Somogy Varga
[Journal für Philosophie & Psychiatrie, Jg. 3 (2010), Ausgabe 1]
Abstract
Autism has recently become the focus of continuous philosophical inquiry, because it affects inter-subjective capacities in a highly selective manner. One of the first behavioural manifestations of autism is impaired play, particularly the lack of pretend play. This article will show that the prevailing 'Theory-Theory of Mind'-approach cannot explain impaired play. I will suggest a richer, phenomenological account of inter-subjectivity. It will be argued that this improves the understanding of impaired play in autism.
Key words: Autism, play, metarepresentation, theory of mind, Merleau-Ponty, intersubjectivity
Autism has recently become the focus of continuous philosophical and psychological inquiry. It has become the 'contrastive case' (McGeer), because it affects inter-subjective capacities in a highly selective manner. In an early paper by Kanner, where childhood autism was first identified as a distinct, clinical entity, he called attention to the fact that autistic children showed sustained interest in their dealings with objects, "without paying the least attention to the persons present" (Kanner 1943, 246). From a philosophical perspective, the developmental disorder of infantile autism provides a prominent example of an interrupted, basic capacity to understand people and their minds - to enter into the social world.
One of the first reliable behavioural manifestations of autism is impaired play (Baron-Cohen 1995; Baron-Cohen et al. 2000): stereotyped behavior toward toys and objects (Atlas 1990); the persistence in the production of sensory-motor play(DeMyer et al. 1967; Tilton & Ottinger 1964); and a lack of pretend play in particular (Jarrold, Boucher, & Smith 1994, 1996; Baron-Cohen 1978; Gould 1986). Autistic spectrum children refrain from using dolls as agents and from substituting an object for another (Jarrold, Boucher, & Smith 1993). Before going further, however, it is worth clarifying what functional-pretend play and symbolic-pretend play means. Following Libby et al., functional pretend-play may be defined as using an object according to its function, even if it is a miniaturized or otherwise distorted type of this object. A good example would be pushing a toy car along the floor while making engine noises (Ungerer & M. Sigman 1981). This differs from symbolic-pretend play, which appears later, at around 20 months of age: this is more complex and characterized by a stronger sense of 'as if' (Libby et al. 1998). Leslie gave a valuable description of the three possible forms of symbolic-pretend play: 1) object substitution - using an object as if it is something else (e.g., using a toy car as an airplane), (b) attribution of false properties - attributing a pretend property to something (pretending that the doll's dry hair is wet, or that she is hungry), and (c) reference to an absent object - or the invention of an imaginary object (here is a piece of cake.) and referring to it as if it were present (Leslie 1987). As already mentioned, impaired pretend play has become an important part of diagnostic criteria for the Autistic Spectrum Disorders (DSM IV). This is why there has been an increased scientific interest in pretend play among children with autism over the past two decades. The idea is that the fundamental inter-subjective deficits that underlie autism must also be closely related to the impairment of play. The aim in this article is somewhat different from the mainstream philosophical, psychological and cognitive science approach: it is to gain equal knowledge about the nature of play and inter-subjectivity. Consequently, focus here is on the inter-subjectivity of play. The inquiry into studies of autism and impaired play in autism should help maintain the main thesis: play is an inherently inter-subjective phenomenon and it requires "the resonative presence" of others.
The article proceeds by presenting the mainstream explanation of autism (I) and impaired play in autism (II). Difficulties in these will be pointed out (III), and an attempt will be made at replacing the mainstream 'Theory-Theory of Mind' with a phenomenologically informed account of inter-subjectivity (IV). In rounding off the paper, it will be argued that this replacement improves comprehension of impaired play in autism (V).
I. Autism as Mindblindness
The cognitive cause of social and communicative failure in autism is widely assumed to be "mindblindness". There are different positions on how central mindblindness is to the autistic syndrome, but there is general agreement that autism involves problems in understanding and appreciating the mental states of others, which result in damaged social interaction (Carruthers 1996). For Leslie and Baron-Cohen, mind-blindness results from the impairment of an implicit mechanism: the ToMM or Theory-of-Mind Module. This enables normal people to understand others and their mental states. So the impairment of ToMM results in the inability to understand others, at least in a primordial, non-inferential sense (Leslie 1987; Baron-Cohen 1991). The module is activated in everyday situations when one seeks an explanation to behavior in another person: this is done by ascribing a mental state to this person. When "mindreading", we make sense of a person's behavior, we understand why someone shakes their head, but we also imagine and ascribe mental states and predict the next action: When seeing someone reaching for an object, we ascribe a volitional mental state to her: she wants the object. Besides volition, the ascribed mental states can also be perceptual (she sees or hears something), and epistemic-mental states (she thinks, knows, or believes something) (Rutherford & Rogers 2003). ToMM deficits result in a well-documented inability to attribute true and false beliefs to others (Baron-Cohen et al. 1985; Leslie & Frith 1985, 1988). "Mindreading" deficits appear early at the end of the first year of life (including joint attention deficits), which is universal for the whole spectrum of this disorder (Baron-Cohen 2000, 16). It seems quite obvious that mindblindness interferes with any kind of social, joint pretending, because these obviously require children to attribute mental states and read the minds of their co-pretenders. It also seems evident that an autistic child will therefore refrain from engaging in the sort of pretend play that involves attributing mental states to toy-figures. However, as Carruthers (1996) notes, it is far from obvious why mindblindness actually leads to universal deficit in pretend-play, which is well-documented in empirical research.
II. Leslie and Meta-representation
The most well-known account of the difficulties involved in pretend play has been proposed by Leslie. This suggests that individuals with autism have a meta-representational deficit and that the capacity for pretending draws on the very same cognitive mechanism, which is involved in understanding other minds. Leslie has put forward the meta-representational conjecture:
"Autistic children are impaired and/or delayed in their capacity to form and/or process metarepresentations. This impairs (/delays) their capacity to acquire a theory of mind." (Leslie 1991, 73).
In this view, pretend play provides early evidence of developing a ToMM (Leslie 1987, 1988), which enables mental representation of another's mental representation. So the main point is that both mind reading and pretend play involve the production of meta-representations (Jarrod, Carruthers, Smith & Boucher 1994, 446). The argument, which is also present in Wittgenstein and Bateson's accounts of play, is that symbolic-pretend play requires 'double knowledge' of the situation, otherwise confusion would occur in regard to what is true about the actual functions of the object (Bateson 1972; McCune-Nicolich 1981). For example: the child pretends that the banana is a telephone, while keeping in mind that inferences made from this are not valid in real-world belief contexts (Williams, Reddy & Costall 2001). This has lead Leslie to suggest that pretend-play requires meta-level representation. In pretense, primary representations (the banana) are doubled and made into a meta-representation (telephone), making possible the manipulation of that representation without disturbing true properties. Leslie's point was that the same de-coupler mechanism is both a central component employed in pretend play and mind reading, in which the child forms a meta-representation of the mental state of the other (Carruthers 1996). The deficit in pretend play is therefore connected to a deficit in the operation of the meta-representational aspect of the ToMM. Following this reasoning, it seems obvious that autistic or mindblind persons would also exhibit impairments in pretend-play.
III. Problems with Leslie's Account
There are, however, a number of problems with the meta-representational account. This requires a sketch of two empirical and one conceptual problem:
1) Prompted pretend play. It has been documented that some high-functioning autistic individuals and children with higher verbal mental ages are able to produce limited symbolic-pretend play. In other words, they show the ability to meta-represent, even if their pretend behaviors are frequently stereotyped. Additionally, a number of studies have shown that, when receiving guidance and appropriate prompts (Let's pretend…), children with autism are both able to engage in symbolic-pretend play (Gould, 1986; Lewis & Boucher, 1988; Whyte & Owens 1989), and able to understand the pretend play-acts of others (Jarrold, Smith, Boucher & Harris 1994; Kavanaugh & Harris 1994). So, even if they do not engage in pretend spontaneously, autistic children have the ability of pretence if prompted (Lewis and Boucher 1988). This evidence presents a serious challenge to the meta-representational account and questions its validity.
2) Impaired functional play. While the explanation of autism, in terms of lacking meta-representation, enjoys a broad general appeal, more recent research has shown that early object-directed functional play is also impaired (Jarrold, Boucher & Smith 1996; Williams, Costall & Reddy 1999). A significant number of studies have revealed deficits in both functional and symbolic play (Jarrold et al, 1996; Lewis and Boucher 1988; Sigman and Ungerer 1984; Whyte and Owens 1989). Toys are played with in a rigid manner and the child will focus rather excessively on details, instead of paying attention to the play-context of the toy. Instead of making a toy car drive, the child could focus intensively on spinning the wheels. Since functional play does not involve meta-representational capacities, the deficits in basic functional play present a serious challenge to Leslie's meta-representational explanation. It simply fails to account for the evidence of a functional play deficit.
3) There is a conceptual problem with meta-representation also; let us look closer at the supposedly constitutive 'double knowledge' of a pretend situation in order to understand it. Is it really the case that one has to know exactly how the real situation differs from the imagined one? I think not. Let us consider the following example: "Daddy pretends that the box contains cookies." I think one can understand this pretense situation without actually having a precise knowledge about the content of the box. So it is possible to fully understand the situation and remain unsure of the real state of affairs, of whether the box is empty, contains a toy or maybe even cookies. In order to understand the pretend situation all one needs to know is what we could call the implied referential ambiguity of pretense: that the pretend situation somehow differs from the real one. So the bottom line is: Pretending implies a double reference, which does not have to be exact. It can merely be ambiguous: One does not have to possess knowledge of the real situation in order to evaluate the truth of psychological predicates (Scott 2001).
To sum up, it seems that the meta-representational and the ToMM approach cannot really account for these empirical findings and runs into conceptual difficulties. Where does this leave us? I think in order to achieve a better comprehension of impaired play (and to achieve new knowledge about play in general), we must revise the philosophical foundation of the 'Theory-Theory of Mind' approach and the meta-representational account.
IV. Theory-Theory of Mind, Mentalizing or Primary Inter-subjectivity?
The fundamental claim underlying the 'Theory-theory of mind' approach is that our knowledge of others and ourselves is similar to our knowledge of objects in the world: it is somewhat theoretical or at least of inferential nature. In this optic, we learn that others are minded creatures and become able to predict and infer their intentional states. In recent years the 'theory-theory of mind' understanding of inter-subjectivity has been criticized for being haunted by conceptual and empirical difficulties. In order to counter such accusations and in order to diminish the analogy to using a 'theory' when understanding others, the term 'mentalizing' was coined. But even if there is less emphasis on 'theory', it still seems that the inferential approach to other minds is not abandoned. As Frith and Frith (2006, 531) point out: "The term mentalizing was coined to refer to the process by which we make inferences about mental states." Now to be fair, there have been various attempts to differentiate between levels of understanding others; in a recent article, Frith and Frith (2008, 504) differentiate between two levels of social cognition, one that is: "...largely automatic and implicit..." and one that is: "...explicit and require the expenditure of mental effort." At first sight it might seem that what they refer to as implicit social cognition is simply a non-inferential approach to other minds. But a closer look reveals the opposite: the example they use to show what such implicit social cognition amounts to, is implicit race prejudice. But what is at stake here? It is correct that implicit race prejudice is automatic, smooth and quick, but this does not mean that it is not-inferential. Rather, implicit social prejudice seems to refer to a quick, habituated inferential process. This was to say that, even if the term 'theory' is not emphasized anymore, the basic idea still remains untouched by claiming that we understand the states of minds of others through implicit or explicit processes of inference. Similarly, recent accounts of intersubjective impairments (Senju, Southgate, White and Frith 2009, 885) in autism, speak of an absence of "Spontaneous Theory of Mind" in Autism Spectrum Disorders, but remain within the inferential paradigm: such automatic and implicit social cognition refers to a: "...spontaneous encoding of socially relevant information and automatic online computation of other's mental states." While the 'inferential' picture is at the core of the most influential explanations of autism, I think there are several valid arguments that question the plausibility of such inference-based accounts. Firstly, for an inferential-theoretical stance to get off the ground some pre-theoretical understanding of the context and behaviour of the other person must already be present. This kind of knowledge, which is 'massively hermeneutic' (Bruner, and D.A. Kalmar 1998), provides the necessary background for developing a theory of mind. Deriving from embodied practices in second-person interactions, this is the basis for human interaction and for understanding others. We can say that these pre-theoretical and interactive capabilities for understanding others constitute a 'primary inter-subjectivity' (Trevarthen 1979). To strengthen this point, let me briefly consider evidence from philosophy, developmental psychology and neuroscience.
The 'theory-theory of mind' position holds that inter-subjectivity is based on an inferential access to other minds essentially hinges on the assumption that we experience others as being 'like us'. In other words, social cognition depends on the cognitive appreciation of the other's similarity to one's own being. But is this plausible? Merleau-Ponty(1996, 352) questions whether one must reflect on similarities in order to achieve inter-subjectivity: "There is nothing here resembling 'reasoning by analogy'.(…) reasoning by analogy presupposes what it is called on to explain." To put it differently, I can never achieve seeing the other as possibly "like" me, because the condition of engaging in a comparison of me and the other implies that I have already achieved inter-subjectivity (Welsh 2007). So, a primary inter-subjectivity precedes comparisons of this sort and the role of reasoning by analogy is only to shed more light on the pre-existing understanding of the other. Due to this foundation, our usual understanding of the other is smooth and non-reflective. Wittgenstein has argued in a similar manner, holding that we understand others without having to read, predict or meta-represent the states of their minds. Due to the expressive and embodied nature of human actions, we mostly have an unproblematic understanding of another person's intentions. Of course, observing others and making inferences on the basis of such input are undoubtedly an essential component of social cognition. But the point here is to emphasize the more fundamental relation to other beings rather than observation and inference. As Wittgenstein (1992, 38) remarks, inference-based attitudes are a secondary form of relating that presupposes a primary attitude. He tries to make the same point as Merleau-Ponty by stating that: "My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul [eine Einstellung zur Seele]. I am not of the Opinion (Meinung) that he has a soul" (Wittgenstein 1963, 178). As Wittgenstein states, it is a mistake to say that I: "am of the opinion"or know that other people have souls, feelings or generally mental states, while he insists that we have a primary attitude towards others (Wittgenstein 1992, 38). Contrasting opinion and attitude, Wittgenstein holds that we react to the behaviour of a person in a specific way. We find a similar remark in the Nachlass, which elaborates on the difference between Einstellung and Meinung. Instead of "attitude toward the soul"one could also say "attitude toward a human'. The attitude is primal to the opinion (Isn't belief in God an attitude?). "An opinion can be wrong. But what would an error (Irrtum) look like here?"(Wittgenstein 1992, 38). Our relation to others does not start by observing certain movements of a body and then interpreting this observation as meaningful. "'We see emotion."- As opposed to what? - We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features" (Wittgenstein 1980, §570). So both for Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, our sense of the other is not based fully on inference and knowledge - more fundamentally we have an instinctive attitude towards them. In short: inter-subjectivity is more basic than knowledge and inference.
Besides these philosophical arguments, in order to strengthen his argument about our non-intellectual relatedness, Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to developmental psychology, more precisely to the behavior of a fifteen months old infant: if one pretends to bite one's own fingers, the baby will open her mouth. Merleau-Ponty (1996, 352) concludes that biting has an immediate, inter-subjective significance for the infant that does not arise from any reflection over analogies, but out of a shared embodiment. Merleau-Ponty reflects on how the infant can reach equivalence between the seen and the performed gesture. At the same time, he doubts that imitation is an analysis-and-reproduction activity that works via a representation of the movements of the other, by which I can understand and imitate the other. More recent empirical findings in developmental psychology, for example by Gallagher and Meltzoff (1996), confirm Merleau-Ponty's point: imitational behaviour patterns of neonate, indicate a proprioceptive sense of one's own body and the recognition of the other belonging to the same 'category' as oneself. It has been shown that neonates have the ability to tell apart lifeless objects and human agents: they simply respond communicatively to human faces, in a way that is different from their response to objects. In other words neonates successfully imitate without having any experience with mirrors, which could give them the necessary knowledge to detect analogies and draw comparisons: they cannot objectify themselves because of a lack of such visual access. Also, long before being able to apply a theory of mind to explain mental states of others, neonates already interact second-personally with others, comprehending their emotions, gestures, intentions, what they see, what they do or pretend to do and how they act toward others. The findings concerning neonatal imitation reveal the equiprimordiality of our own sense of embodied self and a sense of others. The studies indicate that: "…intermodal translation is operative from the very beginning. Strictly speaking, there is no 'translation' or transfer necessary, because it is already accomplished in the embodied perception itself, and this is already inter-subjective" (Gallagher 2005, 80).
Besides the philosophical and developmental evidence, the very recent neuro-scientific theory on Mirror Neurons and recent findings in this area, seem to reinforce the idea of such a primary inter-subjectivity, thus a non-conceptual and non-inferential access to others.1 When drawing on mirror neuron research to sustain a phenomenological account of primary intersubjectivity, we must note that this research has until recently been interpreted in terms of simulation theory (Gallese & Goldman 1998). Such an interpretation has repeatedly been criticized by phenomenologists such as Gallagher (2004a, 2005b) and Zahavi (2008), and recently, Gallese (2009, 582) himself has moved away from a clear cut simulationist understanding of Mirror Neuron Systems, at least from simulation based upon a resemblance between target and simulator. Finally, Gallese (2009, 583) noted that he shares the idea that: "…the primary way of understanding others is direct in nature" with the account of primarily intersubjectivity. Already earlier, Gallese (2006) clearly opposed inferential accounts (based on analogy), and he noted that: "When I see the facial expression of someone else, and this perception leads me to experience that expression as a particular affective state, I do not accomplish this type of understanding through an argument by analogy" (Gallese 2006, 50). When it comes to the study of autism, the Iacoboni group (2006) has made significant progresses in linking the impairment of mirroring neural mechanisms with autism: "Typically developing children can rely upon a right hemisphere-mirroring neural mechanism - interfacing with the limbic system via the insula - whereby the meaning of the imitated (or observed) emotion is directly felt and hence understood. In contrast, this mirroring mechanism is seemingly not engaged in children with ASD, who must then adopt an alternative strategy of increased visual and motor attention whereby the internally felt emotional significance of the imitated facial expression is probably not experienced" (Dapretto et al. 2005, 30). So evidence from neuroscience also points in the direction of such non-inferentially based intersubjectivity as maintained by philosophical and developmental accounts.
In all, this interdisciplinary evidence suggests that we should replace 'theory-theory of mind' and inferential approaches to inter-subjectivity with the phenomenology-inspired 'primary inter-subjectivity', which changes the picture: in primary inter-subjectivity there is a primordial sense of acquaintedness, upon which we eventually build a 'theory of mind'. As Gallese (2007, 362) puts it, it is: "...before and below Theory of Mind." We can now turn the picture presented by the meta-representational account around: we do not first and foremost develop our inter-subjective skills in play. The opposite seems to be the case: only some already established, fundamental, inter-subjective skills allow for even basic functional play.
V. Impaired Play and the Resonance of Others
Are we now in a position to explain impaired play behaviour and thereby increase our understanding of the inter-subjective nature of play? I take this to be the case. Let us look at functional play first:
With the account of primary inter-subjectivity in mind, we may revise our way of relating to the objects of functional play. As Leontiev (1981, 135) has put it; we must keep in mind that (play-) objects are not just there as brute facts outside the socio-cultural domain, but are introduced to the child by others. The infant takes over the actions of others, imitates the way others deal with objects and in this way begins to take over the other's intentions and attitudes toward objects. The meaning of objects arises, because they are introduced to the child by others and thus their preferred contexts and affordances are revealed. According to Gibson's (1979) concept of perceptual experience, we do not primarily perceive the objects in our surroundings in terms of their isolated properties (like form or color), but rather in terms of their "affordances," thus the possible radius of actions they offer us. In Heidegger's terms this would equal the concept of the 'tool'. The hammer is a device for hammering-with, a bed is lay-on-able. So autism does not only involve 'mindblindness', but, as Loveland has pointed out, also a deficit in the child's ability to become aware of the culturally determined affordances of objects (Loveland 1991). For this they must see an object through another's eyes and let others' reactions to objects guide their own response to the object (Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner 1993). I think this account is a continuation of the phenomenologically informed account presented and provides sufficient explanation for impaired functional play: not having access to primary intersubjectivity results in a rigid manner of dealing with objects: play is impaired because the resonance of others lacks.
What about pretend play? Pretending involves distancing from the immediacy of perception, feeling, and acting - a distancing from the context in which the thing is understood and used. As Hobson notes, this already involves self-conscious thought, since: '…one cannot accidentally pretend.' (Hobson 2002, 78). However, there is also a strong sense of other-awareness: pretence involves being aware of the particular perspective one is taking on the object and that other perspectives are possible. Distancing from the immediacy of perception involves distancing towards other perspectives, and other perspectives are the possible perspectives of other people. In other words, pretend-distancing involves placing oneself in the perspective of the other. So it seems natural to think that pretense develops only in conjunction with my awareness of others as having their own perspectives, which depends on a primordial understanding of others.
We may invoke another aspect to support this argument: Gallagher notes that: "Pretense is a relationship between mind and action in such a way that the action by itself cannot contain the full meaning" (Gallagher 2004b, 255). So what or who can contain the full meaning? I think pretense only achieves its full meaning if there is a recipient other, even if he/she is only imagined. Pretense only makes sense if it is potentially for someone.2 To conclude, we are now in a position to make sense of the impairments in functional play and lack of pretend play, without having to explain it via the meta-representational and inferential account and a theory of mind.3
VI. Conclusion
This paper sought to substantiate the claim that play is an inherently intersubjective phenomenon and requires the resonative presence of others, which I have explained in terms of primary intersubjectivity. Empirical evidence was acquired from the psychopathology of autism, which reveals the intertwinement of inter-subjectivity and play. The inquiry into psychopathology has strengthened the claim: Play is only meaningful, if there is a special access to objects that reflects the inter-subjective affordances. It is constitutive for the playful use of the object that there remain traces of others. What we usually mean by play is not focusing on a particular and isolated aspect of an entity apart from its context and affordance, as it is the case in autism, but relating to it as a meaningful whole.4 This need not mean possessing an exact, conceptual knowledge of the affordances of objects, but only knowledge of their meaningful relatedness to some other, an awareness of the existence of perspectives on it. Even functional, object-oriented play requires understanding and the presence of others: Even though play is transformed by language and knowledge and is later articulated within a reflexive space, it remains constitutive that it echoes the primordial presence of others. In this sense there is a constitutive 'double knowledge' in play, but not in the regular (Batesonian) sense, which would mean to know what is real and what is simulation. Rather, it is 'double knowledge' as knowledge of objects and a sense of the resonance of others in them.
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Endnotes
1 Mirror neurons (or "monkey-see, monkey-do cells") are brain cells, first identified in macaque monkeys in the early 1990s. The interesting thing about them is that are active (they fire) both when someone performs an action himself and when he observes another living creature perform that same action. This had lead to the conclusion that there is a mirror neuron resonance system in humans that allows for the ability to imitate and learn from others' actions, or understand their intentions and empathize with their pain.
2 The necessity of the other in play reminds of Gadamer's account of play and art. Hans-Georg Gadamer: Truth and Method, (London: Stagebooks, Sheed & Ward 1989).
3 This is not to say that the inter-subjectivity completely lacks meta-representational content. My point is modest, stating that we cannot understand impaired play in autism through the meta-representational account.
4 Van Berckelaer-Onnes suggests that the weak drive towards central coherence in autism, results in perceiving objects in terms of their parts, rather than as meaningful wholes, and this makes it even harder to acquire knowledge of others required for pretend play. I. A. van Berckelaer-Onnes "Promoting Early Play" Autism, Vol. 7, No. 4, (2003), 415-423.
Somogy Varga, Ph.D.
Institute of Cognitive Science
University of Osnabrück
Albrechtstraße 28
49069 Osnabrück
Germany
Phone: +49 (0) 541-9693358
somogy.varga@uni.osnabrueck.de
Somogy Varga has worked at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt am Main and did his ph.d. in philosophy at the Johann W. Goethe University of Frankfurt. He is currently a post doctoral researcher at the University of Osnabrück (AHRC/DFG project on emotions and psychopathology). He has published on aesthetics, social philosophy, phenomenology and psychopathology.
