Narrative and the minds of others.

Daniel D. Hutto, Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. xxiv + 343 pp.

Theorists of narrative have recently begun drawing on developments in the cognitive sciences, including cognitive, evolutionary, and social psychology, Artificial-Intelligence research, language theory, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind, to explore how frameworks for studying intelligent behavior can throw light on storytelling practices as well as the narrative artifacts that emanate from them. Analysts working in this domain--the domain of cognitive narratology, broadly speaking--have examined how interpreting stories depends on the same processes of folk-psychological reasoning that people deploy in everyday life to make sense of their own and others' conduct. (1) At issue is people's everyday understanding of how thinking works, the rough-and-ready heuristics to which they resort in thinking about thinking itself. We use these heuristics to impute motives or goals to others, to evaluate the bases of our own conduct, and to make predictions about future reactions to events. By the same token, if I read a newspaper story about the reunion of long-separated siblings or a novel whose protagonist tragically overestimates the good will of the other characters, I will make sense of these accounts by ascribing a range of beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions, and goals to the inhabitants of" each storyworld. In the case of the newspaper report, I will assume, for example, that each sibling believes (and believes that the other believes) that they share the same parents, that each desires (and believes that the other desires) to reconnect, and that both experience joy, among other powerful emotions, when they are reunited. By contrast, to make sense of the novel I will assume an asymmetric structure of beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. Whereas the protagonist (call her Isabel Archer) acts in good faith and aims to promote others' as well as her own best interests, her counterparts more or less surreptitiously privilege their particular interests and objectives over those of the protagonist, with the resulting mismatch of beliefs, desires, and goals leading either to a tragic finale or, in another kind of plot, to eventual success built on the mastery of painful lessons about how people may very well be otherwise than they seem.

To account for the assumptions and inferences that readers make about the minds of characters in storyworlds such as these, theorists of narrative have adapted research by evolutionary and cognitive psychologists (among others) suggesting that human beings' mind-reading ability is a biological endowment, a capacity passed down as a phylogenetic inheritance that is acquired in ontogeny--except for people with developmental impairments such as autism. Challenging the underlying premises of much of this research, Daniel D. Hutto's cogently argued, thoroughly documented, and stylishly written Folk Psychological Narratives also constitutes a challenge for the narrative scholarship that seeks to recruit from existing accounts of mindreading processes and abilities. Indeed, Hutto's study will be of special interest to cognitive narratologists, since his approach can be described as the converse of that adopted by story analysts who have looked to other fields to characterize modes of mindreading in narrative contexts. Rather than focusing on ways in which narrative interpretation entails "an attempt to make sense of characters' minds, Hutto hypothesizes that storytelling practices are a basis for being able to make sense of minds in the first place--that is, for the ability to formulate appropriate, well-structured inferences about people's reasons for acting.

According to this hypothesis, which Hutto calls the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH), narratives constitute a primary resource for constructing folk-psychological templates thanks to which circumstances, participants, actions, and intentional states of various kinds can be connected together into (more or less) coherent accounts of why people do the things they do. To put the same point another way, stories afford scaffolding for folk-psychological reasoning--a discourse environment where people can acquire, extend, and exercise their understanding of complex interrelationships among the intentional states (particularly belief-desire pairings) that undergird and provide a way of explaining and predicting human behavior. An important upshot of this view is, as Huttto discusses in chapter 10, a new way of thinking about the "Universal Convergence Assumption." According to many researchers who hold this assumption, the ability to make sense of intentional actions is instantiated in the same way across all (unimpaired) populations and thus best explained via an "inherited mindreading device" (186). By contrast, Hutto suggests that the capacity to ascribe reasons for acting is "acquired if and only if ...