There is a distinction to be made between thin and thick interpretations

of
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 251
the mother that had recently given them so much pleasure. The explanation
of the infants’ distress is, of course, that they miss the contingency
of their mothers’ utterances and expressions on their own utterances and
expressions. They see what is clearly half a dialogue that appears to be
directed at them without any sense of participation in that dialogue—
without the mutual accommodation, adjustment, and responses that define
normal protoconversations.
There is a distinction to be made between thin and thick interpretations
of these mother-infant protoconversations and the discriminative abilities
that they presuppose and implicate. On the thick reading (which is
strongly suggested by Trevarthen’s own interpretation of his results), these
mother-infant interactions reveal genuine intentional communication
involving attempts on the part of both partners to translate their own
feelings to the other participant. On this interpretation, the infants’ behavior
is not only purposeful but also displays recognition that the mothers’
responses are equally purposeful. The infants are aware of what they
are trying to do and aware of what their mothers are trying to do. Their
regulation of the protoconversation is directed toward bringing what they
are trying to do in accord with what their mothers are trying to do. Consider
Trevarthen’s summary of infant development during the first year
of life:
We have shown that from birth infants have no trouble in detecting and interacting
discriminately and optionally with the mental states of other persons. Very
soon after birth, they can enter into a dynamic exchange of mental states that has
a conversational potentially intention-and-knowledge-sharing organisation and
motivation. The emotional and purposeful quality of these interchanges of motives
undergoes rapid differentiation in the games of ensuing months. It becomes
more elaborate, more quickly reactive, and more directive in relation to the responses
of the other and is protracted into longer narratives of feeling.We say the
infant is developing a more assertive, more conscious self, but we mean that the
infant’s experience of being a performer in the eyes of the other is gaining in
power, presence and pleasure. (1993, 161)
This passage makes very clear that if the thick reading is right, explaining
what is going on in mother-infant interactions will require ascribing to
the young infant a form of distinguishing self-awareness. As defined in
the previous section, distinguishing self-awareness involves a recognition
of oneself as a perceiver, an agent, and a bearer of reactive attitudes
252 Chapter 9
against a contrast space of other perceivers, agents, and bearers of reactive
attitudes. It can only make sense to speak of the infant’s experience of
being a performer in the eyes of the other if the infant is aware of himself
as an agent and of his mother as a perceiver. Similarly, talk of intentional
interchanges and narratives of feeling presuppose that the infant is aware
of himself and his mother as bearers of reactive attitudes.
It seems to me, however, that the view that the components of distinguishing
psychological self-awareness are all present in the protoconversations
that start in the second month of life glosses over the very
important distinction between thinking about something in a particular
way and responding differentially to something that has a particular feature.
The fact that the infant regulates his behavior in conformity with
his mother’s responses does not license the conclusion that he is thinking
about either himself or his mother in any particular way. It does not license
ascribing such thoughts to him because those thoughts are not necessary
to explain how he behaves. As has been emphasised in earlier
chapters, it is the principle of inference to the best and most parsimonious
explanation that we must use to regulate content ascriptions to nonlinguistic
and prelinguistic creatures, and this principle does not require us
to credit protoconversational infants with distinguishing psychological
self-awareness. Simpler explanations are available.12
One such possible explanation might employ a version of Piaget’s notion
of secondary circular reactions (although Piaget sees these as characteristic
of his stage IV, which covers the fifth to ninth months of the first
year and hence start rather later than protoconversational behavior). Piaget’s
secondary circular reactions involve a primitive distinction between
means and ends, and the stage of development that he characterizes in
terms of them is one in which infants manipulate objects with a view to
bringing about sights that they find interesting and pleasurable.13 There
are all sorts of reasons why an infant might derive pleasure from protoconversational
interactions. The infant might derive pleasure from noting
the physical contingency between his own bodily movements and the
movements of his mother.14 Or he might derive pleasure from noting (visually,
proprioceptively, or both) the match between his own bodily movements
and his mother’s movements. Or, of course, he might simply find
the whole process intrinsically interesting. Note, moreover, that this line
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 253
of explanation is not necessarily incompatible with an intentional explanation
of the infant’s behavior (in the sense discussed in chapter 4). It is
incompatible only with explanations that describe protoconversational
infants as engaged in intentional communication.
Another, and perhaps in this context more plausible, explanation of
what is going on in mother-infant protoconversations would take more
seriously the idea that protoconversations involve the evocation and regulation
of feelings, while denying that this involves the sort of communicative
acts postulated by the thick reading. The key to this second possible
explanation is the distinction between, on the one hand, having evoked
in one a particular feeling and evoking that feeling in another individual
and, on the other, communicating to another individual the fact that one
has a particular feeling. Only the second of these implicates the thick
interpretation of protoconversations. Evoking a feeling in another person
does not require thinking about a person in a way that identifies them as
a person who has feelings (or, by extension, as a bearer of reactive attitudes).
And this is compatible with the behavior that evokes the feeling
in the other person being intentional—a point easily missed. Suppose, for
example, that I evoke a feeling in you because I have learned that this will
result in the same feeling being evoked in me in a heightened form. This
evocation could be intentional simply under the description of my intending
to bring it about that I experience the same feeling in a heightened
form. It can be the case that feelings are transferred and shared intentionally
in a way that affects the feelings of each participant without it being
the case that the infant is intentionally communicating the fact that he
has a certain feeling to an individual whom he identifies as someone capable
of having feelings herself. Of course, there is little reason to think
that anything like this goes on in normally developed adult subjects (although
it is possible that this offers one way of understanding what seem
to be social interactions in autistic and psychopathic subjects). Nonetheless,
it offers a plausible way of fleshing out the thin reading of what is
going on in mother-infant protoconversations.
The plausibility of the thin interpretation of social interactions in early
infancy emerges even more clearly when we consider the developments
that take place at about 9 months of age, because at this stage infants
start to behave in ways that compel one to explain them using the catego-