Social Understanding in Fictional Contexts and the Question of Error Detection

The paper examines the possibility of using three theories of mindreading (social understanding) – Theory Theory, Simulation Theory and Interaction Theory – and, more precisely, the cognitive mechanisms each of them postulates to account for the reader’s understanding of fictional characters as well as their real authors. Interaction Theory, which explains social cognition in terms of direct, situated, both bodily and minded interactions of agents, might seem irrelevant in the situation from which one agent is, strictly speaking, absent and the other agent’s body does not seem involved. Yet the paper suggests that the interaction might take the form of the reader’s simulated, both minded and bodily, one-sided (pseudo)-interaction with characters, possibly as one of the characters, and artefact-mediated interaction with the real author. The paper suggests further that each theory can account for some error-detection mechanism which might help the reader to differentiate between correct and incorrect ascriptions of characters’ mental states and/or predictions of their next action and/or vicarious anticipations of the reader’s interactions with characters, thus improving the reader’s mindreading skills (social understanding). All these ideas are illustrated with analyses of the hypothetical reader’s mindreading response to passages taken from three works of fiction representing different conventions (mimetic and anti-mimetic, under- and over-representing mental experience, featuring many and few social interactions).