Radicalizing Mindshaping: Toward an Ecological Approach to Social Cognition

Opposing the inherited mindreading view, Zawidzki has defended the thesis that mindshaping, as the practice through which we regulate both our behavior and that of our fellows, constitutes the linchpin of social cognition. Mindshaping is taken to be a further development of the neobehaviorist program of naturalizing intentionality in the wake of Dennett’s intentional stance, for which intentional states help track behavioral patterns instead of being neurally-implemented mental states, as in teleosemantics neocartesianism. However, Zawidzki’s use of teleosemantics to explain how those behavior regulation processes are possible commits him to a form of representationalism that undermines his neobehaviorist program of naturalizing intentionality, and threatens his mindshaping thesis, for neurally-implemented mental states would render some form of mindreading priority for social cognition. Our aim here is to propose an anti-representationalist reading of mindshaping through ecological psychology, showing how it is not only sympathetic to Zawidzki’s ideas, but also that it offers a simpler, yet fruitful theory of radical embodied social cognition.