Laurence Kaufmann

How Preschoolers Use Cues of Dominance to Make Sense of Their Social Environment

A series of four experiments investigated preschoolers’ abilities to make sense of dominance relations. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that as early as 3 years old, preschoolers are able to infer dominance not only from physical supremacy but also from decision power, age, and resources. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that preschoolers have expectations regarding the ways in which a dominant and a subordinate individual are likely to differ. In particular, they expect that an individual who imposes his choice on another will exhibit higher competence in games and will have more resources.

Social cognition is not reducible to theory of mind: When children use deontic rules to predict the behaviour of others

The objective of this paper is to discuss whether children have a capacity for deontic reasoning that is irreducible to mentalizing. The results of two experiments point to the existence of such non-mentalistic understanding and prediction of the behaviour of others. In Study 1, young children (3- and 4-year-olds) were told different versions of classic false-belief tasks, some of which were modified by the introduction of a rule or a regularity. When the task (a standard change of location task) included a rule, the performance of 3-year-olds, who fail traditional false-belief tasks, significantly improved. In Study 2, 3-year-olds proved to be able to infer a rule from a social situation and to use it in order to predict the behaviour of a character involved in a modified version of the false-belief task. These studies suggest that rules play a central role in the social cognition of young children and that deontic reasoning might not necessarily involve mind reading.

The boss is always right: Preschoolers endorse the testimony of a dominant over that of a subordinate

Recent research has shown that young children rely on social cues to evaluate testimony. For instance, they prefer to endorse testimony provided by a consensual group than by a single dissenter. Given that dominance is pervasive in childrens social environment, it can be hypothesized that children also use dominance relations in their selection of testimony. To test this hypothesis, a dominance asymmetry was induced between two characters either by having one repeatedly win in physical contests (physical power; Experiment 1) or by having one repeatedly impose her goals on the other (decisional power; Experiment 2). In two subsequent testimony tasks, 3- to 5-year-old children significantly tended to endorse the testimony of the dominant over that of the subordinate. These results suggest that preschoolers take dominance into account when evaluating testimony. In conclusion, we discuss two potential explanations for these findings.

Self-in-a-Vat: On John Searle's Ontology of Reasons for Acting

John Searle has recently developed a theory of reasons for acting that intends to rescue the freedom of the will, endangered by causal determinism, whether physical or psychological. To achieve this purpose, Searle postulates a series of “gaps” that are supposed toendowthe self with free will. Reviewing key steps in Searles argument, this article shows that such an undertaking cannot be successfully completed because of its solipsist premises. The author argues that reasons for acting do not have a subjective, I-ontology but a first-person plural, Weontology that better accounts for agency and responsibility.

In Search of a Cultural “Common Denominator”: Metaphors, Historical Change and Folk Metaphysics

Numerous recent works, primarily in sociocultural history, emphasize the circulation of common meanings across class lines rather than the unilateral influence of economic conditions or intellectual ideas. This perspective has provided a means to better assess the resources enabling ordinary people to construct and change their world. One of the interesting ways to account for this folk inventiveness is to go back to its origins, that is to say, to the minds and the mainly metaphorical conceptualization that are relentlessly remaking reality. The case of the French Revolution clearly illustrates the political efficiency of a metaphorical reasoning that, in the 18th century, led to both the symbolic and the real overthrow of the kings authority. By virtue of the leading role they play in folk metaphysics, metaphors can be seen as the semantic “books” of the collective mentality that constitutes the lowest common denominator of a given community.

Policing Opinions: Elites, Science and Popular Opinion

AbstractDifferent socio-historical conceptualisations of the emergence of public opinion in the eighteenth century, which have given rise to the works of Habermas about the public sphere, in particular, allow us to think about the actual social referent of the public opinion phenomenon. The classical focus on prerevolutionary, enlightened public opinion and the hypothetical causal effect of the Enlightenment conceal the anthropological invariants of opining as a procedure of sharing differences and individual interests. This “intello-centric” approach reproduces the elitist ideology in this analysis that limits the procedural universality to the pseudo-public sphere of the “true” citizens, although it declares, as a matter of principle, that all citizens ought to participate in government. After having proven the segregating stakes in these processes, the article shows that the concept of public opinion is not reduced to a normative definition ― either in the cultivated sense of a rational discussion or i...

Debunking Deference: The Delusions of Unmediated Reality in the Contemporary Public Sphere

To compensate for the lack of realism of the participatory models of the public sphere, this paper proposes a more minimalist conceptualisation, which emphasises the ontological necessity of representation and deference in the constitution of imagined communities. In the contemporary public spheres, permeated with distrust, representation and deference are becoming synonymous with deception and estrangement. Debunking institutional mediations and political representation, both the “hacktivist” movement Anonymous and the populist leadership of D. Trump yearn to erase any lingering traces of deference. In doing so, I will argue, they endanger the democratic construction of a common world between strangers and erode the pluralist structure of the public sphere.

Must cognitive anthropology be mentalistic? Moving towards a relational ontology of social reality

Maurice Bloch’s Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge (Bloch 2012) is a luminous essay about the tumultuous relationships between cultural anthropology and disciplines more oriented towards the natural sciences. In a theoretical tour-de-force, Bloch’s clear writing allows the reader to better understand why most anthropologists are so reluctant to take into account naturalistic attempts to specify what makes us human. According to Bloch, one of the best ways to reduce the gap between anthropology and the cognitive sciences is to take the architecture of human cognition more seriously. This architecture is constituted by the deepest, universal level that is inherited ‘from our very remote pre-mammalian ancestors’ and the higher levels that are ‘unique specializations ofour species’. Bloch argues thatsuch an architecturealsounderlies human identity, which he calls the ‘blob’ in order to avoid confusion with any relevant existing theories. The blob can be separated into several levels that are ‘organically united’ with each other. The ‘core self’ is characterised by the pre-reflective experience of one’ sb ody as an agent located in space and differentiated from other entities. The ‘minimal self’, which is particularly developed in social species, involves the sense of continuity of oneself and others in time and requires episodic, short-term memory in order to process information about past behaviours and to plan future behaviours. Last but not least, the‘narrative self’ involvesautobiographicalmemorythatismoreorlessreflexively‘sustained’bynarratives that create an identity, invariant over time and contexts. Because this narrative self is infusedwithlanguageandmetarepresentations,itiseasilycaughtupinthepublicdiscourses onwhichanthropologiststendtofocus.But,toBloch,focusingonthese‘publicselves’,so readily accessible to the anthropological gaze, might be misleading. The blob is a multilayered phenomenon that results from a two-way process, one going from the cultural settings to the core layers of the blob, the other going from natural neuro-psychological processes to high-level self-narratives. While we applaud and admire Bloch’s proposal to reconcile anthropology with cognitive sciences, we are more sceptical about the way he tends to take up the mentalistic framing of social cognition as theory of mind that most psychologists tend to favour. Indeed, after characterising the blobs as naturally differentiated entities, Bloch defines social interactions as the mutual process of reading, penetrating or colonising the minds or the ‘blobs’ of others. The social and cultural world is thus based on a process of ‘interpenetration’ that allows us to go in and out of each other’s bodies and minds. Admittedly, this process of interpenetration has different scales of space