Chapter 39: Mindshaping

While the standard paradigm suggests that humans navigate complex social worlds by theoretically inferring hidden mental states like beliefs and desires—a capacity often linked to Machiavellian intelligence and deception detection—this text argues that such a mechanism is computationally intractable due to the problem of holism and unnecessary for basic social coordination, as evidenced by the complex political lives of chimpanzees who lack full propositional attitude attribution. Instead, the author proposes that human social distinctiveness arises from embodied, embedded, and enactive practices of mindshaping, where individuals mold each other's behavioral dispositions through imitation, pedagogy, and norm enforcement to make social targets predictable and cooperative. Drawing on Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics, mindshaping is defined by the proper functions of cognitive mechanisms that align a target mind with a specific model, a process that can occur without high-level metarepresentation. The chapter details four key characteristics that distinguish human mindshaping from animal varieties: the phenomenon of overimitation where children copy even inefficient actions, an intrinsic motivation to match models for its own sake rather than just for rewards, the use of socially extended mechanisms like master-apprentice pedagogy, and the unique ability to emulate abstract or fictional models encoded in public language. This framework aligns closely with 4E cognition by positing that social intelligence is an extended and enactive skill involving the engineering of social environments rather than just the passive observation of internal states. Furthermore, the text reinterprets the role of attributing full-blown propositional attitudes, suggesting that rather than serving as a real-time predictive tool, this capacity likely evolved later as a regulative practice for justification and reputation management when an individual's behavior deviates from established social norms. By shifting the metaphor from the social agent as a "scientific psychologist" to a "social engineer," this approach resolves evolutionary puzzles regarding coordination and offers a cohesive explanation for the cumulative cultural evolution that characterizes human history.