A philosophical and cognitive science paper examines data on early socio-cognitive development from a nativist cognitivist perspective and reinterprets it through the lens of the 4E-Cognition approach, specifically the pairing hypothesis derived from phenomenology. The analysis shows that these cognitivist-nativist data actually strengthen the 4E-Cognition perspective by expanding the range of findings it can explain. The authors argue that engaging seriously with opposing frameworks—cognitivism and 4E-Cognition—can lead to progress in cognitive science, particularly by addressing the debate between rich and lean explanations of early social cognition.
Ordinary language across cultures describes shared mental states as belonging to more than one person, but modern Western thought assumes this is illusory or metaphorical—a stance called Cartesian eliminativism. The paper argues the opposite may be true, proposing a "straightforward view" that explains how individuals assemble and experience shared mental states as unitary wholes with distributed components. Focusing on developmental science, the view explains early shared emotions, goals, and attention using only domain-general associative processes, making it more parsimonious than current theories that require multi-level recursive mindreading or special phenomenal qualities. The approach offers a reductionist, non-eliminativist alternative for cognitive scientists.