is the most interesting andimportant part of the book. This is Zawidzki’s proposal that we should conceive oflanguage and communication not as a development of our capacity for mindreading,but rather as “behaviour reading guided by certain normative assumptions” (146). Tounpack this a little, the idea is that our ability to communicate successfully is the resultof behavioural conformity enforced by prior mindshaping (the normative assumptions).Conformity is important because it limits the possible range of behaviours to acomputationally tractable number, thus allowing (in the majority of cases) relativelysimple behaviour reading as opposed to extremely complex mindreading. The potentialinterpretations of linguistic utterances are similarly constrained, vastly simplifying thetask of language comprehension. Zawidzki explicitly likens this to Dennett’s intentionalstance – during a conversation it is our rational interpretation of an interlocutor’sintentions, not their actual intentions, that guides our interactions and enables commu-nication. As language becomes more complex it also begins to serve as an additionalmindshaping tool, as our powers of persuasion and pedagogy allow us to furthersimplify our social environment.

The final two chapters focus on rehabilitating sophisticated mindreading as a uniquelyhuman mechanism for “discursive commitment” (173), which Zawidzki interprets asessentially just another tool for mindshaping. By making public commitments to behavein certain ways, and by attributing such commitments to others, we further constrain oursocial environment. Propositional attitude attribution (i.e. mindreading) plays “a justifi-catory rather than a predictive role” (222), with beliefs and desires being interpretedaccording to social necessity rather than internal validity. This application ofmindshaping is a compelling development of the claim that folk psychology might servemore of a socio-normative than an epistemic function (cf. Hutto 2008, which Zawidzkireferences frequently).

Throughout the book Zawidzki makes an admirable attempt to synthesise a widerange of phenomena, yet occasionally this makes his argument feel too general, and inplaces lacking in detail. The evolutionary arguments that dominate the second half ofthe book feel particularly strained, relying upon somewhat controversial theories inevolutionary psychology. As Zawidzki admits, even if one accepts the basic premisesthat he is working with, there is ultimately no conclusive means of deciding betweenthe mindshaping- and mindreading-as-linchpin hypotheses. Mindshaping is undoubt-edly a useful metaphor for certain aspects of contemporary human cognition, such aspedagogy and social norm enforcement, but it is less persuasive in its role as a unifyingprinciple. Shifting the emphasis of social cognition away from mindreading is difficult,as the majority view still has a lot of inertia behind it. Zawidzki has provided analternative and coherent conceptualisation of the available data, yet the mindshaping-as-linchpin hypothesis will need some additional empirical purchase if it is to reallytake off.

By itself this book is not going to convince anyone who is already committed to themindreading-as-linchpin hypothesis, but then perhaps very little would. What it does do

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is offer some interesting alternatives for those who are currently sitting on the fence.His comparison with Dennett’s intentional stance provides a novel interpretation ofwhat mindreading even is, and his re-evaluation of the various trends within socialcognition from the perspective of mindshaping is extremely interesting. He also givesan admirably clear overview of the theoretical landscape, and for this reason alone Iwould recommend Mindshaping to both experts and novices alike.

References

Davies, M., & Stone, T. (Eds.). (1995). Folk psychology. Oxford: Blackwell.Hutto, D. (2008). Folk psychological narratives. Cambridge: MIT Press.Onishi, K., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-month-old infants understand false belief? Science, 308, 255–8.Zawidzki, T. (2013). Mindshaping. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki: Mindshaping