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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
