Simulation and Stances II: The Intentional Stance

How can we assess intentions? How does ‘folk psychology’, Theory of Mind, or ‘the intentional stance’ work?
Basically, there are two competing theories, the Theory Theory (TT) Simulation Theories (ST) of mind reading.
The simulation theory proposes that, instead of developing a full-fledged real theory about how to explain our own as well as other peoples' behavior and experience, we mentally try to simulate and imagine the internal states of others (Gopnik 1999).
An embodied perspective on this phenomenon suggests that at least some features of mind-reading are accounted for by ST (Poirier et al. 2005: 758f.). According to neuropsychological evidence, for example, the recognition of face-based emotions (FaBER), is better supported by simulationist accounts than by TT’s of mind-reading (Goldmann & Sripada 2005). As Poirier et al. (2005: 759) argue, it may be that in some situations, simulation may be a more direct means to gain insight into someone else’s, especially emotional, mental states.

Mirror Neurons

Another case for ST comes from the fact of ‘mirror neurons’, which discharge during the observation of goal-directed movement, and thus may be critical to understand others intentional states (Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004). It seems possible that we simulate the behavior of others via our ‘mirror system’ and ascribe to them the resulting intentional states. (Poirier et al. 2005: 759, Gallese et al. 2004). To interpret and integrate this intentional state, though, mirror neurons alone seem to be insufficient and in need of other social cognitive mechanisms, (Wheatley et al. 2007, Uddin et al. 2007, Gallagher 2007). On the other hand, mirror neurons play a greater role in the coding of intentions than is sometimes acknowledged, albeit depending on what we call an ‘intention’ (Iacoboni et al. 2005).

The Intentional Stance

Poirier et al. conclude that:

“the intentional stance is clearly a predictive strategy, which could (but does not always) make use of categories to which we have access not by deriving them from a theory, but by simulating the internal doxastic and volitional states of others on the basis of their behavior, context, and facial expression. Language can give access to higher order intentionality: an agent represents its own mental states as they mentally represent another agent’s mental states, and so on“ (p. 759)

In my next post on “Embodied Categorization”, I will write about Poirier et al.’s account of analogical categorizers.

References:

Gallagher, Shaun. 2007 “Simulation Trouble”. Social Neuroscience 2.3/4: 353-365.

Gallese, Vittorio, Christian Keysers and Giacomo Rizzolatti. “A Unifying View of the
Basis of Social Cognition.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (2004): 396–403.

Goldman Alvin I. and Chandra Sekhar Sripada. 2005. “Simulationist models of face-based emotion recognition” Cognition 94: 193-213.

Gopnik, Alison. 1999. “Theory of Mind.” The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Eds.Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 838-841.

Poirier, Pierre, Benoit Hardy-Vallée and Jean-Frédéric Depasquale. 2005. “Embodied Categorization.” Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Iacoboni M, Molnar-Szakacs I, Gallese V, Buccino G, Mazziotta JC, et al. (2005) "Grasping the intentions of others with one’s own mirror neuron system." PLoS Biol 3(3): e79.

Rizzolatti, Giacomo and Laila Craighero. “The Mirror-Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–192.

Uddin, Lucina Q., Marco Iacoboni, Claudia Lange and Julian Paul Keenan. 2007. “The Self and Social Cognition: The Role of Cortical Midline Structures and Mirror Neurons.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11.4 (2007): 153-157.

Wheatley, Thalia, Shawn C. Milleville and Alex Martin. 2007. “Understanding Animate Agents: Distinct Roles for the Social Network and Mirror System.” Psychological Science 18.6 : 469-474.

Simulation and Stances I: The Physical Stance and The Design Stance

What can the theory of embodied categorization tell us about how the intentional stance works? Dan Dennett (1987) speculates that the combinatorial, generative properties of language/the language of thought play a crucial role in our attempts to predict the behaviors of physical, designed, and intentional systems.
Combining data from various areas of research, Poirier et al. (2005), on the other hand, try to account for some aspects of these stances as internal simulations of possible external states.

The Physical Stance

Systems that are able to categorize physical systems, that is, those able to adopt the ‘physical stance’ or use ‘folk physics’, seem to do so by simulating geometrical relationships. (Poirier et al. 2005). MetaToto, for example, is a robot able to build a map of its environment from sensory input, and whose behavior is guided by simulations of movement in his internal map. Thus, the robot is able to categorize physical features, e.g. a wall, not by hitting it but by simulating it (Poirier et al. 2005 757f.; Stein 1994).
People also seem to make physical inferences either by acting on objects (similar to the “we off-load cognitive work into the environment”-view I described briefly here), or by simulating actions and visuomotor experience internally (opposed to simply engaging in mental imagery, where crucial aspects of action-oriented simulation, and dynamics like gravity and other physical, ‘abstract’ forces seem to be missing) (Schwartz and Black 1999).

The Design Stance

Systems able to categorize functional categories, i.e. those able to adopt the ‘design stance’, ‘folk biology’, or mechanics, simulate features of animals or artifacts. (Poirier et al. 2005: 758). According to Hegarty (2004), design inferences work via the ad hoc simulation of ‘abstract’ functional features in a spatial dimension, which can, but not necessarily has to, be complemented by visual simulation.
Of course, as complexity rises, Dan Dennett might be right in assuming a role for language here.
An interesting question concerns how behavior-reading works in other primates. Do they adopt the ‘design stance’, that is, do they simulate functional features in order to predict behavior, e.g. associate certain behavioral/gestural/facial/phonetic patterns as ‘do not come near me’, and others as ‘safe to approach’, etc. -or “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” (Premack & Woodruff 1978).
Poirier et al. support the idea that other primates do not have a Theory of Mind, that they are not able to model the “’action level’, a rather detailed and linear specification of sequential acts”, but only the “’program level’, a broader description of subroutine structure and the hierarchical layout of a behavioural ‘program’” (Byrne and Russon 1998).
Whereas the action level invokes mental, unobservable, ‘intentional’ concepts, behavior-reading only invokes functional categories such as movement. The reason for this inability to adopt the ‘intentional stance’ may be that primates generally lack the concept of unobservable causes and thus are not able to

“posit hidden mental representations, assessable from the intentional stance.” (Poirier et al. 2005: 758, Povinelli 2000).

The evolution of such a concept may have enabled humans to have a ‘real’ Theory of Mind, and subsequently may have influenced our engagements of the physical stance and the design stance (Herrmann et al. 2007).

Next week I will write about how the intentional stance might work, given what we know about embodiment and simulation.

References:

Byrne, Richard W and Anne E. Russon. 1998. “Learning by Imitation: a Hierarchical Approach.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21: 667-684

Dennett, Daniel C. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books.

Herrmann, Esther, Josep Call, María Victoria Hernández-Lloreda, Brian Hare, and Michael Tomasello. 2007. “Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis.” Science 317: 1360-1365.

Hegarty, Mary.2004.“Mechanical Reasoning by Mental Simulation.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8: 280-285.

Poirier, Pierre, Benoit Hardy-Vallée and Jean-Frédéric Depasquale. 2005. “Embodied Categorization.” Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Premack, David Guy and G. Woodruff. (1978). "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1: 515-526.

Povinellim Daniel J. 2000. Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee's Theory of How the World Works. Oxford: OUP.

Schwartz, Daniel L. and Tamara Black. 1999. “Inferences through imagined actions: Knowing by simulated doing.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 25.1: 116-136.

Stein, Lynn Andrea. 1994. “Imagination and situated cognition.” Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Intelligence 5: 393-407.

The Intentional Stance

According to Dan Dennett (1987) there are different strategies for predicting the future behavior of systems. A successful strategy to predict the behavior of a physical system is the ‘physical stance’, which works like this:

“determine its physical constitution (perhaps all the way down to the microphysical level) and the physical nature of the impingements upon it, and use your knowledge of the laws of physics to predict the outcome to any input.” (Dennett 1987: 16).

For example, to predict that if I lose grip of a stone I hold in my hand it will fall down, we use the physical stance (Dennett 1999).

Another strategy is the ‘design stance’ from which you assume that a certain design enables you to predict that the system will “behave as it is designed to behave” (Dennett 1987: 17). Examples are alarm clocks, computers, or thermostats, where you can gain insight about their function by analyzing the mechanics behind it, or observe the way they work. The 'design stance' is riskier than the physical stance, because first I only suppose that the artifact I encounter works like I think it does, and second, the artifact can be misdesigned or be victim to a malfunction, whereas the laws of physics do not simply do that. (Dennett 1999).

The riskiest stance is the ‘intentional stance’, and

“Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do” (Dennett 1987: 17).

In animate agents, the intentional stance comes very close what we call “Theory of Mind”. Although risky, the ‘intentional stance’ is also incredibly powerful. To illustrate this, Dennett engages in a pretty interesting Gedankenexperiment: If there were Martians – to modify the idea a little, let’s say, zombies – able to predict every future state of the universe, and therefore every action of human beings through a complete knowledge of physics, without treating humans as ‘intentional systems’, they would still miss something.
If one zombie, call him Pierre, would engage in a predicting contest with a human, he would need much more information to predict what would happen if someone went to get cigarettes than a human treating the cigarette-getter as an intentional system and taking into account the patterns in human behavior.
So why does this strategy work, and how? First, in the course of evolution, humans evolved to use these predictive strategies because they worked, or as Quine puts it

“creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die out before reproducing their kind.” (Quine 1953).

According to evolutionary epistemology, natural selection ensures a “fit” between our cognitive mechanisms and the world, at least asymptotically, because the closest approximation of epistemological mechanisms and reality has the greatest survival value. (Some aspects of these thoughts are also important in the “Social Brain Hypothesis”, which I will write about some time in the future.) This probably also holds true for the evolution of the intentional stance/theory of mind. But how does “the machinery which nature has provided us” (Dennett 1987: 33) work? Dennett himself (albeit cautionary) proposes that there may be a connection between the exploding complex combinatorics of mind-reading/the prediction of complex behaviors and the generative, combinatorial properties of language/the language of thought.
Poirier et al. (2005) have an updated idea concerning how these predictive strategies might work, and present their speculations with considerations from an embodied evolutionary-developmental computational cognitive neuroscience (there, I said it again) viewpoint, which I will, finally, discuss in my next post.

References:

Dennett, Daniel C. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books.

Dennet, Daniel C. 1999. "The Intentional Stance." The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Eds.Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Poirier, Pierre, Benoit Hardy-Vallée and Jean-Frédéric Depasquale. 2005. “Embodied
Categorization.” Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Eds. Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Quine, Willard van Orman. 1953. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.