Minds as social institutions
نویسنده
چکیده
I will first discuss how social interactions organize, coordinate, and specialize as “artifacts,” tools; how these tools are not only for coordination but for achieving something, for some outcome (goal/function), for a collective work. In particular, I will argue that these artifacts specify (predict and prescribe) the mental contents of the participants, both in terms of beliefs and acceptances and in terms of motives and plans. We have to revise the behavioristic view of “scripts” and “roles”; when we play a role we wear a “mind.” No collective action would be possible without shared and/or ascribed mental contents. This is also very crucial for a central form of automatic mind-reading (mind ascription). Second, I will argue that often what really matters is the ascribed/prescribed, worn, mind not the real, private one. We have to play (like in the symbolic play) “as if” we had those mental contents. This social convention and mutual assumption makes the interaction work. The ascribed beliefs and goals are not necessarily explicitly there; they might be just implicit as inactive (we act just by routine and automatically) or implicit as potential. The coordination and social action works thanks to these “as if” (ascribed and pretended) minds, thanks to those conventional constructs. Our social minds for social interactions are coordination artifacts and social institutions.
منابع مشابه
Changing Gender Stereotypes in Iran
Abstract In recent decades, because of the vast socio-cultural changes which occurred in Iran, Iranian women have experienced new values and identities and they have achieved more advanced education and consciousness, so that they oppose the gender stereotypes which attribute inferior characteristics to women and cause inequalities and limitations in their everyday life. Although gender stereo...
متن کاملThe Devil's in the details: Mental institutions and proper engagement
In the “Socially Extended Mind,” Shaun Gallagher further develops the theory, introduced in “Mental Institutions” (Gallagher & Crisafi, 2009), that social institutions can become part of a cognitive system. Building on first wave theories of the extended mind, Gallagher (2013) argues that just as our minds are capable of coupling with artifacts in the environment to form larger cognitive system...
متن کاملNormative cognition: a uniquely human cognitive capacity
Normative cognition – a uniquely human cognitive capacity ’Normative cognition’ is a ’mongrel’ concept covering human cognition of symbolically mediated normative information. Humans have social and cultural cognition of which normative cognition is a subset. Humans can produce, distribute, acquire and implement social norms and values. Normative cognition requires certain cognitive skills such...
متن کامل9 Identities , Roles , and Social Institutions
We locate the micro-foundations of social order in the cultural meanings of institutional identities and roles, the daily enactment of which ensures social order through the continual reproduction and legitimation of social institutions. Following discussion of a general conceptual model, we discuss two complementary, micro-level explanations of social order: a cognitive approach combining a cl...
متن کاملThe XIX International Workshop on Coordination , Organizations , Institutions and Norms in Multiagent Systems COIN @ AAMAS 2015
Norms are within minds and out of minds; they work thanks to their mental implementations but also thanks to their externalized supports, processing, diffusion, and behavioral messages. This is the normal and normative working of Ns. Ns is not simply a behavioral and collective fact, 'normality’ or an institution; but they necessarily are mental artifacts. Ns change follows the same circuit. In...
متن کامل