Leda Berio

We motivate and lay out the broad contours of a research program, namely that of developing a systematic ethics of code-switching. Such an ethics will articulate the values and norms that should govern a feature of human selves that we call multiplicity: the capacity to bear a polyphonic range of identities. Our discussion focuses on narratives, stories, and scripts, illustrating how these pivotal entities will be central to advancing our project. We identify two biases implicit in the way prominent cultural narratives depict multiplicity, and explore other ways that stories and scripts can act as both obstacles to and opportunities for the advancement of an ethics of code-switching.

This chapter treats substantial self-knowledge – that is knowledge about our values, character, and dispositions – in relation to self-directed mindshaping mechanisms. In particular, I consider character trait self-attributions and how their mindshaping effects can be accounted for in terms of virtual social models proposed by Zawidzki and the agentialist framework defended by McGeer. I focus on cases of norm change and affective conflict to show how, in these cases, our mindshaping activities include self-ascriptions that have inferentialist and interpretative uses – that is, that are based on inferences from our behavior and other evidence – as well as prescriptive functions.

In engaging in public moral discourse and publicly visible moral behavior, our motivations can be mixed: while on the one hand we might want to genuinely commit to norms we find morally virtuous, we can also be strongly motivated by enhancing our reputation. At times, we might even be accused of “virtue signaling”, that is, of engaging in moral discourse for self-aggrandizing and reputational gains. We might consider these reputational motives as a barrier to moral progress. In this paper, I rely on insights from norm psychology and on the mindshaping framework to suggest that our reputation-guided behavior can, in some instances, actively change us for the better. In particular, I argue that by adhering to social myths in a reputationally motivated way, we might end up exercising self-directed mindshaping, and change the way we see ourselves, the stories we tell about our ourselves, and how we behave.

Constructivist theories of emotions and empirical studies have been increasingly stressing the role of contextual information and cultural conventions in emotion recognition. We propose a new account of emotion recognition and attribution that systematically integrates these aspects, and argue that emotion recognition is part of the general process of person impression formation. To describe the structural organization and the role of background information in emotion recognition and attribution, we introduce situation models and personal models. These models constitute the top-level structures in a complex hierarchy of dimensions which considers different types of basic emotion cues. Thus, we propose a multidimensional account of emotion recognition which enables us to integrate the top-down and bottom-up processes involved: basic emotion cues in certain contexts can trigger situation models and person models, which influence emotion recognition which, in turn, reinforce or modify these models. We argue that this kind of loop deeply affects the way emotions enter our social interactions. Our account is in line with the “normative turn” of social cognition, that stresses the way social expectations actively shape the patterns we recognize, and make, in our social world.

The investigation of folk concepts of race has been central to many theoretical and experimental contributions in recent decades; however, most of these contributions have been centred around the North American cultural context. Despite many philosophers pointing to a possible discrepancy between the European, and especially the German, context and the U.S.-American one, a systematic investigation has yet to be undertaken. This paper provides the first cross-cultural experimental study of U.S.-American and German concepts of race. More specifically, it examines whether German concepts of race are more biological than U.S.- American ones and to what extent Germans and U.S.-Americans lean towards conservationism or eliminativism about concepts of race. Surprisingly, our results suggest that U.S.-Americans’ concepts of racial categories such as Black, White, or Asian are no less biologically loaded than Germans’ but that Germans lean far more towards eliminativism than U.S. Americans. We discuss multiple explanations for this finding and develop avenues for future research. In doing so, this paper contributes to the larger project of cross-cultural comparisons between folk theories of race - a project we deem highly fruitful and timely.

Disagreement remains about whether particular human socio-cognitive traits arose primarily as a result of biological adaptations, or because of changing cultural practices. Heyes argues that uniquely human traits, including imitation and theory of mind, are the product of cultural learning. In contrast, Tomasello argues that they are, in key respects, part of a suite of adaptations for ‘shared intentionality’. We consider how such disagreements might be resolved. We show that the kinds of consideration often used to adjudicate questions about trait origins are insufficient to settle origin questions. Furthermore, humankind’s immersion in culture undermines the prospect that cross-cultural and developmental studies could resolve origin questions. Nonetheless we argue that, when cautiously interpreted, currently neglected studies of enculturated great apes (i.e. apes raised in human environments) can shed new light on trait origins, and inform mechanistic accounts of cognitive development. While acknowledging the shortcomings of enculturation research, we argue that it deserves renewed attention.

Our ability to attribute mental states to others ("to mentalize") has been the subject of philosophical and psychological studies for a very long time, yet the role of language acquisition in the development of our mentalizing abilities has been largely understudied. This book addresses this gap in the philosophical literature. The book presents an account of how false belief reasoning is impacted by language acquisition, and it does so by placing it in the larger context of the issue, how language impacts cognition in general. The work provides the reader with detailed and critical literature reviews, and draws on them to argue that language acquisition helps false belief reasoning by boosting the ability to create schemata that facilitate processing of information in some social contexts. According to this framework, it is a combination of syntactic clues and cultural narratives that helps the child to solve the classic false belief task. The book provides a novel, original account of how language helps false belief reasoning, while also giving the reader a broad, precise and well-documented picture of the debate around some of the most fundamental issues in social cognition.

In this paper, we discuss what we argue is a newly observed use of nouns like woman, man, and lawyer, in the sort of morphosyntax characteristic of count nouns. We argue that the relevant data constitutes normative uses of the relevant nouns, and we build an analysis on the assumption that such nouns are polysemous between descriptive and normative senses (Leslie 2015), using the formal account of polysemy in Pustejovsky (1998), and the analysis of count- ability in Rothstein (2010). In doing so, we provide evidence in support of the aforementioned kinds of analyses of social terms and countability, as opposed to others which do not seem to be able to account for the data in as straight forward a way.

In this article, we discuss the role of labels and generics referring to social kinds in mindshaping practices, arguing that they promote generalizations that foster essentialist thinking and carry a normative force. We propose that their cognitive function consists in both contributing to the formation and reinforcement of schemata and scripts for social interaction and in activating these schemata in specific social situations. Moreover, we suggest that failure to meet the expectations engendered by these schemata and scripts leads to the activation of “reactive attitudes” embedded in feedback loops of reactive exchange that are constitutive of our mindshaping practices.

Classical notions of Common Ground have been criticized for being cognitively demanding given their appeal to complex meta-representations. The authors here propose a distinction between Immediate Common Ground, containing information specific to the communicative situation, and General Common Ground, containing information that is not situation-specific. This distinction builds on previous work by Horton and Gerrig [2016], extending the idea that common cognitive processes are part of the establishment and use of common ground. This is in line with the idea that multiple cognitive resources are involved in dialogue and avoids appealing to special-purpose representations for Common Ground purposes.

Classical notions of Common Ground have been criticized for being cognitively demanding given their appeal to complex meta-representations. The authors here propose a distinction between Immediate Common Ground, containing information specific to the communicative situation, and General Common Ground, containing information that is not situation-specific. This distinction builds on previous work by ], extending the idea that common cognitive processes are part of the establishment and use of common ground. This is in line with the idea that multiple cognitive resources are involved in dialogue and avoids appealing to special-purpose representations for Common Ground purposes.

I argue that both language acquisition and cultural and social factors contribute to the formation of schemata that facilitate false belief reasoning. While the proposal for an active role of language acquisition in this sense has been partially advanced by several voices in the mentalizing debate, I argue that other accounts addressing this issue present some shortcomings. Specifically, I analyze the existing proposals distinguishing between “structure-oriented” views :1858–1878, 2007; de Villiers in Why language matters for theory of mind. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 186–219, 2005), that stress the role of language as a set of rules providing syntactic input and providing a representational format, and “cultural/social-oriented views”, that stress the role of social interaction. Starting from the analysis of these views, I defend my own account of the role of language acquisition in aiding false belief reasoning. I argue that language acquisition plays a pivotal role in the formation of schemata used by pre-schoolers to pass the false belief task. I propose a specific learning mechanism for exploiting linguistic information that taps into specific cognitive abilities, thus making a very concrete suggestion about the role of linguistic input in specific cultural contexts for the development of false belief skills.