The multiplicity view (MV) is part of Albert Newen’s person model theory (PMT), which provides a rich and detailed account of social understanding. It attempts to answer two central questions in the research field of social cognition, which the author neatly differentiates and then again integrates into a comprehensive theory. The first question asks which epistemic strategy humans use to access the mental states of others and to gather information about them. Approaches advocating Simulation Theory (ST; e.g., Goldman 2006), as well as direct perception (DP; e.g., Gallagher 2008), have attempted to yield an answer to that question, while Theory Theory (TT; e.g., Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997) and Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH; e.g., Hutto 2008) focused on a second question: How is the information we obtain to understand others stored and organized? By sorting out these questions, Newen shows that different theories have tried to tackle different problems, which I believe to be a very useful and fruitful contribution to the research field. It reveals that the four main theories mentioned above are less competitive than originally thought, since, on closer examination, they actually aim to give answers to different questions. This viewpoint enables one of Newen’s main arguments, namely that each of these approaches can be merged into one unified account of social understanding. He takes three steps in arguing for his theory. In a first step, he differentiates between the two questions in the research field of social cognition mentioned above, thus setting up a dividing line between the vast manifold of different approaches and theories. Secondly, the author puts forth a pluralistic account of social cognition, the multiplicity view (MV). In doing so, he attempts to answer the first question discussed earlier. In a third step, Newen tackles the second question of how knowledge about other people is organized and stored. He claims that this happens through the formation of so-called person models, hence person model theory (PMT; see Newen this collection).
By laying out MV as a pluralistic account of social cognition, Newen aims to steer the discussion in the research field into a different direction, away from debating whether social understanding is a form of simulation, theoretical inference, DP or interaction. Instead, he argues that all four epistemic strategies are applied, depending on the social context (cf. Newen this collection, p. 7). MV is of particular interest, because it reflects two growing convictions in the research field. First, by paying attention to DP and interaction, it does justice to demands that arose in the so-called “interactive turn” (Gallotti & Frith 2013; Overgaard & Michael 2013) and can thus be seen as part of the movement itself. The interactive turn claims that researchers have not paid enough attention to the phenomenology of social encounters (Gallagher 2001), the interactive contexts in which most social situations are embedded (De Jaegher & Paolo 2007) and the role of the body and emotions in social cognition (Schilbach et al. 2013). This directly relates to MV, since it aims to include intuitive ways of social understanding that do not necessarily require simulation and theoretical inference and thus to widen the theoretical scope towards less “cognitivist” views. The second conviction is that there is more to social cognition than a single all-purpose mechanism (Adolphs 2006, p. 30; Fiebich & Coltheart in press).[2] (Human) social cognition obviously is manifold; it has many aspects that are not only phenomenologically distinct (just think of the different experiences you have when trying to figure out your advisor’s somewhat cryptic Email, or when trying to make your 4 year-old eat her spinach), but also draws on several cognitive mechanisms that are differently implemented. It therefore makes sense that we can find something useful in each of the four theoretical approaches discussed so far; while ST and TT are plausible accounts to describe and explain “higher-level” social cognition that requires quite sophisticated skills, other theories such as DP or interaction theory cover more intuitive ways of understanding others. Merging them into a comprehensive theory seems to be a natural next step.
Newen claims that
[t]here is no standard default strategy of understanding others, but in everyday cases of understanding others we rely on a multiplicity of strategies which we vary depending on the context and on our prior experiences (and eventually also triggered by explicit training). (this collection, p. 7)
How does he arrive at this conclusion? Newen argues against the view that only one of the mechanisms that have been proposed to be important for social cognition (simulation, theorizing, DP and primary interaction) can plausibly be viewed as the default strategy by which humans understand each other. The main argument against such a single-mechanism view is that their activation seems to be highly context-dependent. Simulation, according to Newen, presupposes similarity between two interacting individuals. Theorizing only applies in complex social situations which need explicit and thoughtful disambiguation. Encountering someone of who we already have rich prior information activates DP, while social situations that are easy to understand can be disambiguated by primary interaction. Thus, Newen concludes that “[o]nly the combination of all four strategies, in full sensitivity to the context and applied on the basis of our experience in successfully using the strategies, makes us experts in understanding others” (ibid., p. 7).