Abstract
In this paper, I explain how we just “ascribe” “attribute” to social actors—in a fast and automatic way and without complex reasoning—mental representations on the basis of “scripts,” “roles,” role-signs, tool use and functions, categories and prejudices, and several heuristics; or by default. How scripts and roles must be filled in with the actors’ mental attitudes. How social interaction systematically requires assumptions about the other’s mind. How sometimes in the subject those mental attitudes are not only unconscious but actually implicit; just potential or tacit (non-activated), or just the non-intended or non-understood function of his behavior/role. However, what really matters is that we assume that those beliefs and goals are there, and we act “as if” it were so. I finally claim that this mechanism of mind ascription while reading the behavior or the signs of the roles and scripts is the basis of a fundamental form of communication: Behavioral Implicit Communication.
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Notes
And of “inferences” conceived as complex and conscious deduction and induction by logical rules; while they can just be rule-based: production rules from one information to another one, or associations: (smoke? ==> fire!); (to be hit? ==> to feel pain); (X puts Y in Z? ==> Y is in Z).
Of course, this is quite true in the philosophical debate and in cognitive science and AI, but less true in the social psychological tradition on social perception and categorization, with automatic inference processes. However, also this tradition is not so much focused on the automatic ascription of specific and contextual beliefs and goals.
The “dual processing” tradition (Kahneman et al. 1982; Gilovich et al. 2002; Sun 2002; Petty and Cacioppo 1986) is not opposing the conscious, slow, and costly reasoning process with an intuitive, emotional, empathic one. The latter system is fast, automatic, associative, implicit … but not necessarily “affective” and socially emphatic.
See a representative example in Maibom's work (Maibom 2010).
Maibom 2010—strangely enough—does not mention/discuss “scripts” but introduces a much less specified but very close notion of “social models” for explaining the same kind of phenomena. However, also the “social models” may include specifications of the expected (prescribed) mental attitudes of the actors, and—once recognized—give us the automatic attribution of them.
Scripts are just a form of generalized episodic knowledge structures, representing a chain of events for typical contexts and activities.
Adapted from Niels Kasch & Tim Oates Mining Script-Like Structures from the Web http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W10/W10-0905.pdf.
"The sequence of actions in this script can be analyzed at two levels of abstraction. At a more abstract level, it is divided into what are referred to as scenes, such as “entering”, “ordering”, “eating” and “exiting”. At a more concrete level, the sequence is divided into actions under different scenes. In this way, there is an hierarchical structure within a script…. The overall event is then broken into four scenes, which in turn decompose into actions. Similar to the hierarchical structures of object concepts (taxonomies), there is a basic level within the hierarchical structure of scripts…. A more important interconceptual structure within scripts is the temporal, causal links between actions. As Schank and Abelson put in, “the restaurant script is a giant causal link” (Schank and Abelson 1977: 45). Schank and Abelson suggested strong causal connections between scenes and between actions." Xiang Chen http://public.clunet.edu/~chenxi/Vita_2004_3.pdf.
“Doubts”, “uncertainty”, “worries”, “assumption”, “perceived”, “expectation”,… absolutely non-psychological just behavioral notions!.
Also due—we should add as cognitive scientists—to our need (mechanism) of cognitive coherence and integration, and of social integration and coherence.
And this holds also for complex social interaction. See section on “Social Behavior as Unconsciously Guided by the Current Context” in Bargh and Morsella 2008.
In this perspective, Dennet's reluctance or refusal (at least in my perception) to take a position about the reality of the states postulated by the "intentional stance" ("Do beliefs, desires, etc., really exist? Or are they just external constructions and descriptions?") acquires a different sense. It is not just a matter of epistemology and truth theory. The fact is that socially "it doesn't matters" whether those beliefs and desires do really exist or not in the other's mind.
"Corresponding to the distinction between procedural and declarative knowledge, there are different ways of obtaining (learning) or transferring (teaching) a script…. One can also learn procedurally, as an apprentice, by imitating observed behavior of one or more ‘masters', in a 'community of practice' … In this way, procedural knowledge is a social construction, in a context of application.".
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This article is part of the Supplement Issue on “Social Signals. From Theory to Applications,” guest-edited by Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’Errico, and Alessandro Vinciarelli.
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Castelfranchi, C. Ascribing minds. Cogn Process 13 (Suppl 2), 415–425 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-011-0423-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-011-0423-y