ISSN 0439-755X
CN 11-1911/B
主办:中国心理学会
   中国科学院心理研究所
出版:科学出版社

心理学报 ›› 2025, Vol. 57 ›› Issue (1): 173-189.doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2025.0173

• 理论与史 • 上一篇    下一篇

人不是物:社会认知的稽古维新

董达1, 陈巍1,2   

  1. 1绍兴文理学院心理学系; 大脑、心智与教育研究中心, 浙江 绍兴 312000;
    2中国人民大学哲学与认知科学交叉平台, 北京 100080
  • 收稿日期:2024-01-18 发布日期:2024-11-20 出版日期:2025-01-25
  • 基金资助:
    国家社科基金青年项目(20CZX015)资助

Persons are not things: Rejuvenating social cognition

DONG Da1, CHEN Wei1,2   

  1. 1Department of Psychology; Center for Brain, Mind and Education, Shaoxing University, Zhejiang, Shaoxing 312000, China;
    2Interdisciplinary Center for Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100080, China
  • Received:2024-01-18 Online:2024-11-20 Published:2025-01-25

摘要: 当代社会认知的理论版图可分为经典概念工具箱与正在与之对抗的新概念工具两部分。经考证, 理论论和模拟论等经典概念工具集中诞生于1980年代的美国认知科学界, 可以被视为1956认知革命蔓延至社会心理学领域的产物, 而新概念工具可以被视为与第二代认知革命相适合的替代理论。历史上, 社会心理学接受了认知主义的“物”的抽象认知原理, 也全盘接受了它带来的理论负荷, 即对“人”的感知被还原为对“物”的感知, 并且隶属于后者。然而, 基于“物”的抽象认知原理始终无法与社会认知的以“人”为本的实践经验相结合, 也未能实现该领域的自治。事实上, 这一理论困难并非一直存在于“社会认知”的历史路径中, 至少在以Heider为标志性人物的1950年代早期社会认知中便不是这样。Heider “人不是物”理论体系在个体层面上包括知觉实在论、事件归因和生命性-非生命性范畴区分三个部分, 但是第三个理论部件彼时囿于作者主题侧重、证据不足、技术匮乏等多种原因未能完成。结合当代来自演化和比较的、行为和发展的以及神经通路假设的新证据, 通过重新发掘并最终完整构建了“人不是物”论题, 尝试为当代社会认知理论困难提供一个建设性意见。

关键词: 社会认知, 人的感知, 认知革命, 生命性, 主体间性

Abstract: The dominant classical conceptual toolkits of social cognition primarily originate from the creations of scientists or philosophers of cognitive sciences in the 1980s. From the perspective of long-term history, the ongoing theoretical disputes in social cognition today are an extension of broader struggles between two generations of cognitive sciences. Social cognition, having embraced the fundamental tenets of cognitivism, also wholly incorporates its attendant theoretical burdens. As social psychology transitions into a sub-domain of information processing psychology, its historical route during the early periods of social cognition—which predates the cognitive revolution of 1956—has been inadvertently discarded and destroyed. This has led to the drastic theoretical ramification of “person” perception being forcibly diminished to “thing” perception. “Social cognition” has not always had the theoretical difficulty of devaluing persons to things, at least not during its early periods. This paper seeks to revisit and refine the “persons are not things” thesis (The PANT Thesis) from the early period of social cognition, aiming to offer a constructive proposal to address the theoretical challenges facing contemporary social cognition mainly through the lens of Fritz Heider's object theory. This proposal emerges not simply out of speculative retrospection, but is problem-oriented and has significant reciprocated ties with fresh evidence from cognitive neuroscience. Although this proposal has indeed revived the traditional historical route and classic thesis of early social cognition predating the 1956 cognitive revolution, it has comprehensively incorporated the debates and attempts to transcend the disputes spanning over three decades between two generations of cognitive sciences, indeed.
The abstraction principle of cognition in information processing psychology has always been unable to be well applied to “social” cognition. If the abstraction principle of cognition applies to a universal object and differentiates the living/animate person and the non-living/inanimate thing as distinctive sub-categories of objects, it should naturally extend to the sub-domain of social cognition. However, this abstraction principle is primarily derived from the abstraction of non-living objects (things, machines, computers). Accordingly, its application to living objects (persons, agents) merely appends the prefix “social” to “cognition.” Thus, the information processing psychology of “things” hardly facilitates basic requirements of social cognition—“would stoop to any way to learn more about a person,” the phenomena of the person, the experience of the person, the knowledge of the person.
The PANT Thesis inherently posits that there are categorical distinctions between a “person” and a “thing” as perceptual objects, although both belong to the general category of (perceptual) objects. Thus, this thesis mainly contains two parts of theoretical components in defining objects: defining general objects and the person-thing object distinction (the latter in the contemporary context also involves the animate-inanimate distinction). This paper reviews and refines this thesis in two sections. Section 4 arranges a system of perceptual object theory based on the person-thing distinction resorting to insights from Heider's text. Next, section 5 further confirms the independence and fundamentality of person perception as different from thing perception drawing upon contemporary new experimental evidence and new neural pathway hypotheses.
In the end, while both the abstraction principle of cognition as favored by information processing psychology and the PANT Thesis of early social cognition uphold the objectives of autonomy in social cognition, they take contrasting approaches. The abstraction principle of cognition engenders an epistemological reduction, which results in person perception being diminished to thing perception. The PANT Thesis, proficiently addresses this theoretical challenge, thereby reinforcing theoretical autonomy and unity within social cognition.

Key words: social cognition, person perception, cognitive revolution, animacy, intersubjectivity

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