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The first chapter states that flexible social cognition—having the ability to engage and not engage in mental state inferences with others—perhaps explains why people are capable of pro and anti-social behaviour. It introduces a classical equation for social behaviour, before suggesting an edit that equation that accounts for social cognition. It then suggests a metaphor to explain how social cognition might be engaged based on the social context. Next, it defines the key terms for the argument surrounding flexible social cognition: flexible and mental state inference as the most fundamental form of social cognition. It reconciles differences in the use of various psychological jargon for various types of social cognition, then defines social groups, explaining their importance to the general theory.

Pragmatic representations attribute self-centred action-properties—properties that are relevant to the performance of my action. Vicarious perception attributes other-centred action-properties—properties that are relevant to the performance of someone else’s action. This chapter argues that vicarious perception is a thus far unexplored, very rudimentary, and ontogenetically as well as phylogenetically basic form of social cognition. Some important debates in cognitive science about theory of mind can be fruitfully addressed if we introduce this concept. More precisely, while it is not clear whether non-human primates and infants under one year are capable of theory of mind, it could be argued that the empirical findings show that they are capable of vicarious perception. The phenomenon of seeing something as emotionally relevant to someone else—a form of emotional engagement called ‘vicarious emotional engagement’—is also explored as an alternative to empathy and sympathy.

Cognition is both developmentally and socially scaffolded. I focus on the social aspects of cognition, whose development occurs through a dynamic coordination and integration by individuals of social resources afforded or sought by them over time. In the often open-ended development of expertise, we see vital handholds, or encouragement by mentors and significant others, and footholds or foundational steps such as crucial decisions, commitment to a training program, access to salient information or other key resources. I consider the early scientific careers of Craig Venter and Charles Darwin, and the many ways in which they were scaffolded both emotively and cognitively. For Darwin, I focus mostly on the development of his theory through multifarious social interactions. This also shows the intertwining of career and intellectual development. Other cases I discuss of medical trainees suggest that that factors such as gender may affect availability of career resources.

The perception of human actions in point-light biological motion animations relies on the coordinated activity of brain regions in the occipital, parietal, and frontal cortex. This chapter discusses neuropsychological, single-unit, and neuroimaging evidence for linking the superior temporal sulcus (STS) to the cognitive demands of perceiving biological motion. Although the evidence accumulated over the past twenty years has suggested STS specialization for the perceptual construction of actions, the relatively recent emergence of findings from studies of social cognition suggest that a domain-specific hypothesis of STS specialization may be misplaced. Some proposals for alternatives theories are discussed.

The fifth chapter presents a toy model for the development of social cognition based on psychology experiments that explore this ability in babies, infants and children. It explores when infants dissociate people from objects and other non-human agents, reviewing classical models in developmental psychology that describe these processes. It also explores the development of language, intentionality, and emotion in infants, highlighting commonalities and differences between these important components of social cognition. Finally, it addresses the theoretical debate between theory-theory and and simulation accounts of social cognition, before arguing for a more social psychological perspective that takes the social context into account.

We summarize some of the main proposals of the enactive approach to social understanding and discuss some common misreadings of the notion of participatory sense-making. The emphasis on the role played by social interaction in the enactive perspective is sometimes misinterpreted as the adoption of an interactionist stance, whereby individual processes are less relevant. This is not the case, and we proceed to explain and exemplify the central role played by individual agency, subpersonal processes and subjective personal experience in the framework of participatory sense-making. This is clear from how social interaction is defined as involving the co-arising of autonomous relational patterns, not under the full control of any participant, but without loss of individual autonomy of those engaged in the social encounter. We discuss how interactive patterns can sustain a deep entanglement between brain, body and interactive dynamics during social engagement, as well as the functional role played in some case by collective dynamics. The enactive approach is neither individualistic, nor interactionist. However, we express skepticism regarding the usefulness of hybrid approaches, which perpetuate dualistic distinctions between mind and body. Instead, the tensions in the notion of participatory sense-making are elaborated dialectically, demonstrating how complex forms of social agency, including language, develop from the primordial tension in participatory sense-making.

Mirror neuron system and social cognition. We intuitively feel that others have intensions, sensations and emotions. Here we perform a review of the location and properties of mirror neurons in monkeys and of brain regions with similar properties in humans. We interpret this data to suggest that we vicariously recruit our own actions and sensations while witnessing those of others. We review evidence that these vicarious activations contribute to perceiving, predicting and imitating the actions of others, and may even contribute to (directly or through a cross-talk with mentalizing areas) understanding why another person performs a given action. Hebbian associations between our own motor programs and the sensory consequences of executing them seem to wire up mirror neurons during development. Evidence for a mirror neuron dysfunction in autism is however mixed. Finally, a mirror-like mechanism might also exist that triggers our sensation and emotion vicariously while witnessing those of others.

This chapter critically examines six crucial assumptions or intuitions involved in the familiar view that we live in a world of intrinsically existent objects: the assumption of the intrinsic boundedness and continuity of objects; the assumption of the intrinsic boundedness and continuity of the fundamental parts of which objects are composed; the assumption of the intrinsic existence of (emergent) properties; the intuition of the intrinsic existence of something—causal power—that links one event to another; the intuitive appeal to the unity of sense perceptions; and, finally, the assumption that even if “what is” doesn’t exist intrinsically as things, there’s still something there—it’s just inexpressible. The chapter is summarized by asking “What do objects depend on?” and by answering as follows: Objects depend on observers both to bound them and to hold them as continuous over time; their effects depend on observers to distinguish objects from each other and to note regular interactions between objects that have thus been distinguished; their properties depend on what is sensed and measured, and on the relations observers make between measurement and theories; the vividness of objects and their place as bona-fide members of the real world depend on the coordination of various bodily movements and sense perceptions, as well as coordination between interacting members of social collectives.