* Sara M. Schaafsma, Donald W. Pfaff, Robert P. Spunt, and Ralph Adolphs, ‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing Theory of Mind’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 65-72.
* Cecilia M. Heyes and Chris D. Frith, ‘The Cultural Evolution of Mind Reading’, Science, 344, 1243091 (2014). DOI: 10.1126/science.1243091

Literary critics have responded to few things in cognitive science as energetically as they have responded to ‘mind-reading’ and ‘theory of mind’. In the work of Lisa Zunshine, for example, or indeed in my essay mentioned here, it has been apparent that the ability to read other minds (and the need to, and the problems with doing so) are an area of common interest. So it’s interesting to find two recent essays urging a rethink of the field.
      Schaafsma et al. start from the premise that the term ‘theory of mind’ has gained currency in a number of disciplines, but it has become ‘vague and inconsistent’. They propose that from a scientific point of view it needs to be ‘deconstructed’ into basic component processes as represented by neuroimaging results, and then reconstructed into a more complex human capacity, such that ‘theory of mind’ becomes, in their nice phrase, a more ‘scientifically tractable’ concept.
      Their view is that there is no specific network in the brain responsible for something that could discretely be called ‘theory of mind’. However, it is probably composed of these more basic processes. They make an analogy with memory, which is conveniently thought of as a single thing but is better thought of, again from a scientific point of view, as a set of simpler mental operations that interact.

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Schaafsma et al. cite the Heyes and Frith article as potentially a strong new intervention in the field. The premise here is that the capacity to read minds is best thought of as an analogy with the ability to read ‘print’ (their term; I can’t see a difference with writing in general). That is, it is part of cultural learning, not something that can be explained purely or mainly in relation to the individual mind.
      They make a very important distinction between ‘implicit’ mind-reading, which ‘emerges from observing the behaviour of others… the learner observes the actor, who need not be aware that he or she is being observed’. This is not their subject. They are concerned with ‘explicit mind reading’, which ‘emerges from the deliberately instructive behaviour of others’ where ‘both actor and observer are actively engaged in a communicative process’.
      They argue that ‘no amount of individual learning – implicit mind reading, introspection, and watching the behaviour of others – would be enough for the development of explicit mind reading. If a group of human infants managed to survive on a desert island, in a cruel Lord of the Flies-like experiment, they would be no more likely to develop a theory of mind and become explicit mind readers than to develop a writing system and become literate print readers’.

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My sense is that literary interest in ‘theory of mind’ tends to concern the ‘implicit’ kind: it’s the nuances of observing behaviour and construing intentions that animates novels and plays so much. However, it may also be that when this ‘behaviour’ includes speech, in which others read veiled feelings, that it finds a grey area between implicit and explicit.
      Perhaps in the end neither article is addressing a problem that literary critical interest in ‘theory of mind’ has struggled with – we have been dealing with the concept in fairly general terms, as it is manifest in, and underlies, social interactions. However, these two sharply thought and argued essays offer some important and pertinent prompts for thought.

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