“A Mind Like Ours”: An Interview with Dr. Susan E. Carey About the Origins of the Human Mind
By Grace von Oiste
This semester, I was fortunate enough to get accepted into my first-choice freshman seminar: The Origins of the Human Mind with Dr. Susan E. Carey, the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Dr. Carey is the recipient of many awards and has done impactful research in the cognitive sciences. We began the seminar focusing on the origins of the human mind. For many of the students in the seminar, we had never thought about this phenomenon so deeply before. I immediately began to look forward to class each week. We then moved on to case studies. In these case studies, we picked apart the ways in which humans develop psychological concepts and systems. What is innateness? we asked ourselves with each new case study. For me, the most captivating of these case studies was on the theory of mind. In this interview with Dr. Carey, she explores the introductions of cognitive psychology and ponders the importance of a theory of mind.
Grace: Why do you believe that it is so important to understand the origins of the human mind?
Dr. Carey: You first have to want to understand the human mind and obviously the human mind is a unique phenomenon on Earth. We’re the only animal with a mind like ours. It’s long been recognized, ever since the Greek philosophers, that if you don't have a theory in principle of how the human mind can emerge, you don’t have a theory of the human mind. The big puzzle is babies are born, apparently knowing. As it turns out, however, they don't know anything. They don't know what their mother looks like or where William James Hall is or anything. But they actually have very evolved mechanisms that allow them to learn. That’s part of the answer of the origin of the mind. But there’s no particular interest in understanding the origin of the human mind unless you are fascinated by the issue of understanding the human mind itself. There are also practical reasons [to understand the origin of the human mind]. Throughout my whole career I've always done things that are of political or social value on top of my main scientific interests. Understanding the origins of the human mind is entirely central to education. There’s actually an important societal part of this as well. The United States ranks about 180th in the world in the success of our math and science education and that’s because in the United States they don’t usually pay any attention to what cognitive scientists have learned about what the problem is that has to be solved by math and science education and how to solve it. Whereas other countries have centralized educational systems that draw on evidence-based research in planning their curriculum and it works! So [understanding the origin of the human mind] is actually important to understanding issues of inequity in this country. Basically, every child should be given the best chances to succeed and we know how to do it but schools don’t adapt to what we know. So it's a big political issue. I’m hopeless at the actual politics of it but my interest is in contributing to the evidence based parts of this stuff that says, “look, if you want to do it right, this is how you do it.” But I do that out of a political commitment, it’s not what keeps me awake at night. What keeps me awake at night are the philosophical and the scientific issues.
Grace: What are some misconceptions about the human mind?
Dr. Carey: Basically, it's a highly technical area. I mean we all have minds, and so we all have views about them. There's intuitive theories of the Mind. Some of them are right on, like the intuitive theory of mind we were studying in class. That framework theory is right enough. That theory doesn’t ever get overturned. We do understand each other's behaviours in terms of our intentions, our beliefs, our desires, our goals and our perceptions. That part is perfectly fine. But, since the mind is so important, there are lots of specific theories within that, that are lay theories that are wrong. These include everything we know we learn. That’s an important one. An intuitive theory that all knowledge is consciously accessible. That’s not true either. I think those are two important misconceptions. I think there are misconceptions about rationality. That all reasoning is consciously accessible and rational. That is obviously not true either. Given how hard it actually is to actually do the work that discovers the nature of the mind, it would be very strange if lay people had it right. It only became a topic of scientific study in the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century. But, that's over a hundred years ago, so there is a hundred years of a concerted study and theory building in which we've figured out exactly how perception works, a lot about how language works, a lot about how language acquisition works.
Grace: What systems and abilities are human babies born with?
Dr. Carey: Babies have intuitive physics, intuitive number concepts, and intuitive theory of mind. They have concepts of causality. They have representations of the physical world and causal interactions among objects. They have a lot of innate support for learning language, ofcourse. If you immerse chimpanzees in a linguistic environment, they don't learn english. People have actually tried raising baby chimpanzees with their own children. The chimps learn a lot of things, but they don’t learn language. Baby’s also have intuitive moral attributions. They have an innate concept of person. A baby’s mind is very rich
Grace: How would you describe theory of mind to someone who has never heard of it before?
Dr. Carey: I would just ask them a question of why they did something. Or I would ask them why somebody else did something. Then I’d point out to them that their explanation drew on what they took that person's intentions or goals to be. That's the basic theory of mind: want, belief and explanation. That framework theory, as a matter of empirical fact, is cross-culturally universal. But it is an abstract theory. We can't see intentions or perceptions, but we infer them. These are theoretical constructs and that's what makes [theory of mind] a theory. The notion of a framework theory is a really important construct in cognitive science. It is the reason we read novels. We read novels because we are interested in human variations, goals and intentions. The theory is essential to morality. When you are evaluating whether somebody did something wrong, you have to know what their intentions and beliefs were. If they put cyanide in someone’s coffee genuinely believing it was sugar, then they might be guilty of negligent homicide. Maybe they should have known better but if they genuinely thought it was sugar, they aren’t guilty of murder. The point is that reasoning about other people’s intentions and beliefs is fundamental to making sense of other people and having effective social interactions. Morality, the law... I mean it’s incredibly important.
Grace: In class, we talk about how in order to say something is not innate, you must propose a mechanism of learning. Can you talk about this method?
Dr. Carey: That's just a function of what the scientific concept of innate is. Here is another common misconception. That it's politically dangerous to even consider issues of innateness. But that's mixing up understanding the evolutionary preparation we have for learning with the claim that all differences among people are due to genetics. The sense of innate, in the nativist vs. empiricist debate is about what part of what we know is due to constraints on learning that we are evolutionarily endowed with and what parts of what we know are the result of the learning that they make possible. That is not a politically charged issue at all. Innate simply means not learned. If you don’t have a mechanism by which something that isn't innate can come into being then you don't have anything. You don't have an account of that something. If you think that some fundamental human capacity is learned, you owe me an account of how it could be learned. The world doesn’t give us information for free; it has to filter through our way of interpreting it and there has to be some initial state for how we do that. That has to be innate. There has to be some unlearned beginning point. And there has to be some mechanisms that take that information and transform it.
About the Author
Grace von Oiste is a first-year student at Harvard College.
Grace: Why do you believe that it is so important to understand the origins of the human mind?
Dr. Carey: You first have to want to understand the human mind and obviously the human mind is a unique phenomenon on Earth. We’re the only animal with a mind like ours. It’s long been recognized, ever since the Greek philosophers, that if you don't have a theory in principle of how the human mind can emerge, you don’t have a theory of the human mind. The big puzzle is babies are born, apparently knowing. As it turns out, however, they don't know anything. They don't know what their mother looks like or where William James Hall is or anything. But they actually have very evolved mechanisms that allow them to learn. That’s part of the answer of the origin of the mind. But there’s no particular interest in understanding the origin of the human mind unless you are fascinated by the issue of understanding the human mind itself. There are also practical reasons [to understand the origin of the human mind]. Throughout my whole career I've always done things that are of political or social value on top of my main scientific interests. Understanding the origins of the human mind is entirely central to education. There’s actually an important societal part of this as well. The United States ranks about 180th in the world in the success of our math and science education and that’s because in the United States they don’t usually pay any attention to what cognitive scientists have learned about what the problem is that has to be solved by math and science education and how to solve it. Whereas other countries have centralized educational systems that draw on evidence-based research in planning their curriculum and it works! So [understanding the origin of the human mind] is actually important to understanding issues of inequity in this country. Basically, every child should be given the best chances to succeed and we know how to do it but schools don’t adapt to what we know. So it's a big political issue. I’m hopeless at the actual politics of it but my interest is in contributing to the evidence based parts of this stuff that says, “look, if you want to do it right, this is how you do it.” But I do that out of a political commitment, it’s not what keeps me awake at night. What keeps me awake at night are the philosophical and the scientific issues.
Grace: What are some misconceptions about the human mind?
Dr. Carey: Basically, it's a highly technical area. I mean we all have minds, and so we all have views about them. There's intuitive theories of the Mind. Some of them are right on, like the intuitive theory of mind we were studying in class. That framework theory is right enough. That theory doesn’t ever get overturned. We do understand each other's behaviours in terms of our intentions, our beliefs, our desires, our goals and our perceptions. That part is perfectly fine. But, since the mind is so important, there are lots of specific theories within that, that are lay theories that are wrong. These include everything we know we learn. That’s an important one. An intuitive theory that all knowledge is consciously accessible. That’s not true either. I think those are two important misconceptions. I think there are misconceptions about rationality. That all reasoning is consciously accessible and rational. That is obviously not true either. Given how hard it actually is to actually do the work that discovers the nature of the mind, it would be very strange if lay people had it right. It only became a topic of scientific study in the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century. But, that's over a hundred years ago, so there is a hundred years of a concerted study and theory building in which we've figured out exactly how perception works, a lot about how language works, a lot about how language acquisition works.
Grace: What systems and abilities are human babies born with?
Dr. Carey: Babies have intuitive physics, intuitive number concepts, and intuitive theory of mind. They have concepts of causality. They have representations of the physical world and causal interactions among objects. They have a lot of innate support for learning language, ofcourse. If you immerse chimpanzees in a linguistic environment, they don't learn english. People have actually tried raising baby chimpanzees with their own children. The chimps learn a lot of things, but they don’t learn language. Baby’s also have intuitive moral attributions. They have an innate concept of person. A baby’s mind is very rich
Grace: How would you describe theory of mind to someone who has never heard of it before?
Dr. Carey: I would just ask them a question of why they did something. Or I would ask them why somebody else did something. Then I’d point out to them that their explanation drew on what they took that person's intentions or goals to be. That's the basic theory of mind: want, belief and explanation. That framework theory, as a matter of empirical fact, is cross-culturally universal. But it is an abstract theory. We can't see intentions or perceptions, but we infer them. These are theoretical constructs and that's what makes [theory of mind] a theory. The notion of a framework theory is a really important construct in cognitive science. It is the reason we read novels. We read novels because we are interested in human variations, goals and intentions. The theory is essential to morality. When you are evaluating whether somebody did something wrong, you have to know what their intentions and beliefs were. If they put cyanide in someone’s coffee genuinely believing it was sugar, then they might be guilty of negligent homicide. Maybe they should have known better but if they genuinely thought it was sugar, they aren’t guilty of murder. The point is that reasoning about other people’s intentions and beliefs is fundamental to making sense of other people and having effective social interactions. Morality, the law... I mean it’s incredibly important.
Grace: In class, we talk about how in order to say something is not innate, you must propose a mechanism of learning. Can you talk about this method?
Dr. Carey: That's just a function of what the scientific concept of innate is. Here is another common misconception. That it's politically dangerous to even consider issues of innateness. But that's mixing up understanding the evolutionary preparation we have for learning with the claim that all differences among people are due to genetics. The sense of innate, in the nativist vs. empiricist debate is about what part of what we know is due to constraints on learning that we are evolutionarily endowed with and what parts of what we know are the result of the learning that they make possible. That is not a politically charged issue at all. Innate simply means not learned. If you don’t have a mechanism by which something that isn't innate can come into being then you don't have anything. You don't have an account of that something. If you think that some fundamental human capacity is learned, you owe me an account of how it could be learned. The world doesn’t give us information for free; it has to filter through our way of interpreting it and there has to be some initial state for how we do that. That has to be innate. There has to be some unlearned beginning point. And there has to be some mechanisms that take that information and transform it.
About the Author
Grace von Oiste is a first-year student at Harvard College.
