We are grateful to Michael Brownstein for blogging this week on on The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics (Oxford, 2018). To view all his posts on a single page, please click here.
Category: books
Epistemic and Ethical Implications
Most philosophical discussions of mindreading stay squarely within the realm of philosophy of psychology. Theorizing about mindreading plays a role in debates about the modularity of the mind, the representational theory of mind, language development, the semantics of ordinary language use, etc. Using mindreading as a case study for understanding …
Model Theory
In this post, I argue that Model Theory is a superior account of the broader conception of mindreading laid out in the previous post. Thus far, I have refrained from discussing Theory Theory (TT) and Simulation Theory (ST) even though these theories have been the two main general theories of …
A Broader Conception of Mindreading
In the previous two posts, I examined challenges to the view that we regularly attribute mental states to others and explain and predict their behavior. Although these challenges do not show that mindreading is a rarely used or relatively unimportant tool, they do highlight how limited the ordinary conception of …
Pluralistic Folk Psychology
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 …
Now Featured
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.
How We Understand Others
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 …