My first goal in this commentary was to show that MV as a pluralistic view on social understanding is a valuable contribution to the interactive turn. It has the potential to integrate insights from different directions of empirical and theoretical research and thus to yield a comprehensive account on social cognition. However, I argued that such an approach needs careful consideration concerning its metaphysical background assumptions. I demonstrated that parts of MV as laid out by Newen are not fully compatible and that it thus needs a different kind of framework which allows a coherent picture.
I presented an alternative model by applying Metzinger’s framework of 1-3E to social cognition, hence 1-3sE. Although the details are still to be spelled out in future research, 1-3sE has several advantages that enable a coherent and fruitful framing of MV. It integrates all four social mechanisms mentioned by Newen and thus can be seen as a pluralistic account of social cognition. What is different, however, is that those four elements are described at different levels of description. As such they all play a specific role in the overall image of social understanding and merge into a manifold, but unified picture. Basic interaction, in this theory, can be accounted for without making radical claims in either direction; we do not need to assume that the mind is relational, as claimed by proponents of the enactive theory. However, we also do not have to ascribe a high level of sophistication to a system in order to be able to interact. In my proposal, interaction (or at least simple interactive mechanisms) can function without any complex representation. Interaction is thus located at the lowest level of the hierarchy, namely 1sE. The next level of social embodiment describes representational and computational processes that subserve social cognition. I showed in which ways a model of one’s own body could enable social cognition and which parts of such a model could possibly be shared with others. 2sE encompasses these processes. I further argued that DP should be treated as a phenomenological rather than epistemological concept and should thus be described at the level of 3sE. By doing so, I aimed to avoid mixing up different levels of description and to yield a coherent usage of the term. High-level simulation and theoretical inference have been described at the level of 3sE+, the highest level of the hierarchy, thus doing justice to the fact that they are very special and probably rare cases of social cognition. The application of the notions of transparency and opacity offered a way to emphasize the phenomenological variety that comes with different social situations.
There are still many open questions and this is by no means an exhaustive description of how 1-3sE can be used to frame social understanding. My goal here was to highlight its potential to provide a framework which offers novel ways to (1) incorporate the phenomenal level of description with its representational counterparts, (2) to integrate the role of the body as shaping and grounding social cognitive processes and thus (3) to depict social cognition as a representational, but still embodied ability.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Barbara-Wengeler-Stiftung for their financial support, Thomas Metzinger and Jennifer Windt for giving me the opportunity to be part of this project, two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback, and Luke Miller for helpful suggestions on form and content.