Among philosophers, autonomous agency usually requires having some kind of metacognitive awareness that permits thinking about one’s reasons for action and being self-governing. Autonomous agency, then, requires metacognition. But it requires metacognition of a certain sort, namely beliefs about beliefs. The question about whether any other animal is metacognitive has …
In standard approaches to folk psychology, our folk psychological reasoning is taken to be a species of causal reasoning. And while there is some attention to other kinds of reasoning in the developmental literature, notably teleological reasoning, most of the research I’ve run across on children’s social reasoning and explanations …
It’s natural to think we need language to explain—after all, isn’t an explanation an answer to a why question? It can be, but it can also be a resolution of a wondering why state.
In our daily interactions with people—driving down the street, coordinating childcare, figuring out how to hide from an old girlfriend, buying a nice gift—we rely on folk psychology, our unschooled understanding of other people. These abilities are often attributed to a single mechanism often thought to be unique to the …
Thanks for the invitation to be a featured scholar on Brains. It’s good timing for me, since I just turned in proofs for my second book (The Animal Mind, with Routledge) and I’m on sabbatical. This means I may actually have the time to write up some of my talks …
I am pleased to be able to introduce Kristin Andrews as our next Featured Scholar. Kristin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at York University (Toronto) and works on the nature of social cognition in humans and non-human animals, human social relations and our relations to non-human animals.
