"Mental simulation, Tacit Theory, and the Threat of Collapse" Davies and Stone (2001)

DRAFT (to be proofread)

-Firstly, A GENERAL QUESTION: Why is (so) important the alternative between theory- theory and simulation? What is at stake?

            One possible aspect of this question might be the idea of knowledge in theory-theory involving laws, generalizations, and/or formal rules. Simulation does not require knowledge in this sense.

It is clear the relevance of unconscious processes in our behaviour and even many psychologists point out how they underlie conscious mental states (and cause them, at least to some extent); the problem is whether to account for those unconscious processes in terms of (tacit) knowledge is justified. It is thought that human beings have a kind of innate unconscious system to produce language; due to this system we “know” how to use language, although we are no aware of the system itself. I think that this system is not “knowledge”, because there are different kinds of unconscious processes or unconscious mental phenomena and not all of them have to be knowledge. In my opinion, a key concept which I have not seen in these papers is memory: tacit knowledge should be something that you have stored in your memory and may be accessible. However, an innate and unconscious Universal Grammar (Chomsky) is not stored in the memory in this way. According to this criterion the ability to predict/interpret/explain the behaviour of other people could depend partly on tacit knowledge, but also on unconscious capacities not stored in memory (for example, mirror neurons and their operations). As a general rule, things that are innate are not stored in memory, but in other systems (or ways); therefore they is no (tacit) knowledge.

Possibly the notion of explicit representation somehow corresponds to the criterion based on memory, although they differ in some respects (interesting: analyzing these differences).

Explicit representation may be another controversial issue:

Does require tacit knowledge explicit representation?

The answer given by Heal is NO. But is more difficult to see why or how Davies and Stone connect this question to “the mirroning relation between causal structure and derivational structure” (it seems to me that this relation is, at least apparently, similar to the relation between syntax (causal) and semantic (inferential) in Fodor).

What does mean explicit representation? (An answer is provided in the article: language-like format, sentence-like representations).

PERSONAL AND SUBPERSONAL LEVELS

 The final goal of the debate, as far as I know, concerns interpretations/predictions/explanations at the level of folk psychology[A1] . Since folk psychology runs at the personal level, this level turns out to be crucial. On the other hand, it may be uncontroversial that there are specific relations between personal and subpersonal levels (for example in so far as it is known that mental personal behaviour is connected to particular neural activity), the point is to figure out the nature of these relations and when they are relevant (autonomy, reduction, etc. –By the way, autonomy is relative, that is, concerns to a particular aspect or description, as there are actual relations-). Therefore, there are also subpersonal levels which can be considered if it is showed that they are relevant regarding the personal level. Several problems might be found in this respect: the distinction between biological (mainly neurobiological) subpersonal levels, physical - chemical levels, and psychological subpersonal levels (information processing mechanisms could be just a theory about these levels but I am not very familiar with this concept) is sometimes not taken into account.

QUESTION:

Although subpersonal levels are always unconscious, can be considered any unconscious mental state as a personal?

---

 [A1]So, related to mindreading, to the theory of mind issue and to social cognition. But also to the computational theory of mind and AI (in Fodor explicitely).