Social cognition and social practice

Research on the early development of joint attention and social cognition has been one of the most fruitful and lively areas of developmental inquiry during the last years. Racine and Carpendale (RC 2007) have written a valuable and timely review of the relevant research in this area. In particular, they have done an excellent job in supplying a careful survey of empirical results, debates about contested interpretations of these results and theoretical approaches to infant development. However, the main purpose of R&C’s paper is to develop a – Wittgenstein-inspired, as they say – critique of most theoretical approaches to infant social and cultural development. Though very diverse in scope and nature, in R&C’s opinion, these approaches (oversimplifying drastically, for the purpose of this paper I’ll call them the ‘standard approaches’) share the assumption that it is infants’ developing social cognitive abilities, their developing understanding of others and themselves, that lays the foundation for cultural development. R&C’s central claim is that these standard approaches are flawed because they essentially rest on questionable conceptual presuppositions, particularly a Cartesian picture of the mind as inner entity. This, I think, is a mistake. R&C are right that some standard approaches include assumptions that might be problematic. For example, some approaches, in which uncritically employing the notion of (introspectionist) simulation as a potential foundation of infants’ interpretation of others might make the argument-from-analogy