Mental States in the Absence of a Language: Evidence from the Research of Personality
Abstract
In the present article, we will defend the existence of mental states in the absence of language through the study of personality. Our initial hypothesis is that the study of personality in humans can be applied to individuals regardless of their age, including prelinguistic children. If the main theories within the study of personality make reference to mental states in their statements, then we can assert that these mental states will be present in the cognition of prelinguistic children. To strengthen this hypothesis, we will conclude with other scientific methodologies used for the same purpose outside the realm of personality: deferred imitation and preferential-looking tests. Altogether, these data allow us to conclude that discussing mental states in prelinguistic children is possible and that language is not a necessary condition for possessing this type of states.References
Achinstein, P. (1965). The Problem of Theoretical Terms. North American Philosophical Publications, 2(3): 193-203.
Bezuidenhout, A. (2006). Language as Internal. B. C. Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press: 127-136.
Birkhead, T. R., & Monaghan, P. (2010). Ingenious Ideas: The History of Behavioral Ecology. D. F. Wesneat & C. W. Fox (eds.), Evolutionary Behavioral Ecology. Oxford University Press: 3-15.
Brandom, R. B. (1994). Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Harvard University Press.
Brommer, J., & Class, B. (2017). Personality from the Perspective of Behavioral Ecology. J. Vonk, A. Weiss, & S. Kuczaj (eds.), Personality in Nonhuman Animals. Springer: 73-107.
Camp, E. (2009). Putting Thoughts to Work: Concepts, Systematicity, and Stimulus-Independence. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXXVIII(2): 275-311.
Carruthers, P. (1992). The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice. Cambridge University Press.
Costa, P. T., McCrae, R. R., & Löckenhoff, C. E. (2019). Personality Across the Life Span. Annual Review of Psychology, 70: 423-448.
Davidson, D. (1982). Rational Animals. Dialectica, 36(4): 317-327.
(2001). Thought and Talk. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford University Press: 155-170.
De Pauw, S. (2017). Childhood Personality and Temperament. T. A. Widiger (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Five Factor Model. Oxford University Press: 243-280.
De Pauw, S., & Merviede, I. (2010). Temperament, Personality and Developmental Psychopathology: A Review Based on the Conceptual Dimensions Underlying Childhood Traits. Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 41(3): 313-329.
Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality Structure: Emergence of the Five-Factor Model. Annual Review of Psychology, 41: 417-440.
Dolscheid, S., Hunnius, S., Casasanto, D., & Majid, A. (2014). Prelinguistic Infants are Sensitive to Space-Pitch Associations Found Across Cultures. Psychological Science, 25(6): 1256-1261.
Duff, M. C., Covington, N. V., Hilverman, C., & Cohen, N. J. (2020). Semantic Memory and the Hippocampus: Revisiting, Reaffirming, and Extending the Reach of Their Critical Relationship. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13(January): 1-17.
Fiebich, A., & Coltheart, M. (2015). Various Ways to Understand Other Minds: Towards a Pluralistic Approach to the Explanation of Social Understanding. Mind and Language, 30(3): 235-258.
Fleeson, W. (2001). Toward a Structure- and Process-Integrated View of Personality: Traits as Density Distributions of States. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(6): 1011-1027.
Fleeson, W., & Jayawickreme, E. (2015). Whole Trait Theory. Journal of Research in Personality, 56: 82-92.
Fodor, J. (1975). The Language of Thought. Harvard University Press.
Freeman, H., Gosling, S. D., & Schapiro, S. (2011). Comparison of Methods for Assessing Personality in Nonhuman Primates. A. Weiss, J. E. King, & L. Murray (eds.), Personality and Temperament in Nonhuman Primates. Springer: 17-40.
Funder, D. C. (2001). Personality. Annual Review of Psychology, 52: 197-221.
Gainotti, G. (2006). Anatomical Functional and Cognitive Determinants of Semantic Memory Disorders. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 30(5): 577-594.
Garai, C., Weiss, A., Arnaud, C., & Furuichi, T. (2016). Personality in Wild Bonobos (Pan paniscus). American Journal of Primatology, 78(11): 1178-1189.
Goodwin, R. D., & Friedman, H. S. (2006). Health Status and the Five-Factor Personality Traits in a Nationally Representative Sample. Journal of Health Psychology, 11(5): 643-654.
Hinzen, W. (2013). Narrow Syntax and the Language of Thought. Philosophical Psychology, 26(1): 1-23.
Hochstein, E. (2015). When Does “Folk Psychology” Count as Folk Psychological? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 0: 1-23.
Hylton, P. (2006). Quine on Reference and Ontology. R. Gibson (ed.), A Cambridge Companion to Quine. Cambridge University Press: 115-150.
Jayawickreme, E., Zachry, C. E., & Fleeson, W. (2019). Whole Trait Theory: An Integrative Approach to Examining Personality Structure and Process. Personality and Individual Differences, 136: 2-11.
Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago University Press.
Jones, E., & Herbert, J. (2006). Exploring Memory in Infancy: Deferred Imitation and the Development of Declarative Memory. Infant and Child Development, 15: 195-205.
King, J. E., & Figueredo, A. J. (1997). The Five-Factor Model plus Dominance in Chimpanzee Personality. Journal of Personality, 31: 257-271.
Kornblith, H. (2002). Knowledge and Its Place in Nature. Oxford University Press.
Lepore, E., & Ludwig, K. (2005). Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality. Oxford University Press.
Machery, E. (2009). Doing without Concepts. Oxford University Press.
Mandler, J. M. (2012). On the Spatial Foundations of the Conceptual System and Its Enrichment. Cognitive Science, 36(3): 421-451.
McCrae, R. R. (2010). The Place of the FFM in Personality Psychology. Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory, 21(1): 57-64.
McCrae, R. R. (2013). Exploring Trait Assessment of Samples, Persons, and Cultures. Journal of Personality Assessment, 95: 557-570.
(2018). Defining Traits. V. Zeigler-Hill & T. K. Shackelford (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Personality and Individual Differences: The Science of Personality and Individual Differences. SAGE Publications: 3-22.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1992). Discriminant validity of NEO-PI-R Facets. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 52: 229-237.
(2008). The Five-Factor Theory of Personality. O. P. John & R. W. Robins (eds.), Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research. Guilford: 159-181.
McCrae, R. R., & John, O. P. (1992). An Introduction to the Five-Factor Model and Its Applications. Journal of Personality, 60(2): 175-215.
McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and World. Harvard University Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1953). From a Logical Point of View. Harper Torchbooks.
(1960). World and Object. The MIT Press.
(1969). Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Columbia University Press.
Reale, D., Reader, S. M., Sol, D., McDougall, P. T., & Dingemanse, N. J. (2007). Integrating Animal Temperament Within Ecology and Evolution. Biological Reviews, 82(2): 291-318.
Ryle, G. (2009). The Concept of Mind. Routledge.
Sih, A. (2011). Behavioral Syndromes: A Behavioral Ecologist’s View on the Evolutionary and Ecological Implications of Animal Personalities.A. Weiss, J. E. King, & L. Murray (eds.), Personality and Temperament in Nonhuman Primates. Springer: 313-336.
Slobodskaya, H. R. (2021). Personality Development from Early Childhood Through Adolescence. Personality and Individual Differences, 172(December 2020): 110596.
Soto, C. J., & John, O. P. (2014). Traits in Transition: The Structure of Parent-Reported Personality Traits from Early Childhood to Early Adulthood. Journal of Personality, 82(3): 182-199.
Spaulding, S. (2018). Mindreading Beyond Belief: A More Comprehensive Conception of How We Understand Others. Philosophy Compass, 13(11): 1-11.
Tamási, K., McKean, C., Gafos, A., & Höhle, B. (2019). Children’s Gradient Sensitivity to Phonological Mismatch: Considering the Dynamics of Looking Behavior and Pupil Dilation. Journal of Child Language, 46(1): 1-23.
Walker, P., Bretnner, J. G., Mason, U., Spring, J., Mattock, K., Slater, A., & Johnson, S. P. (2010). Preverbal Infants’ Sensitivity to Synaesthetic Cross-Modality Correspondences. Psychological Science, 21: 21-25.
Weiss, A. (2017). Exploring Factor Space (and Other Adventures) with the Hominoid Personality Questionnaire. J.Vonk, A. Weiss, y S. A. Kuczaj (eds.), Personality in Nonhuman Animals. Springer: 19-38.
Weiss, A., Inoue-Murayama, Hong KW, Inoue E, Udono T, Ochiai T, Matsuzawa T, Hirata S, King JE. (2009). Assessing Chimpanzee Personality and Subjective Well-Being in Japan. American Journal of Primatology, 71(4): 283-292.
Westra, E. (2021). Folk Personality Psychology: Mindreading and Mindshaping in Trait Attribution. Synthese, 198: 8213-8232. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02566-7.
Whitham, W., & Washburn, D. (2017). A History of Animal Personality Research. J. Vonk, A. Weiss, & S. Kuczaj (eds.), Personality in Nonhuman Animals. Springer: 3-18.
