Nicolas Cuevas-Alvear and Camila Suarez
Affiliation: Bayreuth University, Politecnico Grancolombiano
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: Joint attention, Intentionalism, Modularism, enactive experientialist-emotional explanation
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 18:30
Location: GSSR Plenary Hall (268)
View the full session: Cognitive Development
The developmental psychology literature presents a classic analogy that seeks to understand scientific progress through the lens of infant cognitive development (Gopnik, 1996). The analogy of the baby as a scientist aims to offer a framework for understanding their psychological development process. This analogy suggests that both enterprises—scientific theory construction and children's psychological development—share similarities best explained by positing a set of abstract rules and representational mechanisms that allow for prediction, explanation, and control of phenomena of interest. It has gained widespread dissemination and has reinforced the notion that the best way to understand children is by considering them as little scientists: from a very early age, infants engage in calculations, discoveries, hypothesis testing, and law formation. To review this analogy, we examine the case of joint attention development. Two psychological theories that aim to explain this development embody this analogy: modular theory (Baron-Cohen, 1996, 1995) and intentionalism (Carpenter et al., 1998). The analogy reaches its peak in the modular theory of joint attention, which culminates in the theory-theory version of the theory of mind. However, intentionalism aligns more with a simulation theory interpretation of the same function but still shares the analogy. The common assumption underlying both views is that the infant maintains a third-person relationship with the world—acting as a detached observer capable of making complex inferences and adjusting means to well-defined ends once cognitive capacities allow for self-representation and representing others. In modularism and intentionalism, the analogy of the baby as a scientist is expressed in a sort of instrumentalist stance. From the modularism standpoint, brain architecture allows for the instrumentalization of the world through the reading of intentions in others from very early in development, which accounts for a first-person take on the world and other people. Instead, in intentionalism, the ability to interact from a third-person perspective comes from the sensorimotor capacities of the baby to rationalize instrumentally (Tomasello, 1995, 2007). The baby knows how to act instrumentally and how goals intentionally determine actions and means to get them. So, to understand others, the baby takes a third-person approach and, by inferential analogy, projects his own capacities and intentions over the others. In other words, infants' understanding of others is necessarily the result of their conceiving themselves as agents, and by simulation, they understand others as agents since they are “like me” (Meltzoff & Brooks, 2013). The baby scientist analogy and the two theories rely on wired-in internal or biologically driven mechanisms that prioritize mental representations, suggesting a solipsistic view of development. These mechanisms to propose laws and hypotheses testing do not capture the important features of joint attention, that is, the interaction between the participants in developmentally relevant social interaction situations. Instead, it focuses just on causal language like neurobiology about conditioned and unconditioned reflexes, or encapsulated structures, to explain the joint attention phenomenon and the infant's psychological development. Following the studies from Trevarthen, Hobson (2002), Reddy (2018), and Español, we hold that an infant’s activity is impoverished when explained solely through this kind of language and models. We hold that the third- and first-person approach should be replaced with a second-person perspective focusing on the interaction between the baby, the environment, and their caregivers. The enactive experientialist-emotional explanation of joint attention embodies our perspective (Suárez-Acevedo, 2021, Suárez y Pérez, 2019). The goal is to integrate this model's empirical evidence and ideas into a broader framework that makes justice to the richness of infants' psychological lives (Hobson, 2002). Within this approach, the instrumentalist stance is reviewed under the light of a contemplative one. That is, there is a distance between the baby and the world, which determines how they interact with it. The baby shows interest and can contemplate the world without necessarily engaging with it to pursue specific ends. Werner and Kaplan (1963) argue that this stance emerges gradually through intersubjective experiences focused on the external world, beginning very early on. According to this, the ability to interact from a third-person perspective is an evolutionary achievement akin to instrumentalization rather than an innate starting point. They hold that infants are interested in (self-)reproducing outcomes to re-experience the pleasure of what they find novel and engaging (Rochat, 2004). The contemplative stance motivates focused exploration of means rather than goal achievement, making it crucial in the early months of life. This exploration centers on enjoyment and recognition of the environment, relying on the infant's present movement within a specific space and time. Such contemplative exploration forms the foundation for the later adaptation of previously explored means to achieve goals (such as requesting objects). Contemplation is ontogenetically primary, though this does not preclude the possibility that, through development, we learn to instrumentalize our cognition. Empiric research shows than in the early months of life, dyadic intersubjective experiences do not depend on representational capacities of self and others but rather on the reciprocity of relationships. This reciprocity manifests in synchronized movements, mutual gazes, and the vitality of the relationship—purely the joy of being with the other. Trevarthen (2008) and Español (2010) emphasize that this synchrony can be characterized in terms of musicality: rhythm, intensity, tone, vibration, volume, accord, harmony, and melody. Hence, it has been proposed that psychological development can be well understood in aesthetic terms. Our embodied emotionality is inherently musical and is enacted whenever our bids for connection are acknowledged or when we accept an invitation to perceive the world as someone else does. Infants do not merely discover. They create alongside others, engaging their vitality in relational interactions. Considering this, we argue that the new analogy could be the baby as an artisan, a more fitting model for understanding child development. Much like an experienced artisan's craft, psychological development unfolds through the dialogical and creative interplay of movement and emotionality, which permeates our relationships with the natural world when socially guided (Brinck & Reddy, 2019). Within this framework, cognition is fundamentally embodied, enactive, embedded in the environment, and extended, all within a reciprocal dynamic between the infant and their surroundings.