Philosophical Explorations

Vol. 11, No. 3, September 2008, 211– 218

Some ways to understand people

Gregory Currie
Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Shaun Gallagher and Dan Hutto claim that those once bitter rivals, simulation theory and theory-
theory, are now to be treated as partners in crime. It’s true that the debate has become more
nuanced, with detailed suggestions abroad as to how these two approaches might peaceably
divide the field. And there is common ground between them, at least to the extent that they
agree on what needs to be explained. But I see no fatal flaw in what they share. In particular, I
reject the idea that most interpersonal understanding can be accounted for without the
postulation of mechanisms for inferring beliefs and desires. I also query the claim that
simulation mechanisms have a very limited explanatory scope, and argue for the existence of
such mechanisms at sub-personal levels. I suggest that Gallagher and Hutto’s strictures against
false belief tests are unwarranted, and their conclusions about the role of narrative in
interpersonal understanding are unfounded.

Keywords: simulation theory; theory theory; interpersonal understanding

Some ways to understand people

Simulation theory (ST) has gone, in 20 short years, from radical alternative to boring orthodoxy,
irreproachably conservative in its assumptions about how we understand the mind. So say Shaun
Gallagher and Dan Hutto, whose writings, single and jointly, offer a perspective from which these
once bitter rivals – ST and theory-theory (TT) – now look like partners in crime. It’s true that the
debate has become more nuanced, with detailed suggestions abroad as to how these two
approaches might divide the field.1 And there is common ground between them, at least to
the extent that they agree on what needs to be explained. But I see no fatal flaw in what they
share. At best the Gallagher – Hutto package is a supplement to whatever comes out of this
debate; it provides no reason for turning away from it.

What is in dispute?
What is it that ST and TT agree needs explaining? They agree that we have beliefs about other
people’s mental states, in particular about their beliefs and desires, and they offer conflicting
explanations of how, in at least some cases, this comes about.
There are things Gallagher and Hutto say which suggest a strong contrast between these two
approaches and their own. Their aim is to give an ‘adequate account of our everyday intersubjective
abilities for understanding the intentions and the behaviors of other persons’ (Gallagher and Hutto
2008, 18). On the account they offer, we do not need to invoke either simulation or theory as the


Email: Gregory.Currie@nottingham.ac.uk

ISSN 1386-9795 print/ISSN 1741-5918 online

# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13869790802239243
http://www.informaworld.com
212 Gregory Currie

means by which we acquire intersubjective understanding, because this understanding is given to us

directly in our interactive, properly contextualized encounters with other people, together with the
right kinds of narratives, about which I will say something later. These things, they say, are ‘sufficient
to deliver the nuanced adult capacity for understanding (as well as for mis-understanding) others’
(Gallagher and Hutto 2008, 22). ST and TT both make the mistake of thinking that intersubjective
understanding is a matter of making inferences to hidden mental states – typically beliefs and
desires – and they disagree merely about how this is done. Whereas in fact ‘In seeing the actions
and expressive movements of the other person one already sees their meaning; no inference to a
hidden set of mental states (beliefs, desires, etc.) is necessary’ (Gallagher and Hutto 2008, 22).
This suggests a stark contrast between the ST/TT coalition and the Gallagher –Hutto theory.
But other things they say suggest a more peaceable opinion, allowing a legitimate region of inter-
pretive phenomena to which simulation and/or theory apply, or at least concerning which it is
not obviously false that they apply:

Thus, before we are in a position to theorize, simulate, explain or predict mental states in others, we are
already in a position to interact with and to understand others in terms of their expressions, gestures,
intentions, and emotions, and how they act toward ourselves and others . . . [This] underpins those
developmentally later, and occasional, practices that may involve explaining or predicting mental
states in others. (Gallagher and Hutto 2008, 20, my emphasis)

Here Gallagher and Hutto seem to be claiming only that ‘primary intersubjectivity’ is developmen-
tally prior to and essential for the development of theory and/or simulation. Who among the ST/TT
folk would deny this? Theorists in both camps have insisted that well before children acquire belief-
desire psychology there is much going on which underpins competent interaction with other
people, and some have speculated on what these precursor states might be. If their speculations
do not give rise to hypotheses the same as those of Gallagher and Hutto, that is incidental: neither
ST nor TT commits anyone to a view about exactly what these precursor states are.
Still, there is disagreement here, for Gallagher and Hutto say that theory/simulation are not
merely later developments: they are ‘occasional’ practices. So while ST/TT folk have treated inter-
subjective understanding as being centrally a matter of inference to beliefs and desires, this sort
of intersubjective understanding is in fact rather unusual and certainly peripheral to the normal
range of human interactions, which proceed, by and large, without such cerebral and reflective
activities.
I am sceptical about this proposition. We interact with people in all sorts of ways: we negotiate
our way past them on the subway, we occasionally attend to their urgent needs, we converse,
barter, compete and co-operate with them. Our dealings with them may last a few seconds or
a lifetime. For anything more than a momentary interaction, where a person’s intention is
clear from his or her bodily disposition, we need to understand a great deal more about them
than their current intentions (I am assuming here that Gallagher and Hutto will not want to
argue that a person’s long-term intentions, say, to attend college in a year’s time, are readable
from their expression and bodily posture). And it is not merely that we need to predict or
explain their behaviour, though that is certainly something which has been much emphasized,
perhaps overemphasized, in the theory of mind literature. As Adam Morton and Jane Heal
have both insisted, there are all sorts of ways in which we want to know what people believe
or desire which have nothing directly to do with making predictions about how they will
behave, or giving explanations for how they have behaved. We want to annoy or please or
placate people; generally, this is part of wanting to make a difference to their behaviour,
though a difference we could not really pin down to specific predictions. And doing these
 Some Ways to Understand People 213

things requires us to have views about their beliefs and desires. In deceiving people we try to get
them to have false beliefs; we could hardly do this if we had no ideas about what they already
believed. And co-operating with people depends on having some sense of what they desire,
as well as of what they believe. I co-operate with you confidently as long as I believe that you
share my desire, and my belief about how to achieve it; I will become doubtful or suspicious
when that belief weakens or disappears.
Our place in a community of agents is not secured merely by being able to read, more or less
automatically, the immediate practical intentions of our fellows as expressed in their socially situ-
ated bodily comportment. It involves seeing ourselves as related to others as rational agents with
beliefs and desires many of which are relatively stable, and many of which, insofar as they are sus-
ceptible to change, are sensitive to strategic influences concerning what others think and want.
And these assumptions about beliefs and desires are able to provide us with the materials on
which we base our interactions with other people over the middle, long, and sometimes the
short terms. In these interactions we need to know, not merely what someone will do, but what
they would or might do, or think, or want in a range of circumstances, including those where
their actions or thoughts are materially affected by our own actions. Having a grip on people’s rela-
tively stable beliefs and desires is a very good way of doing that. Thus I am inclined to accept some-
thing which Gallagher has called the supposition of universality:

Our reliance on theory (or our reliance on simulation or some combination of theory and simulation) is
close to universal. That is, this folk-psychological way of understanding and interacting with others is
pervasive in our everyday life. (Gallagher 2004, 200)

But holding this principle is consistent with thinking that, while the use of some method – simu-
lation, or theory, or both – of finding out beliefs and desires is close to universal, it regularly goes
along with, and indeed depends on, the use of more primitive modes of intersubjective under-
standing which include, for all I know, the perceptual methods suggested by Gallagher and Hutto.

Personal and sub-personal

In this assertive mood, it is tempting for an advocate of ST to claim back even more territory. The
move consists in asking, of those cases where it seems plausible that we know with some imme-
diacy, on the basis of a perceptual confrontation, what a person’s mental state is, how this actu-
ally happens. The evidence as I understand it suggests that in some cases at least it happens
because of the operation of processes which can be called simulative in a broad sense. There
is evidence that understanding people’s emotions involves the activation, in ourselves, of that
very emotion, and people who have a deficit in experiencing a certain emotion often have a com-
parable deficit in recognizing that emotion in others (see Adolphs, Tranel, and Damasio 2003).
Interestingly, other, ‘extended’ aspects of human cognition may turn out to be understood in
the same way. It has been suggested that we read other people’s handwriting (which often cor-
responds very little to the shaping of a canonical letter) by engaging in a motor simulation of the
action necessary to perform the inscription we see; this gives us a clue as to what letter was
intended by the action as originally performed (see Knoblich et al. 2002). We might also think,
with the early advocates of empathic approaches to the arts, that aesthetic perception
depends partly on simulative processes; on this view we could not appreciate the aesthetic
force of a load-bearing architectural column unless we responded to the sight of it with a
sense of inner striving as of supporting a great weight (see Currie 2008). As you can see from
my examples, cases in this domain range from the well-supported to the largely speculative,
214 Gregory Currie

but to the extent that we accept them, should we think of cases like these as falling within the
purview of ST? Gallagher and Hutto say no:

Implicit approaches to ST appeal to the neuroscience of mirror neurons and shared representations,
but there is no justification for calling these sub-personal processes simulation, since according to ST,
simulation is defined as using a first-person model to form third-person ‘as if’ or ‘pretend’ mental
states. In sub-personal processes, there is no first- or third-person, nothing (or no one) is using a
model, and neuronal processes cannot pretend. (Gallagher and Hutto 2008, 19)

It is persons who have beliefs and desires, and where we ape another’s reasoning, we do so by
having – that is ourselves having – pretend versions of those beliefs and desires. Now take the
case of emotion-recognition: here, it is said, a person recognizes the emotion of another by
having that very emotion triggered within herself. Isn’t that a case of person-level simulation?
You might resist this by saying that there is no consciousness of the emotion on the part of
the observer and that all that is happening is that areas of the brain are activated which are nor-
mally implicated in the experiencing of emotions; so this is a case of the activation of brain pro-
cesses – a sub-personal matter – and not of the having of emotions. I disagree. In these
situations the presence of a felt emotion is sometimes detectable introspectively, though the
emotion may not be very salient without a special effort of attention; many states at or below
the threshold of awareness are person-level states. It is the same with belief-desire simulation,
which no one claims is always something we are aware of. If we agree that person-level simu-
lations of reasoning can take place of which we are not conscious, why not say the same
about person-level simulations of emotion? If, on the other hand, unawareness makes the
emotion case a case of the activation of sub-personal mechanisms, unawareness should have
the same effect in the case of belief-desire simulation, and it would no longer be true, as
Gallagher and Hutto claim, that simulation, as described in ST, is an essentially person-level
phenomenon ‘that cannot be legitimately applied to sub-personal processes’.
Perhaps Gallagher and Hutto can point to another significant difference between belief-desire
simulation and the mechanisms that support emotion-perception. Their emphasis, in opposing
both ST and TT, is on the inferential nature of the understanding of others that is supposed to
be an axiom of ST and TT alike. And since they claim that interpersonal understanding is not,
by and large, inferential, perhaps all they need say is that, while there might be various things
with legitimate claim to the label simulation, ST itself is committed to an inferential model
which the ‘simulations’ taking place elsewhere don’t support. Call emotion perception simu-
lation-based if you like, they might say, but it certainly is not inferential.
Is it true that belief-desire simulation is inferential? What is true is that it is the simulation of an
inferential process: it is the simulation of practical and theoretical reasoning. Simulation of
emotion is not inferential in this sense, since emotional processes are not inferential. But it is a
further question as to whether the knowledge we gain from any given kind of simulation – be
it inferential or not – is gained by inference. Gallagher and Hutto’s claim is that the knowledge
gained from belief-desire simulation is knowledge gained by inference while the knowledge
gained by what they call ‘sub-personal’ means is not. I don’t know why they are confident of
this. If ‘inferential’ means, as Recanati suggests it should, that the knowledge is grounded in
another judgement, and this grounding is accessible to consciousness, then ST is not committed
to the view that the beliefs we gain by simulating other people’s beliefs and desires are beliefs
that we infer.2 It might be that we have certain natural inclinations to form beliefs about other
people’s beliefs and desires on the basis of simulation processes to which we have limited con-
scious access, and would not, at least in many cases, be able to say what grounded the belief.
 Some Ways to Understand People 215

Perhaps our simulation-generated beliefs about other people’s beliefs are sometimes derived
by inference, and sometimes arrived at by other, non-inferential means. If that is the case (and
why shouldn’t it be?) ST would count as a theory which covers some cases of beliefs about
mental states which are non-inferentially arrived at. And then there would be no grounds for
denying that such processes as those that underpin the recognition of emotion are simulative
processes. So everything depends, for Gallagher and Hutto, on being able to show that ST is com-
mitted to the proposition that our knowledge of beliefs and desires is always arrived at by infer-
ence when it is based on the mirroring, within our own selves, of the agent’s inferential processes.
It seems to me unlikely that this could be established.

False belief tests

Gallagher and Hutto (2008) say that ‘there is good evidence from developmental psychology
that our ability to understand others emerges much earlier than TT or ST would predict’.
What predictions about this do ST and TT actually make? It is helpful to distinguish, as some
philosophers of science have done, between research programmes and specific theories
which embody the principles and methods of a given research programme. ST and TT are
really best thought of as research programmes, not theories; they are somewhat unspecific pro-
posals about how to explain intersubjective understanding, and they make specific predictions
only in conjunction with auxiliary hypotheses. Thus simulation theorists will tend to look for evi-
dence that children use simulation methods to understand other people’s beliefs, from when-
ever it is that children start understanding belief, and simulation theory does not tell us when
that is. For a while we were told that this sort of understanding emerged rather late in devel-
opment – at around age four – and this was justified by reference to false belief tests such as
the famous Maxi experiment. On the other hand, there is also long-standing evidence that,
under certain conditions, children display a sensitivity to false belief before that age. Much
more recently, Onishi and Baillargeon (2005) have shown that, in a non-verbal false belief
test, children as young as 15 months show surprise when the Maxi character looks in the
correct box – when in fact, given what she has seen, she should be looking in the wrong
box. There is currently a dispute about whether we should conclude from this that children
this young understand false belief, but I see no reason why advocates of either ST or TT
should insist that this must be the wrong interpretation of the results; their position ought
rather to be to accept whatever the evidence best suggests concerning the first glimmerings
of such understanding, and then to look for an explanation of that understanding consistent
with their own principles.3
Gallagher has suggested that false belief tests are of very limited value in telling us anything
about interpersonal understanding because they test children’s capacity for conscious reasoning
about other people. But this is not true of the non-verbal version of the test which is used by
Onishi and Baillargeon to test false belief understanding in children at 15 months; nor is it true
of the versions developed by Alain Tschudin (2006) for testing false belief understanding in bot-
tlenose dolphins. These tests, which do not involve attempts to mimic interactive ‘second person’
relations between subjects, have generated interesting evidence that false belief understanding
is within the reach not only of infants but of non-human mammals. While these results are
controversial, they indicate that false belief tests offer a rich method for generating theories of
interpersonal understanding – though no one, I hope, will claim that they could not benefit
from being supplemented by other kinds of tests.
216 Gregory Currie

Kinds of interaction
Gallagher and Hutto emphasize that we need to see human interpersonal understanding as
socially situated, as something that takes place, primarily, as part of our engagement with con-
specifics in an environment which is predominantly a social one. But there are different forms
of engagement which exemplify this pattern. Consider the sorts of cases which might have pre-
vailed in the environment of evolutionary development. One sort is exemplified in cases where
two or more people, face to face, are engaged in some urgent joint activity: stalking prey, fighting
with an enemy or with each other, erecting a shelter. In these sorts of cases a perceptually based
understanding of the other will be useful, though I would not say that simulation-based under-
standing of belief and desire would be irrelevant even here. But there are other kinds of inter-
actions which our ancestors may have spent a lot of time on and which were responses to
problems that arise in complex social situations. Grooming is one, and, some say that when
the social dynamics got so complex that we had to spend all day grooming to get anywhere
socially, we conveniently invented language. That meant we could gossip instead of groom,
and cut down on the time necessary for cementing social relations.4 Gossip involves intense
social interaction, but with a slightly speculative and detached air; there are normally no pressing
issues to do with what your partner intends to do in the next moment or two, and there may not
be very much that is readable in his or her face. The situation is as thoroughly second person and
engaged as one could look for, yet here the need for mind-reading in terms of beliefs and desires
is very obvious.
Human interactions lie on a continuum the extremes of which are marked by, on the left,
activities for which a purely perceptually based grasp of another’s intentions will serve and, on
the right, activities for which belief-desire simulation on its own is sufficient. Most of this inter-
action lies somewhere in between the extremes, and involves both perceptually based under-
standing of agency and representation of beliefs and desires.

Narratives
Hutto and Gallagher emphasize the importance of narrative in our developing understanding of
others. It seems to play two roles for them:
(1) Giving us access to folk psychology, but to a practical rather than a theoretical grasp of
folk psychology.
(2) Providing us with ways to avoid belief-desire explanations of people’s behaviour.

I’ll comment just on the second of these. In the example given by Gallagher and Hutto, we
wonder why it is that someone we know, Laura, is going to India. We might speculate, folk psy-
chologically, on the reasons, but we might have access to Laura’s ‘life story’, and know that ‘Laura
is going to India because she is going to work with children in a rural village’. How is this avoiding
attribution of belief and desire? You might say that narrative makes folk-psychological attribution
unnecessary since narratives like this one explain people’s behaviour without using folk-
psychological vocabulary. Why did Laura go to India? To help children. Why did Laura put up
an umbrella? Because it was raining.5 But the absence of folk-psychological terms here is
explained on Gricean grounds. If we say that Mary went to India because she wanted to help
children, or that she put up the umbrella because she believed it was raining, we implicate
that she might not, in fact, have been well placed to help children when she got there, or that
it might not really have been raining. Putting it the way we do communicates that she had
 Some Ways to Understand People 217

the relevant belief or desire – without explicitly saying so – and that the state of the world was
appropriate to that belief or desire. If, having told you Mary’s story in this way, you discovered
that, due to some bizarre development in the people trafficking trade, Mary had been forcibly
transported to India to work with children, or if it turned out that, while it had been raining at
the time, Mary had not believed that it was raining, the ‘narrative’ accounts I had offered you
would seem highly misleading. That would be hard to understand if the narratives had no implicit
content concerning Mary’s beliefs and desires.
There is something puzzling about the suggestion that an emphasis on the role of narratives in
understanding people’s reasons provides an explanation of the mechanisms by which we acquire
understanding of people’s beliefs and desires. An advocate of ST is likely to agree enthusiastically
that narratives help us build up our folk-psychological competence, because they scaffold our
early attempts to simulate people’s practical and theoretical reasoning. But no amount of empha-
sis on the role of narratives explains anything about intersubjective understanding unless it goes
with an account of how it is that we come to learn from narratives why it is that people act as they
do. As I have just noted, folk-psychological narratives are often not explicit about people’s beliefs
and desires. Assuming, as I think we must, that understanding the activities of the people
described in such narratives (people such as Laura in the example above) involves coming to
appreciate their beliefs and desires, there remains the question of how this is done. ST has, at
least, an answer to this: we do it by putting ourselves, imaginatively, in the positions of the
story’s protagonists, taking as many cues from the story as to the mental adjustments necessary,
and then see what decision-making processes flow naturally from all this. The theory may be
wrong, but it is, at least, an answer to the right question.

Notes
1. For an empirically detailed account of what ST should concede to TT in its account of the development of
mind-reading, see Mitchell, Currie, and Zeigler (forthcoming).
2. See Recanati (2004, section 3.2). Recanati’s is just one account of what it is for knowledge to be inferen-
tial; there are other accounts, and I am not aware of any that would make it mandatory to say that knowl-
edge gained by simulation is inferential.
3. I emphasize again that neither ST not TT theorists are obliged to say that understanding of false belief,
however early it occurs, is the first stage in interpersonal understanding.
4. So it is argued by Dunbar (1997).
5. Gallagher and Hutto (2008, 30) say ‘we do not use folk psychological narratives nearly as often as the
tradition supposes’.

Notes on contributor
Gregory Currie teaches philosophy at the University of Nottingham. His most recent book is Arts
and Minds (Oxford, 2004). He is currently a British Academy Senior Research Fellow, working on
irony and point of view in art and literature.

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