In the first post, I considered the 4-E objection that mindreading is not an important, frequently used tool in our folk psychological toolkit. I argued that mindreading accounts can withstand this challenge. We do regularly attribute mental states to others and explain and predict their behavior. Nevertheless, such challenges open the …
We are grateful to Shannon Spaulding for blogging this week on How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition (Routledge, 2018). To view all her posts on a single page, please click here.
A question that has long interested me is how we understand others – that is, what are the cognitive processes that underlie successful social understanding and interaction – and what happens when we misunderstand others. In philosophy and the cognitive sciences, the orthodox view is that understanding and interacting with …
Split-brain subjects talk about themselves using the first-person, singular, pronoun. Of course, by hypothesis, it’s always just one of two split-brain thinkers doing the talking. (In some subjects, R seems to have learned to speak a bit, but never in whole sentences.) Still, this thinker and speaker—L—consistently uses the first-person …
In yesterday’s post I argued that a split-brain subject is not unitary qua thinker but is actually composed of two thinkers. The book also defends two further, related duality claims: that R and L are distinct subjects of experience and that they are distinct intentional agents. To many people, however, …
The book argues for three duality claims: one concerning split-brain consciousness, one concerning split-brain intentional agency, and one concerning split-brain psychology generally. Each of the duality claims amounts to a claim about personal identity. If there are two centers or streams of conscious there must be two subjects of conscious …
Thanks, John, for this opportunity to talk about my book, and thanks, everyone else, for reading. The book is an empirically informed work of personal identity about the split-brain phenomenon. “Split-brain surgery” is a colloquial term for a surgery that cuts through the corpus callosum (and sometimes additional white matter …
