University of Toronto Quarterly

The volume contains seventeen chapters (plus a foreword and brief introduction) selected from presentations delivered at an interdisciplinary conference on the social making of minds held in Irsee, Germany, in 2004. The chapters focus on the psychological mechanisms that arise in and through social interaction (verbal and non-verbal) that underlie the organization of human – and, in a few cases, animal – minds. At issue is how interaction shapes the way we talk and think about others and how others talk and think about us, and the influence that both of these activities have on how we talk and think about ourselves. The central topics dealt with in the chapters include the formation of identity, self and agency, emotions and thinking, ostracism and its effects on thinking and emotional well-being, and the role of joint attention and imitation in learning and mental development. Since this necessarily brief review cannot do justice to all of the chapters and all of the topics they address, I will focus my comments on a few that I believe are particularly important for those who work in socio-culturally grounded theories of thinking and mental development. My apologies to the authors whose contributions I am simply unable to address. This is in no way intended [End Page 147] as a negative evaluation of their work. All of the chapters are very much worth reading.

Two early scholars who argued that imitation was the primary process through which social minds were formed were the American, James Mark Baldwin, and the Russian, Lev S. Vygotsky. Contemporary researchers such as Andrew Meltzoff and Michael Tomasello have assigned imitation a central role in their theories of development and have carried out extensive empirical research to support their theoretical stance. According to both researchers, imitation, unlike copy or emulation, relies crucially on the ability of children to ‘read’ the intentions and the strategies used by others to carry out others’ actions. The chapter by Györgi Gergely and Gergely Csibra offers an alternative and more fine-grained account of how imitative learning functions. The authors discuss a series of experiments, which convincingly support their view that humans have evolved a unique pedagogical capacity to transmit and receive ‘relevant cultural knowledge through ostensive communicative “teaching.”’

An especially informative chapter – not only for those interested in the social formation of mind, but also in applied linguistics – is the one by Denis Hilton, Gaëlle Villejoubert, and Jean-François Bonnefon, which focuses on the pragmatics of ‘logical vocabulary,’ an area that to my knowledge has been under-researched by those working on pragmatics. Words such as if, because, some, few, possible, etc., according to the authors, not only have truth–conditions built into their meaning, but they also encode social functions. If a tourist asks a local, ‘How is the fishing in this lake?’ and is given the response, ‘There are few fish left in the lake,’ the response is intended as a recommendation not to fish the lake. On the other hand, a response to the same question, ‘There are a few fish left in the lake,’ is likely intended as an invitation, though perhaps not enthusiastic, to fish the lake. However, both responses satisfy the same true conditions on the fish in the lake.

The chapter by Kusch offers a very interesting interpretation of agency and human freedom grounded in social interaction. The author proposes that humans employ either ‘causal’ or ‘voluntaristic’ discourse in order to get others to do what we want. The former directly coerces others to act in accordance with our wishes, while the latter has, in the long run, much greater influence, because it appeals to a sense of honour and freedom. In other words, it assigns to the other the ‘status of being a responsible and free agent.’ On this view, agency and free will are understood as acting in a way that ‘could have been otherwise if symbolic intervention had occurred.’

The volume is...