Nimra Asif

This dissertation develops an account of a form of mindreading that those with limited or still developing cognitive resources, such as nonhuman animals and infants, can plausibly use to understand others. I begin by arguing that the standard framework of mindreading over- intellectualizes social cognition, since it treats mental states as hidden states whose existence we must infer and attribute to others using concepts of mental states. The standard framework also shapes the debate over whether infants and nonhuman animals understand other minds, forcing a choice between full-blown mindreading and mere behavior-reading. I argue that existing minimal theory of mind accounts fail to articulate a middle ground between these options because they remain wedded to the standard framework. Those that posit simpler mental states for the minimal mindreader to infer and attribute to others (Butterfill and Apperly, 2013; Danón, 2016) are still demanding along the same dimensions as standard mindreading, while those that appeal only to observable cues (Gómez, 2005, 2017) fall into a version of behavior-reading. Drawing on the teleosemantic framework, especially the notion of pushmi-pullyu representations (Millikan, 1984, 2017), I develop an account on which minimal mindreaders represent others’ mental states as affordances, recognizing and responding to them noninferentially, without concepts or mental state attribution. I argue that this account carves out a genuine middle ground between full-blown mindreading and behavior-reading by making the process of mindreading (the ‘how’) easier for minimal mindreaders. Finally, I explain the empirical and practical advantages of the account and defend its teleosemantic foundations against challenges to the cogency and explanatory utility of pushmi-pullyu representations.

Minimal theory of mind is presented in the theory of mind literature as a middle ground between full-blown ToM and mere behavior-reading. Minimal ToM seems to be a useful construct for studying and understanding the minds of nonhuman animals and infants. However, providing an account of minimal ToM on which minimal mindreading is significantly less demanding than full-blown mindreading yet more than just a behavior-reading process is a challenge. In this paper, I argue that to address this challenge, we need to depart from the traditional framework of mindreading in more radical ways than offered by current minimal theory of mind accounts. First, I explain the traditional view of mindreading on which mental state attribution is treated as essential for mindreading and analyze the general respects in which it makes mindreading demanding for the mindreader, such as requiring the mindreader to have concepts of mental states, engage in inferential reasoning processes involving mental states, and form meta-representations. Then I discuss and critically evaluate two accounts of minimal ToM and argue that these accounts either do not depart sufficiently from the demanding requirements of traditional mindreading or risk becoming re-descriptions of behavior-reading accounts. Finally, I present an alternative Millikanian account of minimal ToM that avoids this risk while departing more radically from the traditional view of mindreading by providing a way for minimal mindreaders to represent the mental states of others and respond to them without engaging in conceptual mental state attribution.