What do you think?
Rate this book
How Infants Know Minds
Most psychologists claim that we begin to develop a “theory of mind”―some basic ideas about other people’s minds―at age two or three, by inference, deduction, and logical reasoning.
But does this mean that small babies are unaware of minds? That they see other people simply as another (rather dynamic and noisy) kind of object? This is a common view in developmental psychology. Yet, as this book explains, there is compelling evidence that babies in the first year of life can tease, pretend, feel self-conscious, and joke with people. Using observations from infants’ everyday interactions with their families, Vasudevi Reddy argues that such early emotional engagements show infants’ growing awareness of other people’s attention, expectations, and intentions.
Reddy deals with the persistent problem of “other minds” by proposing a “second-person” we know other minds if we can respond to them. And we respond most richly in engagement with them. She challenges psychology’s traditional “detached” stance toward understanding people, arguing that the most fundamental way of knowing minds―both for babies and for adults―is through engagement with them. According to this argument the starting point for understanding other minds is not isolation and ignorance but emotional relation.
But does this mean that small babies are unaware of minds? That they see other people simply as another (rather dynamic and noisy) kind of object? This is a common view in developmental psychology. Yet, as this book explains, there is compelling evidence that babies in the first year of life can tease, pretend, feel self-conscious, and joke with people. Using observations from infants’ everyday interactions with their families, Vasudevi Reddy argues that such early emotional engagements show infants’ growing awareness of other people’s attention, expectations, and intentions.
Reddy deals with the persistent problem of “other minds” by proposing a “second-person” we know other minds if we can respond to them. And we respond most richly in engagement with them. She challenges psychology’s traditional “detached” stance toward understanding people, arguing that the most fundamental way of knowing minds―both for babies and for adults―is through engagement with them. According to this argument the starting point for understanding other minds is not isolation and ignorance but emotional relation.
288 pages, Paperback
First published April 30, 2008
3 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 27, 2021
It is not uncommon to hear the claim that the self is fluid and is constructed over dialogue, given the influence of post-modern thinkers. Developmental psychologist Reddy nicely qualifies and deepens this claim over her presentation and analysis of various findings in her and others' experiments. Her basic thesis is that young infants, even newborns, are capable of engaging with others emotionally. They can feel emotions and physiological changes spring up in their own bodies, given the gaze and emotional expression that another directs towards them.
Ulrich Neisser made the classic distinction, now widely accepted by philosophers and psychologists, that there are 5 forms of self that are ambiguated over when we use the term "self": the most developmentally primitive form is the ecological self. This refers to our sense of our spatiotemporal body as an entity that is distinct from and interacts with our environment. Reddy's innovation is to argue that this ecological self is inextricably emotional/affective; it is not only that infants sense that their bodies are soft and warm, in contrast to a hard and cold wooden floor, for example. It is also that infants sense emotions surging through their bodies, in contrast (or as a reaction to) other people directing attention towards them.
Reddy argues that this sense of one's bodily emotions as caused by one's caretakers is the origin of any sense of selfhood and of one's "theory of mind" (i.e., the ability to tell what other people are thinking and feeling). When an infant feels her emotions in response to her caretakers' attention, this serves as a basis for her becoming aware of herself as an object that is perceived by her caretaker. This also serves as a basis for her becoming aware of what her caretaker is perceiving -- a preliminary form of theory of mind. This opens the door for the infant to become aware of her caretaker as perceiving other objects in the world, a capacity that develops around 2 months of age. It also opens the door for the infant to respond to the caretaker's attention directed towards her, which substantiates her sense of selfhood and agency. Only later on in life, once infants begin grasping abstract entities and concepts, do they begin having a conceptual understanding of the self (e.g., that each person has a self that are all on par with one another and that face an objective world) and a theory-based theory of mind (e.g., a conceptual scheme correlating certain behaviors with the intentional states 'behind' those).
I have one complaint about this book. I didn't like the organization. Reddy doesn't lay down in any particular place her core arguments for either of these theses about the role of affective engagement in the development of selfhood and of theory of mind. Rather, points that defend these arguments are dispersed over various chapters. The chapters are topical, addressing phenomena that are tied to the development of selfhood and theory of mind (e.g., imitation/mimesis, having conversations/dialogue, experiencing another's attention, feeling self-conscious). This organization has its merits; if a reader is interested in reviewing empirical literature on one of these phenomena, it is easy to identify the chapter that will present that literature. But this organization detracts from the robustness of Reddy's theses; I am not sure if I can reconstruct her implicit arguments, and so some premises for her theses seem to lack justification. For example, in chapter 6 Reddy claims that infants can perceive their own body parts and their own emotions in an analogous manner; she doesn't defend this rigorously, but I have the vague sense that points she makes in other chapters might support this claim.
Overall, I like Reddy's radical claims (radical relative to the typical claims made by empirical psychologists) which support thinkers, like Buber, who've been outed by the empirically-minded as wishy-washy or spiritual. I also really like her overall methodological approach: she shows that certain, critical data points for understanding infant development can be discerned only when we engage with infants directly and take the phenomenology of these interactions seriously. These data points can never be found if we stick solely to third-personal observation. (This methodological point is somewhat different than the traditional phenomenologists; the latter emphasize that we inspect our own first-personal experiences, those we have when we are by ourselves, whereas Reddy is emphasizing that we inspect our interpersonal experiences).
But in the end, I feel dissatisfied. The various claims she makes are intuitions I've had as a student of philosophy -- I picked up this book with hopes to acquire rigorous empirical evidence to support my phenomenology-based intuitions. But unfortunately many of Reddy's critical claims are also based in phenomenology, or are just not defended at all. The experiments she cites are often relevant, but don't get us the full way to her claims. Nonetheless, I'd highly recommend this book to readers interested in the "I-Thou" relationship (coined by Buber) and topics like the ontological status of the self and how we come to know other minds.
Ulrich Neisser made the classic distinction, now widely accepted by philosophers and psychologists, that there are 5 forms of self that are ambiguated over when we use the term "self": the most developmentally primitive form is the ecological self. This refers to our sense of our spatiotemporal body as an entity that is distinct from and interacts with our environment. Reddy's innovation is to argue that this ecological self is inextricably emotional/affective; it is not only that infants sense that their bodies are soft and warm, in contrast to a hard and cold wooden floor, for example. It is also that infants sense emotions surging through their bodies, in contrast (or as a reaction to) other people directing attention towards them.
Reddy argues that this sense of one's bodily emotions as caused by one's caretakers is the origin of any sense of selfhood and of one's "theory of mind" (i.e., the ability to tell what other people are thinking and feeling). When an infant feels her emotions in response to her caretakers' attention, this serves as a basis for her becoming aware of herself as an object that is perceived by her caretaker. This also serves as a basis for her becoming aware of what her caretaker is perceiving -- a preliminary form of theory of mind. This opens the door for the infant to become aware of her caretaker as perceiving other objects in the world, a capacity that develops around 2 months of age. It also opens the door for the infant to respond to the caretaker's attention directed towards her, which substantiates her sense of selfhood and agency. Only later on in life, once infants begin grasping abstract entities and concepts, do they begin having a conceptual understanding of the self (e.g., that each person has a self that are all on par with one another and that face an objective world) and a theory-based theory of mind (e.g., a conceptual scheme correlating certain behaviors with the intentional states 'behind' those).
I have one complaint about this book. I didn't like the organization. Reddy doesn't lay down in any particular place her core arguments for either of these theses about the role of affective engagement in the development of selfhood and of theory of mind. Rather, points that defend these arguments are dispersed over various chapters. The chapters are topical, addressing phenomena that are tied to the development of selfhood and theory of mind (e.g., imitation/mimesis, having conversations/dialogue, experiencing another's attention, feeling self-conscious). This organization has its merits; if a reader is interested in reviewing empirical literature on one of these phenomena, it is easy to identify the chapter that will present that literature. But this organization detracts from the robustness of Reddy's theses; I am not sure if I can reconstruct her implicit arguments, and so some premises for her theses seem to lack justification. For example, in chapter 6 Reddy claims that infants can perceive their own body parts and their own emotions in an analogous manner; she doesn't defend this rigorously, but I have the vague sense that points she makes in other chapters might support this claim.
Overall, I like Reddy's radical claims (radical relative to the typical claims made by empirical psychologists) which support thinkers, like Buber, who've been outed by the empirically-minded as wishy-washy or spiritual. I also really like her overall methodological approach: she shows that certain, critical data points for understanding infant development can be discerned only when we engage with infants directly and take the phenomenology of these interactions seriously. These data points can never be found if we stick solely to third-personal observation. (This methodological point is somewhat different than the traditional phenomenologists; the latter emphasize that we inspect our own first-personal experiences, those we have when we are by ourselves, whereas Reddy is emphasizing that we inspect our interpersonal experiences).
But in the end, I feel dissatisfied. The various claims she makes are intuitions I've had as a student of philosophy -- I picked up this book with hopes to acquire rigorous empirical evidence to support my phenomenology-based intuitions. But unfortunately many of Reddy's critical claims are also based in phenomenology, or are just not defended at all. The experiments she cites are often relevant, but don't get us the full way to her claims. Nonetheless, I'd highly recommend this book to readers interested in the "I-Thou" relationship (coined by Buber) and topics like the ontological status of the self and how we come to know other minds.
June 28, 2025
A good book and an innovative proposal for overhauling the dominant methodology of contemporary psychology.
April 27, 2015
A huge and impressive work as it is. Reddy stands decidedly on the other side. A disengaged observation can never get what other mind is like. This is a statement not only for babies, whatever age they are, but also for psychologists. Being an engaged participant in a relationship is the only way that leads to the core of what a mind is. We are not opaques to others and do not need to simulate in us, in our isolated private mind, what is happening to the other to understand her/him (an approximation in the first person, the Simulation-Theory), nor we need to construct a detached theory-of-mind of her/him in order to communicate (an approximation in the third person, the Theory-Theory-of-Mind). In both the cases the observer is a static detached one. But the truth is that we are simply there, facing each other in an I-Thou relationship in the second person, a relationship which first of all we are experiencing (and not just observing, inferring or simulating), that is, a committed relationship. We are transparent from the beginning, from birth. We live in these relationships in the second person, in engagement, since we came to this world with others, since the very minute we are born. To be recognised as a You by another person is essential for an individual development. Reddy, with a large body of experimental work, shows an extremely attractive path for the cognitive sciences in general and psychology in particular.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews