This Is a Practical Problem

Click here and press the right key for the next slide.

(This may not work on mobile or ipad. You can try using chrome or firefox, but even that may fail. Sorry.)

also ...

Press the left key to go backwards (or swipe right)

Press n to toggle whether notes are shown (or add '?notes' to the url before the #)

Press m or double tap to slide thumbnails (menu)

Press ? at any time to show the keyboard shortcuts

This Is a Practical Problem

We lack a shared understanding.

This is a practical problem.

But one we can work around.

So I didn’t tell you, but this talk has three parts.

We’ve just done the first.

Now for the next part. This will comprise two illustrations of how our lack of a shared understanding of mental states is a practical problem for research in developmental and comparative psychology.

first illustration : intention

‘infants in the 2nd year of life can understand deceptive intentions’ (Scott, Richman, & Baillargeon, 2015, p. 50)

‘infants understand intentions as existing independently of particular concrete actions and as residing within the individual. Each of these [...] is part of what it means to understand intention’ (Woodward, 2009, p. 55)

We lack a shared understanding of intention.

This is a practical problem
for interpreting discoveries about development.

Maybe it’s not surprising I would say this. After all, not understanding things is what I do for a living. (Look at all these things I failed to know. A few years ago I even got a promotion for it.)

But there is really a problem here; or, rather, two problems.

FIRST: It is coherent to think with Moses (and Davidson) that understanding intention is involves understanding belief; but it is also coherent to think, with Woodward, that it does not. If we had a shared understanding of intention, we would know which of these views is correct. We would also know whether intentions ‘reside within an individual’ or not. But we do not. Therefore we lack a shared understanding of intention.

Second, the debate proceeds by arguing about what intention *is* whereas what we really want to know is *how intention appears to the mindreaders*. The only reason we, as researchers, need a shared understanding of intention is so that we can evaluate competing hypotheses about the mindreaders’ perspectives. It doesn’t matter at all whether our shared understanding of intention is a correct one; it just needs to be coherent. All we really want is a way mental aspects of the world *could be*; we need not be worried about how they *actually are*.

second illustration : knowledge

Steve, no one cares about this old stuff on intention.

Well, Steve, I really think they should. But they definitely seem to care about knowledge, here’s a much more recent debate ...

hypothesis: 
you can represent knowledge even if unable to represent belief
(Nagel, 2013; Phillips et al., 2020)
‘Rather than representing what others know by first
representing what they believe, people may have a separate set of
processes that give rise to some comparatively simple representation
of what others know.’
evidence:
some can track knowledge but not belief
When our concern is with tracking, we need very little shared understanding.
We only need to agree that the facts about knowledge differ between two
conditions of an experiment.
And we might agree on this despite having quite different views of what
knowledge is; and even despite not understanding much about what knowledge is.
But when concerned with representation, we need a deeper shared understanding.
Let me illustrate ...

‘signature features that are specific to knowledge 
(i) it is factive
(ii) it is not just true belief
(iii) it allows for egocentric ignorance
(iv) it is not modality-specific.’
(Phillips et al., 2020, p. 12)
Nagel: ‘Knowledge is simply a factive mental state, where the factivity condition
is read as necessarily binding agents only to truths’(p. 48)
response 1
not signatures
Durdevic & Krupenye: epistemic contact vs knowledge
Schlicht et al: know that, know how & perceptual access
Starmans: ‘not being ignorant’ vs ‘knowing’
also: encountering vs knowing
It is actually easy to construct a variety of things that have these supposedly
signature features.
So using these ‘signature features’ does not seem to anchor our thinking.
But why does this matter?

hypothesis:
you can represent knowledge even if unable to represent belief

(Nagel, 2013; Phillips et al., 2020)

evidence:
some can track knowledge but not belief

Second response concerns whether what is represented is really knowledge.

response 2

fact not knowledge

Schlicht et al (p. 57):
The tracking observations can be explained in terms of a fact-based (‘teleological’) model of minds and actions.

Objection generalises: for anything that first the four signature features, there is an alternative hypothesis that also explains the observations of tracking.

But this isn’t my objection. My objection is that I don’t even understand whether this is an objection.

‘personal propositional knowledge is the ability to act, to refrain from acting, to believe, desire or doubt for reasons that are facts’ (Hyman, 1999, p. 451).

My problem here is that Hyman (1999) might be right that for me to know a fact is for it to explain an action of mine, in which case this is a false contrast. (Just here it is important to recognise a difference: the debate proceed by arguing about what knowledge *is* whereas what we really want to know is *how it appears to the mindreaders*.)

So I do not even know if Schlicht et al’s view contradicts Phillips et al’s. (Phillips et do *say* that it does, but they also clearly misunderstand it.)

Phillips et al. (2020, p. 70) mistakenly characterise Schlicht et al [2] as ‘reducing [knowledge] to representations of ... goals’. This is wrong (see Hyman).

We lack a shared understanding of knowledge.

This is a practical problem
for interpreting developmental and comparative discoveries.

And this is a practical obstacle. It means that an apparently substantive hypothesis seems to boil down to a terminological debate.

We lack a shared understanding.

This is a practical problem.

But one we can work around.

As I did tell you, but this talk has three parts.

We’ve just done the second.

Keyboard Shortcuts?f

This Is a Practical Problem

Keyboard Shortcuts`?f`