To explain agent-identification behaviours, universalist theories in the biological and cognitive sciences have posited mental mechanisms thought to be universal to all humans, such as agent detection and face recognition mechanisms. These universalist theories have paid little attention to how particular sociocultural or historical contexts interact with the psychobiological processes of agent-identification. In contrast to universalist theories, contextualist theories appeal to particular historical and sociocultural contexts for explaining agent-identification. Contextualist theories tend to adopt idiographic methods aimed at recording the heterogeneity of human behaviours across history, space, and cultures. Defenders of the universalist approach tend to criticise idiographic methods because such methods can lead to relativism or may lack generality. To overcome explanatory limitations of proposals that adopt either universalist or contextualist approaches in isolation, I propose a philosophical model that integrates contributions from both traditions: the psycho-historical theory of agent-identification. This theory investigates how the tracking processes that humans use for identifying agents interact with the unique socio-historical contexts that support agent-identification practices. In integrating hypotheses about the history of agents with psychological and epistemological principles regarding agent-identification, the theory can generate novel hypotheses regarding the distinction between recognition-based, heuristic-based, and explanation-based agent-identification.

中文翻译：

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主体追踪：识别活体和社会主体的心理历史理论

为了解释主体识别行为，生物和认知科学中的普遍主义理论提出了被认为对所有人类都通用的心理机制，例如主体检测和面部识别机制。这些普遍主义理论很少关注特定的社会文化或历史背景如何与主体识别的心理生物学过程相互作用。与普遍主义理论相反，情境主义理论诉诸特定的历史和社会文化背景来解释主体认同。情境主义理论倾向于采用具体的方法，旨在记录人类行为在历史、空间和文化中的异质性。普遍主义方法的捍卫者倾向于批评个别方法，因为这种方法可能导致相对主义或可能缺乏普遍性。为了克服孤立地采用普遍主义或情境主义方法的建议的解释局限性，我提出了一个整合了这两种传统贡献的哲学模型：主体识别的心理历史理论。该理论研究了人类用于识别代理的跟踪过程如何与支持代理识别实践的独特社会历史背景相互作用。通过将关于主体历史的假设与关于主体识别的心理学和认识论原则相结合，该理论可以产生关于基于识别、基于启发式和基于解释的主体识别之间的区别的新假设。