The Lazy Mindreader

A new perspective on “mindreading” from the study of language and narrative

How is social cognition shaped by our knowledge of language and stories?

Human interaction is characterised by an ongoing polyphony of perspectives and perspectives-on-perspectives. Not only do we share and coordinate our own inner life with that of the people we interact with, but we also constantly make implicit and explicit reference to the intentional states of others who may or may not be present at the time of speaking, or who may even exist only in the imagined worlds of thought and fiction. In the cognitive sciences, this polyphony has generally been conceptualised as a series of embedded ‘orders of intentionality’: A thinks that B understands that C expects… (etc.). I argue that this conceptualisation stands in stark contrast to how multiple perspectives are handled in actual discourse and interaction. Based on linguistic and narratological analysis of literary texts, newspaper articles, examples from spoken discourse, and stimuli from psychological experiments investigating multiple-order intentionality in the lab, a new perspective is offered on how we deal with networks of embedded and interlinked intentional states. The findings are discussed in the light of current theories about mindreading (a.k.a. ‘theory of mind’), discussing in particular cognitive models, issues of development and learning, and scenarios of how this capacity may have evolved in our lineage.

Find the summary, or the full dissertation, here.

Partners

Supervisors at Leiden University are Professor Ineke Sluiter (Classics) and Professor Arie Verhagen (Cognitive Linguistics). Part of the research was done at the University of Oxford, in affiliation with the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group (SENRG) headed by Professor Robin Dunbar. In Oxford, a series of discussion sessions was organised on drama and social cognition together with Dr. Felix Budelmann and Professor Laurie Maguire.