2016 Volume 27 Issue 4 Pages 288-298
This article critiques the theories of Theory of Mind (ToM), and proposes an alternative phenomenological framework that demarcates a socio-cultural construction process and its resulting social understanding. First, we observe that the ToM framework and its cognitive science background originated from the premise that a representational understanding of an unobservable mind (i.e., mind-reading) is an intrinsic, universal ability from a third-person perspective. The author then reviews recent phenomenological explanations and their multi- or dual-process models of social cognition which includes implicit false-belief understanding, that emphasize first- and second-person perspectives of social interaction. It is argued that although it may be the most plausible framework of social understanding, the phenomenological model still lacks enough consideration of socio-cultural construction, a process which should be universal across socio-historical contexts. We further assert that ToM, believed to be the one and only universal cognitive process, is nothing more than an outcome of such socio-cultural processes.
