A Broader Conception of Mindreading

Shannon Spaulding: How We Understand Others / Social Cognition / Uncategorized
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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

Shannon Spaulding: How We Understand Others / Social Cognition
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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 …

How We Understand Others

Phenomenology / Shannon Spaulding: How We Understand Others / Social Cognition
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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 …

Empirically-Informed Approaches to Weakness of Will: A Brains Blog Roundtable

Folk Psychology / Neuroscience / Psychology
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Weakness of will is a traditional puzzle in the philosophy of action. The puzzle goes something like this:

FOLK PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY: If, at time t, an agent judges that it is better to do A than B, and she believes she is free to do A, then, provided she tries to do either at that time, she will try to do A and not B.

WEAKNESS OF WILL: An agent judges that it is better to do A than B, believes that she is free to do A, but tries to do B.

But taken together, these statements are inconsistent. FOLK PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY precludes the possibility of weakness of will (as characterized in WEAKNESS OF WILL), but WEAKNESS OF WILL asserts that it occurs. So can WEAKNESS OF WILL be possible, and if so, how?

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