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8 - Opacity of other minds: local theories revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2014

Alessandro Duranti
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Summary

Introduction

Starting in the late 1980s, a number of developmental psychologists and philosophers (e.g., Astington, Harris, and Olson 1988; Carruthers and Smith 1996) recast the issue of the role of intentions in interpreting people’s actions, words included, in terms of the so-called “theory of mind,” a term originally introduced by David Premack and Guy Woodruff (1978) in their work on primates’ cognition. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, linguistic and cultural anthropologists entered this tradition of studies not so much to claim cross-cultural differences in the capacity to read other minds, which they took to be a human universal, but in the need and willingness that members of different communities express and demonstrate to engage in introspection or in guessing what others might be thinking, wishing, or feeling. As shown in the following quote by Joel Robbins and Alan Rumsey, the doubts that Michelle Rosaldo and I, and others, had raised in the 1980s about whether we need to involve individual intentions to interpret human action were reframed as issues of ideological control.

While it may seem at first blush as if the work on intentional communication and “theory of mind” that we have referred to in the last two paragraphs is completely at odds with the anthropological critique of personalist/intentionalist theories of meaning, this is not necessarily the case. For even if it is true that the capacity for inferring the mental states of others is a generically human one, and plays a part in communication everywhere, it does not follow that all language ideologies will give it equal prominence, or even allow it to be openly recognized or actualized in speech.

(Robbins and Rumsey 2008: 414)

Starting from the observation that, according to existing ethnographic accounts, people in a number of societies in the Pacific have been said to claim – or to imply through their behavior – that it is impossible to know what goes on in another person’s mind, Robbins and Rumsey (2008) put forward the hypothesis that members of these societies subscribed to what they called “doctrine of the opacity of other minds” and that such a doctrine “matter[s] to how people operate socially” (Robbins and Rumsey 2008: 414).

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Chapter
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The Anthropology of Intentions
Language in a World of Others
, pp. 175 - 186
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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