The new hybrids: Continuing debates on social perception q Shaun Gallagher ⇑ Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, USA Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia article info Article history: Received 25 November 2014 Revised 25 February 2015 Accepted 7 April 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Social cognition Hybrid theories Direct perception Inference Theory of mind Simulation Interaction abstract I evaluate several attempts to integrate standard theories of social cognition, either theory theory or simulation theory, with aspects of interaction theory, and especially with the concept of direct social perception. I refer to these as new hybrid theories of social cogni- tion. One of the new hybrids accomplishes the integration only by weakening the concept of mindreading or by understanding mindreading as targeting the shared situation rather than the other’s mental states. Hybrids that attempt to accommodate the idea of direct per- ception of mental states grant a phenomenological directness only by maintaining tacit (theory-based) inferences on the subpersonal level. If such inferential processes are thought to be extra-perceptual, then perception is neither sufficient nor direct for an understanding of intentions and emotions. Moreover, insistence on top-down inferential processes trades off against the possibility of plasticity in the perceptual system itself. I suggest that a better model than a hybrid theory would be a pluralist one. A pluralist approach to social cognition would treat theoretical inference, simulation, direct percep- tion, interactive skills, etc. as different strategies. The real challenge is to work out a plu- ralist account of subpersonal processes. Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Until recently, debates about social cognition have been dominated by approaches framed around the notions of mind- reading under the general heading of ‘theory of mind’ (ToM). Since the 1980s theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST) have defined different perspectives on these issues. In some cases there have been attempts to form hybrid theories that rely on both the TT appeal to inferences based on folk psychology and the ST appeal to either explicit or implicit simulation rou- tines (e.g., Goldman, 2006; Malle & Hodges, 2007; Mitchell, 2005; Nichols & Stich, 2003). Over the past several years there has been renewed debate about the notion of direct perception in the context of social cognition (call this ‘direct social per- ception’ or DSP). Variations on the idea that we can perceive a person’s emotions and intentions, can be traced back to both Wittgenstein (1967, 1980) and several early 20th-century phenomenologists (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Scheler, 1954), and have been defended more recently by a number of philosophers (Green, 2010; McDowell, 1998; Stout, 2010). The notion of DSP has also been put forward as part of ‘interaction theory’ (IT), proposed as an alternative to ToM approaches (Gallagher, 2008; Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012; Ratcliffe, 2007; Reddy, 2008). In the wake of this challenge, however, several theorists have argued http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.04.002 1053-8100/Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. q The author acknowledges support received from the Marie-Curie Initial Training Network, ‘‘TESIS: toward an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity’’ (FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, 264828), European Commission Research, and the Humboldt Foundation’s Anneliese Maier Research Award. ⇑ Address: 331 Clement Hall, Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA. E-mail address: s.gallagher@memphis.edu Consciousness and Cognition 36 (2015) 452–465 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog Please cite this article in press as: Gallagher, S. The new hybrids: Continuing debates on social perception. Consciousness and Cognition (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.04.002