[Philosophy of Social Cognition] Bonus Meeting Reminder + Thank You's + Info

[Martyna Meyer]

Dear all,

I hope you're doing well. Perhaps some of you are, like me, already 
enjoying the post-semester freedom :)
I have the last few announcements to share with you.

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Firstly, I wanted to sincerely thank you for the participation. I really 
appreciated your engagement and interest, in every form in which it was 
expressed. Many, many thanks!

A special thank you goes to *Flavi**a*, who helped with the organization 
from the very beginning; *Alicja*, for the administrative support she 
provided, and many others (both the regulars and less-than-regulars at 
the reading group)--thank you for sticking around!

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Secondly, please remember that _*tomorrow *__(Tue) __*we meet for a 
bonus session*__prepared by Andreas_.

It will take place at NIG (3B, as usual). You're all invited to come! 
Please take a look at this text beforehand:

Gergely, G., Bekkering, H., & Király, I. (2002). Rational imitation in 
preverbal infants. /Nature/, 415(6873), 755–755.
Access: https://doi.org/10.1038/415755a (just 2 pages!)

I'm excited to see you again. :)
PS - Andreas promised refreshments! (i.e. cold drinks, very needed in 
this weather)

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Thirdly, I wanted to share Daria's email with you. Do you remember when 
Bailey talked about empathy accounts (M. Ratcliffe's text) and truth 
conditions? Here is a response:

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I have some thoughts about what Bailey said. I would be curious what you 
guys think of this.

And ok, gosh, this turned very long... here is a TLDR:

Truth aptness in false belief tasks can be attributed to the mental 
states in question being directed towards the "outside world" that offer 
a constant of reliable observations, hence the inference from your mind 
to the other is very straightforward. It makes sense to accept truth 
aptness as a necessary condition because of the empiric data.
Reading another's mental state that is not so much concerned with 
knowledge about the world but rather with their corporal sensation (on 
which affects are built) seems to be qualifiable as empathy without 
having to account for truth aptness. Hence I propose to see ToM as 
derivative of empathy, not the other way around.
The problem in the movie example is a misidentification to whom the 
empathy it directed towards as well as a poor execution of empathy that 
ist too self-directed.


Long answer:

I think I need to address my presupposition (because I don't know the 
stance on this in cogsci literature) that mental states are either 
directed at sensations or "build upon" them (directed at mental states 
of memory of sensation, even if indirectly connected through several 
links of mental states). I have no prove for this other than that it 
makes sense to me. If you know of some account that either 
disagrees/disproves or elaborates on something like this further, I 
would be very interested!

Also I am using ToM/mind reading/false belief task pretty much 
interchangeably since my knowledge of this stuff is still very much lacking.

Regarding this I have to wonder how ToM and empathy relate to each other 
exactly. If empathy is understood as the recognition that others have an 
"inner life" such as yours (and i don't really know what else would be 
meant by empathy tbh) I would actually say that ToM (or "mindreading" I 
guess?) is a sub-category of empathy. The main difference being their 
degree of truth reliability.

I would think in every case of "mind reading" there is some projection 
happening ("What would I (not) know if I left the room and came back?"). 
I think you guys would call this inference, right?
In the false belief task it makes sense to me to prescribe a high degree 
of truth aptness to the result since the focus lies on reading mental 
states very much directed towards the "outside world" that can be 
perceived and revisited often in more or less the same conditon and is 
more easily accessible to several people at the same than someone else's 
"corporal world".

I mean that as in: You have a big "data base" of observations of the 
outside world, and you learn over time that some observations can highly 
reliably be reproduced more often, so you can infer that others have 
access to similarly reliable observations (idk how you exactly learn 
that others do this too, I'm just accepting it that you can). Since the 
conditions are so reliable, the task that remains is a pretty 
straightforward projection from your experiences to someone else's.

With mental states that are directed at a person's own body (like 
feelings/affects built on body sensation) the accessibility and 
reliability is highly lacking, the task of exactly what somebody's 
conditions are in one moment can be quite hard to decipher in the first 
place. And I'm a bit uncertain if in these cases it's fair to ask for 
truth aptness to qualify something as empathy. I would say that the 
empathetic skill can be poorly executed by being too self-directed - 
projecting before actually having assessed the conditions as far as you 
could.

Hence my proposition that ToM is actually derived from empathy, since it 
doesn't seem reasonable to disagree with truth aptness as a necessary 
condition.

As for the movie example... that Bickley fellow sure seems like the 
silliest of geese. I would argue that he has empathy towards a network 
of storytellers working on a movie under a certain tradition of 
narration and style (and so on and so forth), and merely indirectly via 
a character written into the story. On top of that he seems to be... 
highly lacking in media competency. Not understanding what acting is. 
Not understand how to untangle the fabric of the exposition to conclude 
that the main character is deluded in their belief etc. And because of 
that - or maybe on top of that - executing his empathy poorly.

....Hope this is interesting in any way! It was fun to think about

Best wishes, have fun on tuesday!
Daria

Many thanks, Daria!

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Lastly, an admin note: I will try to keep the website 
<https://socialcognition.phl.univie.ac.at/> online as long as 
possible--but if you need the references to the texts we have read, 
please remember that they might not be there forever (and save them on 
your own). All the wonderful email contributions that you sent are saved 
in the email archive 
<https://lists.univie.ac.at/pipermail/socialcognition/>. Glory to 
*Felix*, who, as the story goes, once made a social cognition meme.

In a moment I will send you another email, with an announcement of a 
different (summer) reading group (yes, we haven't had enough...)--so 
please stay tuned!

Best & See you tomorrow & Have a wonderful summer!

Yours,
Martyna