Mindreading (or folk psychology, Theory of Mind, mentalizing) is the capacity to represent and reason about others’ mental states. The Simulation Theory (ST) is one of the main approaches to mindreading. ST draws on the common-sense idea that we represent and reason about others’ mental states by putting ourselves in their shoes. More precisely, we typically arrive at representing others’ mental states by simulating their mental states in our own mind. This entry offers a detailed analysis of ST, considers theoretical (...) arguments and empirical data in favour of and against it, discusses its philosophical implications, and illustrates some alternatives to it. (shrink)

This article argues that we could improve the design of research protocols by developing an awareness of and a responsiveness to the social contexts of all the actors in the research enterprise, including subjects, investigators, sponsors, and members of the community in which the research will be conducted. “Social context” refers to the settings in which the actors are situated, including, but not limited to, their social, economic, political, cultural, and technological features. The utility of thinking about social contexts is (...) introduced and exemplified by the presentation of a hypothetical case in which one central issue is limitation of the probability of injury to subjects by selection of individuals who are not expected to live long enough for the known risks of the study to become manifest as harms. Benefits of such considerations may include enhanced subject satisfaction and cooperation, community acceptance, and improved data quality, among other desirable consequences. (shrink)

How should we understand the emotional rationality? This first part will explore two models of cognition and analogy strategies, test their intuition about the emotional desire. I distinguish between subjective and objective desire, then presents with a feeling from the "paradigm of drama" export semantics, here our emotional repertoire is acquired all the learned, and our emotions in the form of an object is fixed. It is pretty well in line with the general principles of rationality, especially the lowest reasonable (...) principles. Turned to the second part of this side of reasonable. I will inquire how emotional beliefs, desires, and behaviors contribute to the rationality. I will present a very general biological hypothesis: emotions by controlling highlights the characteristics of perception and reasoning, so that we remove the difficulties due in particular to lead to paralysis; they are being simulated by a simplified perception of information, thus limiting our practice and cognitive choice. How are we to understand emotional or axiological rationality? I pursue analogies with both the cognitive and the strategic models, testing them against intuitions about emotional desires. We distinguish two different classes of desires, the subjective and the objective, and propose that emotions have a semantics that derives from "paradigmatic scenarios", in terms of which our emotional repertoire is learned and the formal objects of our emotions fixed. This fits in well with emerging facts about how our emotional capacities develop, and it can also be squared with the general principles of rationality, particularly minimal rationality. In the second part, I return to the perspective of rationality. I ask how emotions contribute to the rationality of beliefs, desires, and behavior. I proffer a very general biological hypothesis: Emotions spare us the paralysis potentially induced by a particular predicament by controlling the salience of features of perception and reasoning; they temporarily mimic the informational encapsulation of perception and so circumscribe our practical and cognitive options. (shrink)

An ascent routine (AR) allows a speaker to self-ascribe a given propositional attitude (PA) by redeploying the process that generates a corresponding lower level utterance. Thus, we may report on our beliefs about the weather by reporting (under certain constraints) on the weather. The chief criticism of my AR account of self-ascription, by Alvin Goldman and others, is that it covers few if any PA’s other than belief and offers no account of how we can attain reliability in identifying our (...) attitude as belief, desire, hope, etc., without presupposing some sort of recognition process. The criticism can be answered, but only by giving up a tacit—and wholly unnecessary—assumption that has influenced discussions of ascent routines. Abandoning the assumption allows a different account of ARs that avoids the criticism and even provides an algorithm for finding a corresponding lower level utterance for any PA. The account I give is supported by research on children’s first uses of a propositional attitude vocabulary. (shrink)

I argue that there is no conflict between the simulation theory, once it is freed from certain constraints carried over from theory theory, and Gallagher's view that our primary and pervasive way of engaging with others rests on 'direct', non-mentalizing perception of the 'meanings' of others' facial expressions, gestures, and intentional actions.

Alvin Goldman's early work in action theory and theory of knowledge was a major influence on my own thinking and writing about emotions. For that reason and others, it was a very happy moment in my professional life when I learned, in 1988, that in his presidential address to the Society for Philosophy and Psychology Goldman endorsed and defended the “simulation” theory I had put forward in a 1986 article. I discovered afterward that we share a strong conviction that empirical (...) evidence is relevant to a full assessment of the theory. We both find the burgeoning evidence from cognitive neuroscience to be of particular interest, I believe, in part because it makes possible a major departure for the philosophy of mind: turning its attention from " the neural basis of mental states, " to. (shrink)

I attempt to show that when someone is, E.G., Angry about something, The events or states that conjointly are causing him to be angry conform to a certain structure, And that from the causal structure underlying his anger it is possible to 'read out' what he is angry about. In this respect, And even in some of the details of the structure, My analysis of being angry about something resembles the belief-Want analysis of intentional action. The chief elements of the (...) causal structure I describe are a belief and an attitude so related in content as to constitute either a wish-Frustration (in the case of negative emotions) or a wish-Satisfaction (in the case of positive emotions). The analysis makes otiose, In those cases for which it is a correct analysis, The mysterious non-Causal relation between an emotion and its 'object' which is invoked by the majority of philosophers now writing on emotions. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars's essay, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," (1) introduced, although it did not exactly endorse, what many philosophers consider the first defense of functionalism in the philosophy of mind and the original "theory" theory of commonsense psychology.

Individual differences in the mere willingness to think analytically has been shown to predict religious disbelief. Recently, however, it has been argued that analytic thinkers are not actually less religious; rather, the putative association may be a result of religiosity typically being measured after analytic thinking (an order effect). In light of this possibility, we report four studies in which a negative correlation between religious belief and performance on analytic thinking measures is found when religious belief is measured in a (...) separate session. We also performed a meta-analysis on all previously published studies on the topic along with our four new studies (N = 15,078, k = 31), focusing specifically on the association between performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test (the most widely used individual difference measure of analytic thinking) and religious belief. This meta-analysis revealed an overall negative correlation (r) of -.18, 95% CI [-.21, -.16]. Although this correlation is modest, self-identified atheists (N = 133) scored 18.7% higher than religiously affiliated individuals (N = 597) on a composite measure of analytic thinking administered across our four new studies (d = .72). Our results indicate that the association between analytic thinking and religious disbelief is not caused by a simple order effect. There is good evidence that atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers. (shrink)

Philosophers have been debating the nature of folk or commonsense psychology for three decades. We ask: What are the resources that enable us to navigate the social world, anticipating what others do, explaining what they’ve done, and perceiving them--and ourselves--as selves, subjects, persons, with beliefs, desire, perceptions, and feelings? Unlike traditional philosophy of mind, instead of directly confronting the mind-body problem and subproblems such as intentionality and qualia, we step back and look at the resources that give us the concepts (...) that get us into these knots. (shrink)

What is the simulation theory? Arguments for simulation theory Simulation theory versus theory theory Simulation theory and cognitive science Versions of simulation theory A possible test of the simulation theory.

Psychological research has generally suffered from methodological fundamentalism, which is an overly strict interpretation of what is considered “scientific” and has created a psychology of triviality. Methodological fundamentalism often constricts the study of a complex dynamic psychology that encompasses both observed and unobserved reality with interacting and interdependent variables. In Against Method, Feyerabend (1993) posits there could be no set scientific method and that great scientists are methodological opportunists who use any methodology that helps with discovery. As opposed to Fisher’s (...) (1925) arbitrary, categorical standard of p<.05, I suggest as a strength of a scientific finding the review of confidence levels of across various populations, methods, measures and forms of analyses. Eventually, I hope that an unbiased computer analysis of studies can guide researchers as to what theories show high confidence levels across various populations, methods, measures and forms of analyses and suggest the next step to advance the science. (shrink)

The wealth of important and convergent evidence discussed in the target article contrasts with the poorly conceived theory put forward to explain it. The simulation theory does a better job of explaining how automatic “mirroring” mechanisms might work together with high-level cognitive processes. It also explains what the authors' PAM theory merely stipulates.

Although their thesis is generally sound, Barresi & Moore give insufficient attention to the need for a methodology, whether simulation based or theory-based, for choosing among alternative possible matches of first person and third person information. This choice must be sensitive to contextual information, including past behavior. Moreover, apart from simulation or theory, first person information would not help predict future behavior.

In evaluating conditionals concerning what a person would have done in counterfactual circumstances, we suppose the counterfactual antecedent to be true, just as in what I loosely term the standard "Ramsey" procedure; but then we follow a different path--a simulative path--in evaluating the consequent. The simulative path imposes an implicit restriction on possible worlds, a procedural guarantee that the individual simulated is aware of or knows about the counterfactual condition. This difference makes clear the way in which reason explanations are (...) implicitly cognitive and psychological. (shrink)

investigation).^{1} We project ourselves into what, from his remarks and other indications, we imagine the speaker's state of mind to have been, . . . even into what from his behavior we imagine a mouse's state of mind to have been, and dramatize it as a belief, wish or striving, verbalized as seems relevant and natural to us in the state thus.