Mentalism and Mechanism

the twin modes of human cognition

Christopher Badcock PhD.,

Reader in Sociology, University of London

The following article, commissioned as a chapter to appear in Human Nature and Social Values:
Implications of Evolutionary Psychology for Public Policy edited by Charles Crawford &
Catherine Salmon (Erlbaum, 2003), sets out a new paradigm for thinking about many fundamental
controversies in human thought especially the fact/value, science/humanities, nature/nurture and
mind/brain ones.

Anti-mentalism

Much of the difficulty that people have had in the past with evolutionary approaches to
human psychology and behaviour arose from the tendency of twentieth-century
evolutionists to ignore the mind and concentrate wholly on genes and/or behaviour.
According to George Williams, one of the most important of twentieth-century
Darwinists:

only confusion can arise from the use of an animal-mind concept in any
explanatory role in biological studies of behaviour. Mind may be self evident
to most people, but I see only a remote possibility of its being made logically or
empirically evident. I feel intuitively that my daughters horse has a mind. I am
even more convinced that my daughter has. Neither conclusion is supported by
reason or evidence. Only if it violates physical laws would mind be a factor that
biologists would have to deal with. There is no such evidence for mind as an
entity that interferes with physical processes, and therefore there can be no
physical or biological science of mind. no kind of material reductionism can
approach any mental phenomenon.

Williams concludes that the solution to the non-objectivity of mind is to exclude mind
from all biological discussion. Elsewhere Williams castigates what he calls lubricious
slides into discussions of pleasure and anxiety and other concepts proper to the mental
domain as nothing other than flights of unreason on the part of authors who claim to

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have provided a physical explanation of mental phenomena (Williams, 1985; Williams,
1996).

Anti-mentalism was typical of most twentieth-century Darwinists and students of animal

behaviour. Similar comments to those of Williams quoted just now can be found in the
work of the ethologists, Niko Tinbergen (1907-88) and Konrad Lorenz (1903-89). These
writers concentrated on observed behaviour and mistrusted mental terms, which were
often dismissed as anthropomorphic (that is, committing the error of attributing human
thoughts and feelings to animals). Such views have been perpetuated and popularized by
their pupils, such as Dawkins (Dawkins, 1995).

To this extent, evolutionary anti-mentalism resembled that of the behaviourist movement,

which dominated mid-twentieth century academic psychology. Behaviourism derived its
name from its dogmatic assertion that the mind was a black box that could not be
opened and whose internal workings science could not speculate about. All that could be
studied objectively was what went into it in the form of stimuli and what came out of it
as observed behaviour. Nothing else could be said. Behaviourism was the study of
behaviour, not of the mind mindless psychology, if ever there was.

The result of such views was what you might call evolutionary, genetic or ethological
behaviourism: explanations of behaviour that went directly from the evolutionary,
genetic, or ethological factors proposed to the observed behavioural result. Such an
approach neglected the mental level of explanation altogether, and at times left you
wondering why organisms that have them have minds at all so irrelevant did they seem
to behaviour. Where human beings were concerned, evolutionary, genetic or ethological
behaviourism prompted understandable protests that such an approach was
reductionistic and diminished people to the status of mindless robots, controlled by their
genes or evolutionary programming to act in ways essentially no different from the way
in which an ant or an amoeba might behave.

Theory of mind

According to Premack and Woodruff, who originated the term, theory of mind describes
the ability to infer that other people experience mental states like our own. They claim
that such a capacity may properly be viewed as a theory because mental states are not
directly observable, and can be used to make predictions about the behaviours of others
(Premack & W oodruff, 1978).

Conversely, the inability to attribute such states to others that is seen in autism has been
graphically described as mindblindness. People with autism tend to be insensitive to
other peoples feelings, are poor at interpreting others intentions, beliefs and knowledge,
and often fail to anticipate the reactions that other people will have to their behaviour.
They have difficulty dealing with misunderstandings, and are often unable to practice,

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detect, or understand deception. The result is that their behaviour often seems bizarre,
callous, or childish to others (Baron-Cohen & Howlin, 1993).

Experiments suggest that normal children acquire a theory of mind between the ages of
three and five, but that autistic children are notably lacking in this respect. Studies show
that autistic children do not differ from others in their ability to understand the functions
of an internal organ like the heart. Nor are they deficient in their knowledge about the
location of organs such as liver or brain. However, whereas other children are able to
understand that the brain has purely mental functions, autistic children tend to associate
it only with behavioural functions, so that it appears that specifically mental,
unobservable events are beyond their comprehension. As Simon Baron-Cohen puts it,
Lacking a theory of mind is in one sense akin to viewing the world as a behaviorist
(Baron-Cohen, 1989).

Today a great deal of evidence of many kinds has accumulated in support of the view that
theory of mind deficits characterize autism (Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen,
2000). Indeed, research has even begun to reveal the brain structures that might be
involved. In a recent experiment using brain-imaging, ten autistic and ten normal subjects
viewed animations of two moving triangles on a screen in three different conditions:
moving randomly, moving in a goal-directed fashion (chasing, fighting), and moving
interactively with implied intentions (coaxing, tricking). The last condition frequently
elicited descriptions in terms of mental states that viewers attributed to the triangles. The
autism group gave fewer and less accurate descriptions of these latter animations, but
equally accurate descriptions of the other animations compared with the controls. While
viewing animations that elicited mentalizing, in contrast to randomly moving shapes, the
normal group showed increased activation in parts of the brain previously identified with
theory of mind functions. The autism group showed less activation than the normal group
in all these regions (Castelli, Frith, Happ, & Frith, 2002).

Direction of gaze

From an evolutionary point of view, a plausible origin for theory of mind might be found
in direction of gaze. Primates are typified by forward-rotated eyes, often to the extent that
the visual axes of the eyes are practically parallel (as in the human case). The benefit of
this is excellent stereoscopic vision, which would have served their ancestors well in the
arboreal habitat in which primates almost certainly first evolved. However, the cost is a
notable reduction in field of vision, particularly when compared with the almost
panoramic view enjoyed by most mammals whose visual fields normally only overlap to
a limited amount at the front, leaving only a small blind area behind the head. The result
is that primates have become more social (and more vocal) so as to gain the advantage of
many different pairs of eyes (Allman, 1999).

Primates have also compensated by becoming sensitive to the direction of gaze of others.

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This is particularly important because, not only can it tell you where the others in the
group are looking, it can also give useful clues about what they are seeing, their state of
mind, and intentions. (Indeed, an analogy now exists in military technology: radars
function essential like eyes, and like them can be directed. Rules of engagement in some
recent conflicts have allowed pilots to interpret a lock-on to their aircraft by an enemy
radar as hostile, and to react immediately rather than wait for the missile-launch or gun-
attack that might be expected to follow.)

In other words, not only may direction of gaze have an important social dimension in
primates like human beings, it also may have evolved as a critical and fundamental factor
in primate sociality from the beginning. What might at first have seemed an after-effect
of social behaviour, or a trivial detail in it, now begins to take on the appearance of a
central, strategic social adaptation.

There is now good evidence that autistics are notably lacking in awareness of direction
of gaze, and are poor at interpreting its psychological significance. If there is indeed a
mental module specialized for gaze-monitoring as some have speculated, it appears to be
defective in their case. However, there are also reasons for thinking that it could be over-
active, or at least that some people may over-interpret its output. Here the best example
is the delusion of being watched or spied-on that is so typical of paranoia.

The most famous paranoiac in the psychiatric literature was Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-
1911), a German high-court judge who published an autobiographical account of his
illness that was later the subject of a paper by Sigmund Freud (Freud, 1911; Schreber,
1903). Schreber included in it a section entitled Direction of Gaze long before the
subject had been introduced into discussions of theory of mind (chapter XVIII).
According to Schreber the sun was a living being who spoke to him in human language,
or was the organ of a higher being lying behind it (Schreber, 1903:47). Although
impossible before his illness, in the course of it Schreber believed he could look at the sun
without blinking indeed, the suns rays visibly paled before him when he did so (quoted
by Freud, 1911: 53-4).

Schreber also often railed at the sun, which at times he saw as Gods eye, and paranoiacs
are often morbidly sensitive to other peoples direction of gaze to the extent of
interpreting it as hostile and/or intrusive. Indeed, they sometimes feel that they are being
watched even when no one is there. Nowadays they often extend this naturally-evolved
sensitivity about direction of gaze to modern technological surrogates for it, and become
similarly pathologically pre-occupied with cameras, closed-circuit TV and ray- or
radiation-producing mechanisms of many different kinds. Such delusions might fit nicely
under another of Schrebers headings: Egocentricity of the rays regarding my person
(Schreber, 1903, chapter XX). Indeed, Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), a psychiatrist
famed for treating schizophrenics, advised his colleagues to sit at the side of such a
patient rather than facing them, never to look them in the eyes (which he found created

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suspicion), and to address them in the third person (personal communication from Dr
Andy Thompson, quoted with thanks by kind permission).

Mentalism

Another deficit found in autism is an ability to judge and interpret others intentions
towards oneself: what Baron-Cohen calls intentionality detection. Autistic people often
fail to pick up cues directed at them in otherwise obvious and unmistakable ways, and are
poor at interpreting body-language or judging the implications of others statements and
behaviour. Indeed, autistic children notably make pronoun-reversal errors, referring to
themselves as you and their mothers as I or me. However, language-impaired
controls, such as sufferers from Down syndrome, do not make comparable errors, despite
their poor speech competence (Baron-Cohen, 1989).

If autistics are deficient in this respect, then paranoiacs are notable in detecting intentions
far too readily, and in over-interpreting their significance for themselves. Furthermore,
this over-sensitivity to intention can take two forms, depending on whether the intention
is positive or negative. Positive over-interpretation of others intentions underlies
erotomania. In this case, the subject delusionally believes that others are attracted to, or
are in love with them. However, negative over-valuation of intention is much more
common and seen in the delusions of persecution which are found in so many paranoiacs.
Here, as usual, Schreber was no exception:

a conspiracy against me was brought to a head its object was to contrive that
I should be handed over to a certain person in a particular manner my soul
was to be delivered up to him, but my body w as to be transformed into a
female body, and as such surrendered to the person in question with a view to
sexual abuse (Freud, 1911:19)

Indeed, Schrebers delusional system centred on a universal struggle of good against evil
in which Schreber himself played a central Christ-like role as the persecuted saviour of
the human race.

Another autistic deficit is found in what Baron-Cohen calls shared attention mechanism.
Autistic people typically do not become involved in group conversations or activities
because they usually fail to understand the element of collective psychological activity
that is inevitably involved. Once again, paranoiacs are characteristically at the opposite
extreme and are given to imagining concerted group activity often expressed as
conspiracies against them, as the last quotation above illustrates. To take another
example, Schreber noticed that, every time he need to go himself,

some other person in my vicinity was sent (by having his nerves stimulated for that
purpose) to the lavatory, in order to prevent me evacuating. This is a phenomenon

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 which I have observed for years and upon such countless occasions thousands
of them and with such regularity, as to exclude any possibility of its being
attributable to chance. (Freud, 1911:26)

Finally, as we have already seen, autistic people are deficient in theory of mind: they fail
to attribute mental states to others and to react to them accordingly. Here again, paranoia
shows the opposite tendency. In Schrebers case this was a readiness to attribute minds
or what he actually called bemiracled residues of former human souls to birds and
trees and generally to mentalize he would have called it to spiritualize the whole
world (Freud, 1911:17). Hence the Suns rays were by turns the nerves of God or
Gods spermatozoa. The entire universe became the stage for a spiritual drama centering
on Schreber and his eventual redemption of the world through his transformation into a
woman who would give birth to a new race of men (Schreber, 1903).

Adopting the modular view of the mind that has become popular with evolutionary
psychology, Baron-Cohen sums up his approach by suggesting that autistics may have
deficits in four particular modules (Baron-Cohen, 1995). We might summarize the
argument above to add that, if autistics are characterized by deficits in the mental
modules listed by Baron-Cohen, paranoiacs might be regarded as characterized by their
expression in excess:

! Eye Direction Detection (delusions of being watched)

! Intentionality Detection (delusions of persecution/erotomania)
! Shared Attention Mechanism (delusions of conspiracy)
! Theory of Mind Mechanism (religious/mystical delusions)

Although currently fashionable with many evolutionary psychologists, modular thinking

has it critics (even including one of its founders (Fodor, 2000). One limitation of the
modular approach to the factors listed immediately above is that it suggests that each is
a separate, discreet, all-or-nothing functioning sub-unit of the mind, with little overlap or
possibility of variation. Nevertheless, this is not the only way to see it. Making the same
point in different terms to Baron-Cohens mental modules, you could say that whereas
autism was characteristically hypo-mentalistic (too little mentalistic thinking), paranoia
was hyper-mentalistic (too much). This in turn would suggest that mentalism the ability
to attribute minds to others, and to interpret and understand mental states was not an all-
or-nothing phenomenon of human psychology, but covered a continuum stretching from
the extremes of hypo-mentalism in severe autism to hyper-mentalism in cases of paranoia
like Schrebers.

Mentalism, then, is the language that human beings use to talk about their own behaviour.
It uses verbs like think, feel, intend, believe, foresee, wish, know and understand;
adjectives like good, bad, moral, immoral, right, wrong, true, false, evil, criminal, human
and divine; nouns like mind, soul, spirit, motive, aim, desire, love, hate, justice and

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desert. Mentalism invokes conditions like consciousness, righteousness, redemption,
knowledge, ignorance, obligation and culpability, and enables its practitioners a unique
ability to travel mentally through time in both directions: imaginatively into the future and
retrospectively into the past (Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997).

To put it another way, you could say that mentalism is characteristically human in that
it allows us to name, blame and shame (or alternatively to except, exonerate and extol).
Indeed, this almost certainly explains much of the evolution of mentalism: not just a
useful grammar of mental agency, but an effective psychological tool with which to
manipulate and influence the behaviour of others. How else could people be motivated
to act in the name of purely abstract that is, mentalistic concepts like justice, truth or
equality? And what else would we regard as characteristically, definitively and
quintessentially human than action motivated by such ideals?

Although not one of Baron-Cohens defective modules, language is yet another

mentalistic phenomenon that fits the hypo-/hyper-mentalistic pattern found in autism and
paranoia. Words and the concepts they represent are clearly mentalistic particularly
when the concept is a purely abstract one, like mentalism itself. And even when a word
represents an object which we might rightly see as part of the physical world, the fact
remains that the word representing it is an arbitrary mental construct imposed by
linguistic tradition and mentalistic to that extent. Indeed, paranoiacs like Schreber are
often given to coining neologisms, and his book is embellished with many elaborate
pieces of inventive phraseology and word-elision whose precise meaning is wholly
Schreberian.

Hearing voices is another classic symptom epitomized by Schreber, whose verbal

mentalistic sensitivity was such that he could discern that souls in general and God in
particular spoke the basic language, a vigorous if somewhat antiquated German,
characterized by its great wealth of euphemisms (Freud, 1911:23). Autism, by contrast,
is hypo-mentalistic in this respect also because a linguistic deficit is typical of the
disorder, and verbal communication skills are usually severely impaired.

Sex, autism and engineering

If there is indeed a continuum of mentalism, ranging from the hypo-mentalistic extreme

represented by autism to the hyper-mentalistic one represented by paranoia, then recent
research suggests that sex differences may also relate to it. Here the critical finding is that
autism and the milder, less severe, Aspergers Syndrome which seems to share many of
the same mentalistic deficits, are much more prevalent in males than females.

Although those who are diagnosed with autism and Aspergers Syndrome have deficits
in language development, social ability and what I am calling mentalism, they are notably
better than average at spatial tasks. This finding is important, not only because it suggests

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that there may be pluses as well as minuses associated with hypo-mentalism, but because
it ties in with what is already known about normal differences between the sexes where
issues like language, social skills and spatial ability are concerned.

Here, studies suggest average female superiority in language skills; social judgement;
empathy and co-operation; perceptual speed (finding matching items); fine-motor co-
ordination; pretend play in childhood; and mathematical calculation. M ale superiority is
normally found in mathematical reasoning (especially geometry, logic: at the highest level
male mathematicians outnumber female 13:1); embedded figure tasks; some (but not all)
spatial skills; target-directed motor skills (irrespective of practice); navigation; and
geography (boys always win the National Geography Bee, which tests children in grades
four to eight on their knowledge of places around the world, and male college students
can locate almost twice as many countries on an unlabelled map of the world as females
can) (Baron-Cohen, 2002; Dabbs & Dabbs, 2000; Kimura, 2000).

From birth girls attend more to social stimuli, such as faces and voices than do boys, who
have a preference to attend more to non-social, spatial stimuli, such as mobiles or traffic.
Most girls develop language earlier than most boys, and normally girls develop social
skills sooner than boys. However, babies with autism lack the innate preference for
looking at faces rather than objects found normally in both sexes and shown, for example,
in the readiness of older babies to return a smile. Here it may be significant that autistics
process visual information about faces in the same part of the brain normally used for
objects alone, rather than in the specialized face-recognition and reaction region found
in normal people (Pierce, M uller, Ambrose, Allen, & Courchesne, 2001).

Aspergers Syndrome is sometimes called the engineers disorder and authorities in the
field comment that

it is hard to find a clinical account of autism that does not involve the child being
obsessed by some machine or another. Typical examples include extreme
fascinations with electricity pylons, burglar alarms, vacuum cleaners, washing
machines, video players, trains, planes and clocks. Showing an apparently
precocious mechanical understanding, whilst being relatively oblivious to their
listeners level of interest, suggests that their folk physics might be outstripping
their folk psychology in development. (Baron-Cohen, 2000:75)

According to a recent survey of 919 families of children with autism or Aspergers

Syndrome which listed occupations of parents, fathers of children with autism or
Aspergers were twice as often employed in engineering as were fathers in any of four
control groups of children with Tourettes or Down Syndrome. Another study of a
mathematician, a physicist and a computer scientist all diagnosed with Aspergers tested
them against controls on folk physics and folk psychology (Reading Eyes Test). Although
all three equalled control subjects performance on sex judgements on the eye test, all

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scored more than one standard deviation below controls on folk psychology and more
than one standard deviation above on folk physics (which is comparable to 85 per cent
of Aspergers subjects, who also score at or above this level). As the researchers
comment, These results strongly suggest that theory of mind (folk psychology) is
independent of IQ, executive function and reasoning about the physical world and may
therefore have its own unique evolutionary history. They conclude,

There thus seems to be a small but statistically significant link between autism and
engineering. The current result might also help to explain why a condition like
autism persists in the gene pool: the very same genes that lead an individual to
have a child with autism can lead to superior functioning in the domain of folk
physics. Engineering and related folk physics skills have transformed the way in
which our species lives, without question for the better. Indeed, without such
skills, Homo sapiens would still be pre-industrial. (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright,
Stone, & Rutherford, 1999:475-83)

Astonishing evidence of the link between autism and engineering can be found in Silicon
Valley (Santa Clara County, California). In 1993 there were 4,911 diagnosed cases of
classic autism in Santa Clara County. In 1999 the figure passed 10,000, and in 2001 there
were 15,441 cases, with new ones added at 7 per day, 85 per cent of them children. Given
that employment in Silicon Valley is primarily in electronic engineering and computing,
and that equal opportunity employment means that many children born there will have
both parents in these industries, so-called assortative mating has been suggested as the
most likely explanation. This is the idea that likes attract, and that people tend to marry
partners who have much in common with themselves. In other words, it looks as if
mentalistic deficits in people with engineering skills are being compounded in their
children by inheritance of these deficits from both parents. There is certainly strong
evidence that autism and Aspergers Syndrome are heritable disorders. For example, there
is a 90 per cent chance an identical twin of a sufferer will also be diagnosed autistic. The
risk of second child being autistic if one is already rises from 1-in-500 to 1-in-20, while
the risk for a third being autistic after two children already are diagnosed is 1-in-3
(Silberman, 2001).

Mechanism

If gaze-monitoring and the attendant social sensitivities usually found most developed in
females suggest an evolutionary origin for what I am calling mentalism, then the
throwing, tool-using and fabricating skills associated with hunting suggest a parallel one
for what we might call mechanism. In other words, if mentalism is a noun equivalent for
theory of mind or folk psychology, so mechanism as understood here would be an
equivalent for theory of bodies or folk physics (Baron-Cohen, 1999).

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The contrast between the false belief and false photo test is a telling illustration. Here the
finding is that an autistic who sees an object moved without the knowledge of another
person does not usually appreciate that others ignorance of its new position a clear
Mentalistic deficit (indeed, one that has been called the acid test of theory of mind
(Wimmer & Perner, 1983). However, an autistic who sees an object moved after they
have photographed it usually predicts where it will appear in the resulting photograph
correctly. This can be seen as a compensating mechanistic competence to the extent that
it involves a correct understanding of the optics of photography (Baron-Cohen, 2000).

An additional virtue of looking at things this way is that it avoids stigmatizing autistics
as simply deficient and instead balances their mentalistic deficits against compensating
cognitive skills, suggesting that their apparent mental retardation in one dimension might
open up precocious development in another. Ten per cent of autistics, but only one per
cent with other developmental deficits, show so-called savant skills: in other words,
outstanding cognitive and memory ability found among more prevalent disability. Such
talents are usually limited to music, art, maths and calendar calculation, mechanical and
spatial skills, often featuring astonishing memorization feats, while the combination of
blindness, autism and musical genius is unusually frequent (Treffert, 2001). For example,
a pair of identical twin savants described by Sacks possessed calendar-calculating skills
over an 80,000 year range; could not do simple arithmetic, but would calculate lengthy
primes for fun; could instantly count the number of matches that fell out of a box; and
could remember the weather and the important political events on every day of their adult
lives while having little or no memory of more personal events (Sacks, 1995).

W. D. Hamilton (1936-2000, the originator of modern, selfish gene Darwinism)

described himself as almost idiot savant (Hamilton, 2001:xxvii) and rated himself fairly
good at woodwork as at other handicrafts to the extent of having carpentry as a reserve
life plan in case his theory proved unpublishable (Hamilton, 1996:26). Hamilton also
conformed to the typical family of someone with autistic tendencies suggested above: his
father was a well-known engineer (designer of the Callender-Hamilton bridge), and a
geriatrician sister had engineering skills to the extent that she developed an improved
pressure mattress for the treatment of bed sores (Bliss, 2001). Hamilton describes himself
as possessing

notably a trait approaching to autism about what most regard as the higher
attributes of our species a person who believes he understands the human
species in many ways better than anyone and yet who manifestly doesnt
understand in any practical way how the human world works neither how he
himself fits in and nor, it seems, the conventions.

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He continues,

It is known now how autists, for all that they cannot do in the way of human
relationships, detect better out of confusing minimal sketches on paper the true,
physical 3-D objects an artist worked from, than do ordinary un-handicapped
socialites so may some kinds of autists, unaffected by all the propaganda they
have failed to hear, see further into the true shapes that underlie social phenomena.
(Hamilton, 2001:xxvii-xxxi)

The significance of these comments is that Hamiltons insights were almost exclusively
into the fundamental mechanisms of evolution: natural and sexual selection, population
genetics, and M endelian inheritance. Furthermore, it is these very mechanisms which
arouse most resistance in the general public when they are invoked as explanations,
causes or foundations of human behaviour. Such invocations typically attract
denunciation as reductionistic, deterministic, sexist, racist, and so on. But what
most of such reactions share in common is their mentalistic bias: they are offended by the
claims of evolutionary and genetic explanation because they appear to impugn mentalistic
agency the belief that, not only do we have minds, but that our minds and not our genes
or evolved psychology determine our behaviour.

Scientific insights also appear to question mentalistic states especially consciousness,

the quintessence of mentalism because here, as elsewhere with mentalistic subjectivity,
the facts now strongly suggest that consciousness is very much the last part of the mind
to become aware of what we are doing (Libet, 1985). And it is now an irrefutable fact that
the vast majority of what goes on in our brains does so in total ignorance of our
consciousness as such (LeDoux, 1996). This in turn casts doubt on the true nature of
mental contents such as beliefs, emotions, and intentions, and generally makes mentalistic
subjectivity seem worryingly different from objective, scientific knowledge of the
mechanisms of the brain and mind.

Mental culture

According to the distinction I am suggesting here, biological science describes the

evolved genetic, neurophysiological and psychological mechanisms underlying human
thought, feeling and behaviour, while social and environmental factors determine the
mentalistic subjectivity of human actors. What we may term mental or non-material
culture can be seen to be both mentalistic in content and as arbitrary or individually-
or socially-determined in nature. Indeed, we could list the mentalistic aspects of culture
as follows:

! Etiquette, Social Conventions and Language

Although language has been rightly described as an instinct from the mechanistic, evolved
point of view (Pinker, 1994), here language is understood merely as a collection of

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arbitrary signs determined by cultural convention. And the same goes for etiquette:
shaking hands or bowing, and eating with a fork rather than chop-sticks, are clearly also
arbitrary, culturally-determined conventions (what sociologists like mile Durkheim
would have called social facts (Durkheim, 1982) and later structuralist social scientists
applying the linguistic analogy would regard as signifiers (Lvi-Strauss, 1969).

! Abstract and Conceptual art, Literature and Aesthetics

Recent research on the abstract art of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) who claimed that
elements of his compositions were critically placed for aesthetic effect suggest that, on
the contrary, subjects (experts included) are unable to pick real Mondrians from others
randomly generated by computer (Taylor, 2002). Much so-called conceptual art appears
to rely similarly on the mental attitude of the spectator more than it does on the intrinsic
qualities of the object in question, and this is the reason I suggest that all such non-
representational, non-realist art be regarded as essentially mentalistic.

The appreciation of literature relies fundamentally on mentalistic skills, and particularly

on theory of mind to represent reality by purely representational and figurative means.
Aesthetic values in general are highly subjective. Beauty notoriously lies in the eye or
perhaps we should say mind of the beholder, and what one person regards as artistic
or aesthetically pleasing may just as easily seem ugly or prosaic to another. (For example,
painted depictions of nudes are usually regarded as art, whereas photographic depictions
of the same models could just as easily be seen as examples of erotica or even
pornography.)

! Religion, Superstition and Ethics

As I mentioned above, Schreber interpreted his delusions as religious and mystical
insights into reality, and to the extent that all theological thinking presupposes the
existence of supernatural beings and a psychic or spiritual dimension to the human
mind, you could see it as similarly hyper-mentalistic. Indeed, such an approach readily
suggests an intriguing new evolutionary insight into religion. According to this way of
looking at it, theory of mind originally evolved to facilitate purely psychological inter-
personal interactions in primeval societies. However, in the absence of the more
mechanistic, scientific understanding of the physical world that was not to evolve until
recently, existing mentalistic adaptations were applied to the universe as a whole,
transferring concepts like agency, intention, culpability and prescience to deities, demons
and supernatural entities of all kinds. As a result, reality as a whole and not just social
reality became peopled with mental agents who could be influenced in ways analogous
to those in which ordinary humans could be: through supplication (prayer), generosity
(sacrifice), or contrition (penance). In this way, personal needs, failings and frustrations
beyond the remedy of mere mortals could be redressed, and a mentalistic pre-adaptation
set the scene for the evolution of religion, magic and superstition as independent
cognitive systems.

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Historically and socially, morality and religion are closely associated, and our routine
tendency to name, blame and shame leaves little doubt that an ability to make and
manipulate moral concepts such as justice, virtue and culpability are of enormous
importance in our attempts to influence the behaviour of others by purely mental means
(witness the frequency with which purely intellectual disagreements can lead to
accusations of the wickedness or immorality of the view being criticized: (McKie &
Thorpe, 2002).

! Law, Politics and Ideology

There is also a close affinity between ethics and law, particularly when the latter has a
religious or scriptural basis as it does for example in Judaism or Islam. But all legal codes
are mentalistic to the extent that they can and typically do lead to legal argument and
contestation, for example in the conduct of trials. But you only have to compare this
situation with that of laws as they are understood in natural science to see how different
legal principles are from scientific ones. You could not, for example, advocate the repeal
of the second law of thermodynamics in the way you might that of any human law, or
dispute Mendelian inheritance in the same way that someone might challenge a will.

As for politics at least in Western-style democracies the adversarial nature of law

finds an exact parallel in the similarly adversarial organization of political parties and
legislatures into government and opposition, left as opposed to right wings of the political
spectrum, conservatives versus progressives, and so on. W here ideology is concerned, no
one will I think need to be convinced that the appeal of political ideologies lies in the
arguments used to justify them, the emotions which they arouse, and in other mentalistic
factors on which they rely, such as the personalities of political leaders or the beliefs of
their followers. Indeed, and in so far as they are non-violent alternatives to more war-like
social conflicts, you could see law, politics and ideology as the supreme cultural
expression of mentalism as an evolved means of influencing others by psychological,
rather than physical means.

Material culture

By contrast to mental culture, what might be termed material culture (the kinds of things
studied by cultural anthropologists), reflects what I have called mechanistic cognition,
rather than mentalism:

! Mathematics and Calendar Calculation

Even though systems of mathematical notation, and the base number for counting systems
may vary culturally, mathematical principles, like Pythagorass theorem, or numbers like
pi, remain true irrespective of culture or circumstance. And mathematical logic and
numerical expression remain fundamental to mechanistic thinking wherever it is
systematically applied in the sciences, technology or engineering.

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Calendrical calculation is a particularly notable application in many cultures, and can
often be embodied in objects characteristic of material culture such as written records,
buildings, or religious artifacts. And as we have already seen, calendrical calculation is
also a prime expertise of savants, many of whom are autistic.

! Representational and Utilitarian Art and Architecture

Savant syndrome can also be expressed in outstanding artistic talent, but here the output,
be it drawing, painting, sculpture or modelling, is characteristically realistic, rather than
abstract or conceptual. Indeed, this is often how savants artistic skills are first
recognized: even as children they show technical competence in representing things in
their art that goes far beyond that normal for their age. To the extent that realistic art
relies on objectivity rather than subjectivity it may be seen as mechanistic in the sense
intended here rather than mentalistic.

In utilitarian art such as ceramics, joinery or glass-blowing, the link with technology and
mechanical skill is self-evident, and in architecture the mechanistic basis is more evident
still. Buildings are, after all, ultimately a question of engineering in whatever materials
may be used, and although glass, wood, stone, brick and concrete remain the most
common, today materials employed in more conventional engineering such as metal,
plastics or composites are also increasingly used in architecture along with the
engineering principles they make possible, such as cantilevers, pivots, tensioning and
damping.

! Science, Technology and Engineering

Having already made the point about science, technology and engineering being the
epitome of mechanistic as opposed to mentalistic cognition, I will not repeat it here
except to add that, as applied to human behaviour, the result of such thinking is not
simply hypo-mentalistic, but actually anti-mentalistic, as I suggested at the beginning. Its
effect is to reduce human beings to the status of unthinking, biologically-determined
robots without the many mentalistic attributes listed above which humans rightly think
make them exceptional: etiquette, social conventions and language; abstract and
conceptual art, literature and aesthetics; religion, superstition and ethics, law, politics and
ideology.

Conclusion: the naturalistic and moralistic fallacies revisited

It is common to contrast the naturalistic fallacy what exists is what ought to be, or
facts should dictate values with the moralistic fallacy what ought to be is what
exists, or values should dictate facts. However, the argument set out above suggests an
intriguing new way of resolving the issue, and of doing justice to both sides of the
argument about fact and value.

According to this way of looking at it, what is fallacious about both is their common over-

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stepping of the boundaries between what I have termed mentalistic and mechanistic
cognition. The moralistic fallacy mentalizes facts by confusing a purely psychological
factor moral evaluation, wholly justifiable in its proper, human context with objective
realities outside and beyond human subjectivity. It uses the mentalistic verb ought in a
context to which it does not apply. The naturalistic fallacy, conversely, objectifies mental,
human subjectivity by treating it as if it were continuous with the natural world. To use
the jargon of cognitive science, both erroneously portray domain-specific systems of
representation as domain-general. But in reality values can only be applied to human
subjectivity, and facts belong to the separate world of objective reality.

You could compare the mistake made by these fallacies with regard to the two modes of
cognition which I have tried to distinguish here to someone expecting a spreadsheet
program to play music on their computer, or an email program to produce graphics. No
one today expects a single piece of software to be able to do everything you could do on
a computer, and the same applies according to my argument to the human brain. Yet up
until the present the assumption that has been generally made is that the human mind is
equipped to comprehend any kind of reality using essentially the same basic cognitive
skills and processes. While external influences on cognition in the form of political,
social and economic biases were exhaustively catalogued in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the existence of internal, biological, brain-based biases was largely ignored.
But as I have tried to argue, today the situation is quite different, and recent research into
autism, theory of mind, and normal sex differences in cognition has transformed the
situation entirely. Indeed, now it seems completely naive to think that there is only one
mode of human cognition and just a single means by which people comprehend reality.

Consider a surgeon operating on a patient. The surgeon treats the patient as an

unconscious, material object on which the surgery is performed, rather as a mechanic
might approach a piece of machinery that needed fixing. (Here autistic tendencies would
not matter, indeed, to the extent that they helped the surgeon be detached and objective
in operating on a patient, they might actually be beneficial.) But in a clinical interview,
the same surgeon would treat the same patient as a conscious subject, for example in
negotiating a drug regime or post-operative care. In such contexts as this, the surgeon is
obliged to respect the patients real freedom to choose, for example in agreeing or not
agreeing to take medication or exercise in circumstances where, unlike the situation on
the operating table, the surgeon does not have the power to enforce compliance on an
unfeeling object. (And in such circumstances of persuasion mentalistic skills would
definitely pay off, while autistic tendencies would be a serious handicap.) Clearly, both
the mechanistic approach to surgery and the mentalistic one to the clinical interview are
appropriate and correct, and no one would criticize a surgeon for either. On the contrary,
a surgeon who insisted that the patient should be conscious and choose for themselves
each and every procedure during surgery would probably have as few patients as one who
treated patients in interviews as if they were inert, unconscious bodies on an operating
table!

15
Much the same applies to mentalistic and mechanistic cognition. Each has its appropriate
context. Essentially, what I have proposed is that values of an ethical, aesthetic, political,
legal or religious kind have a proper place in mentalistic cognition, which is rightly
applied in the humanities; is voluntaristic in its mode of explanation; relates peculiarly
to psychological subjectivity; is the basis of mental culture; and is particularistic in the
sense that mental life is individually- or socially-determined and culturally-relative.
Material facts, on the other hand, relate to mechanistic cognition, which is properly
applied in technology and the sciences; is deterministic in its mode of explanation; relates
peculiarly to physical objectivity; is the basis of material culture; and is universalistic in
the sense that scientific and technological truths are equally valid in all cultural contexts.

What I have tried to do here is to show that the fact/value problem is part of this much
larger picture and finds new and unexpected insights in the study of autism and paranoia,
as well as in normal sex differences in cognition. Essentially, I have argued that human
cognition employs two distinct, non-commensurate and in many ways incompatible
modes, each appropriate and reliable in its specific domain, but prone to fallacious or
unreliable outputs if employed in the other. If I have succeeded in clarifying the
differences between what I have termed mentalism and mechanism for want of better
terms, I hope that I will have thereby contributed something however small to the
avoidance of confusion between them in the future .

One virtue of this way of looking at things is that it would discourage religious, political
and moral credulity, bigotry and fanaticism of all kinds by cutting mentalism down to
size, so to speak. This is because all such reactions are quintessentially mentalistic, and
according to this analysis, mentalism is just another human adaptation: the psychological
equivalent of something like striding bipedalism, rather than some god-given, specially-
created or necessarily-evolved spiritual superiority. (To use one of the few good analogies
in another species, you might see mentalism as a means of communication and interaction
as peculiar to our species and as quaint in its symbolism as the waggle-dance is to bees.)

Seeing culture as essentially mentalistic would also reduce literary and artistic snobbery
and elitism, and would help to counter emotive, phobic and irrational reactions to
scientific and technological innovation. Finally, understanding and accepting the
mentalistic deficits of mechanistic thinking would also help to limit social exclusion,
prejudice and misunderstanding of autistics of all kinds. Indeed, such a change in attitude
might confer a new and special esteem on those who, like William Hamilton, have
arguably contributed the most of lasting worth to our species as a whole through their
work in engineering, technology, and science.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Charles Crawford, Alex Monto, Thomas Suddendorf, and J.
Anderson Thomson Jr., for their helpful comments and suggestions.

16
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