CHRISTINA E. ERNELING
Institute of Communication
Lund University, Campus Helsingborg

The Primacy of Social Interaction

How the Mind Explains Behavior: Folk Explanations, Meaning, and Social Interaction.
By Bertram F. Malle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 202 pp. Cloth, $38.

Human infants are born helpless, more helpless than most other species of mammals, and need the constant attention of and interaction with other humans to survive. They need other human beings for physical survival and for intellectual and emotional development. If social interaction is disrupted for some reason, the result is disastrous, as is the case of severely autistic children. Indeed, the ability to successfully interact with and make sense of other humans is at the core of human life, culture, and society.