Forskningsseminariet i praktisk filosofi och politisk teori: Tobias Schlicht Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Seminarium

Tobias Schlicht: Social Cognition as Know-How

Abstract:
Human beings are intensely social creatures and our capacity to understand others is central to our comprehension of human nature itself. Philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists alike have tried to characterize our capacities for social cognition and their underlying mechanisms. For a long time, these debates have been dominated by a choice between the Theory-Theory or Simulation-Theory or some hybrid view that contains elements of both of them. In this talk, I would like to develop and characterize constituents of an alternative to these two approaches to social cognition which also brings to the fore what is wrong about them. It is based on the premise that direct interaction and engagement with others within second-person relations, i.e. when being addressed by an other as a You, is the principal source of our social understanding ¿ rather than inferential processes from the third-person perspective (3PP) or simulation heuristics from the first-person perspective (1PP). This alternative is based on the embodied enactive view to cognition. Despite the popularity of this view, its resources have not yet been exploited for the social domain. Crucial to this view is the claim that cognition is facilitated by embodied know how based on the sensorimotor coupling between agent and world¿by a dynamic pattern of interaction among brain, body, and world. Analogously, I claim that social cognition is also facilitated primarily by our embodied know how to deal with people. I also draw the consequences of this view for our interpretation of autism as a social disorder.