The goal of the post-Gettier Analysis of Knowledge program was to come up with a good X to plug into the formula “Knowledge = True Belief + X”, where X itself didn’t illicitly smuggle in the concept of knowledge (theories invoking “competence”, I’m looking at you). As the Analysis of …
I’m surprised to find myself here. I started out in philosophy as a very old-fashioned epistemologist, concerned with the question of how necessary truths are known, and I think there was a whole chapter in my thesis arguing against naturalist approaches. For what it’s worth, I’m still a sworn enemy …
I’m happy to initiate our latest Mind & Language symposium on Hayley Clatterbucks’s “Chimpanzee Mindreading and the Value of Parsimonious Mental Models,” from the journal’s September 2015 issue, with commentaries by Cameron Buckner (Houston), Shannon Spaulding (Oklahoma), and Jennifer Vonk (Oakland). There has been a long-standing debate about whether apes, dogs, corvids, and possibly other animals have the capacity to engage in …
The Minds Online conference has begun, and our first session will be open for discussion through September 4. It is on the theme of Social Cognition, and includes the following papers: Tony Jack and Jared Friedman (Case Western Reserve): “Mapping cognitive structure onto the landscape of philosophical debate: an empirical framework …
In my final post I would like to wrap up by sketching some of the implications of my proposal – in particular concerning our theorizing about social cognition – as well as raising some questions that are being left open. There exists quite a large controversy in philosophy and psychology …
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 …
Classical explanations of social cognition assume that complex social interaction involves social understanding and that social understanding in turn depends on the ability to read others’ minds, i.e. on the ability to attribute mental states, such as beliefs and desires, to others for the purposes of predicting and explaining their …
