Could interacting mindreaders be in a position to know things which they would be unable to know if they were manifestly passive observers? This paper argues that they could. Mindreading is sometimes reciprocal: the mindreader’s target reciprocates by taking the mindreader as a target for mindreading. The paper explains how such reciprocity can significantly narrow the range of possible interpretations of behaviour where mindreaders are, or appear to be, in a position to interact. A consequence is that revisions and extensions (...) are needed to standard theories of the evidential basis of mindreading. The view also has consequences for understanding how abilities to interact combined with comparatively simple forms of mindreading may explain the emergence, in evolution or development, of sophisticated forms of social cognition. (shrink)

Are there distinct roles for intention and motor representation in explaining the purposiveness of action? Standard accounts of action assign a role to intention but are silent on motor representation. The temptation is to suppose that nothing need be said here because motor representation is either only an enabling condition for purposive action or else merely a variety of intention. This paper provides reasons for resisting that temptation. Some motor representations, like intentions, coordinate actions in virtue of representing outcomes; but, (...) unlike intentions, motor representations cannot feature as premises or conclusions in practical reasoning. This implies that motor representation has a distinctive role in explaining the purposiveness of action. It also gives rise to a problem: were the roles of intention and motor representation entirely independent, this would impair effective action. It is therefore necessary to explain how intentions interlock with motor representations. The solution, we argue, is to recognise that the contents of intentions can be partially determined by the contents of motor representations. Understanding this content-determining relation enables better understanding how intentions relate to actions. (shrink)

The lack of consensus on how to characterize humans’ capacity for belief reasoning has been brought into sharp focus by recent research. Children fail critical tests of belief reasoning before 3 to 4 years (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001; Wimmer & Perner, 1983), yet infants apparently pass false belief tasks at 13 or 15 months (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005; Surian, Caldi, & Sperber, 2007). Non-human animals also fail critical tests of belief reasoning but can show very complex social behaviour (e.g., (...) Call & Tomasello, 2005). Fluent social interaction in adult humans implies efficient processing of beliefs, yet direct tests suggest that belief reasoning is cognitively demanding, even for adults (e.g., Apperly, Samson & Humphreys, 2005). We interpret these findings by drawing an analogy with the domain of number cognition, where similarly contrasting results have been observed. We propose that the success of infants and non-human animals on some belief reasoning tasks may be best explained by a cognitively efficient but inflexible capacity for tracking belief-like states. In humans this capacity persists in parallel with later-developing, more flexible but more cognitively demanding theory of mind abilities. (shrink)

Can humans see causal interactions? Evidence on the visual perception of causal interactions, from Michotte to contemporary work, is best interpreted as showing that we can see some causal interactions in the same sense as that in which we can hear speech. Causal perception, like speech perception, is a form of categorical perception.

Given the premise that joint action plays some role in explaining how humans come to understand minds, what could joint action be? Not what a leading account, Michael Bratman's, says it is. For on that account engaging in joint action involves sharing intentions and sharing intentions requires much of the understanding of minds whose development is supposed to be explained by appeal to joint action. This paper therefore offers an account of a different kind of joint action, an account compatible (...) with the premise about development. The new account is no replacement for the leading account; rather the accounts characterise two kinds of joint action. Where the kind of joint characterised by the leading account involves shared intentions, the new account characterises a kind of joint action involving shared goals. (shrink)

When two or more people coordinate their actions in space and time to produce a joint outcome, they perform a joint action. The perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes that enable individuals to coordinate their actions with others have been receiving increasing attention during the last decade, complementing earlier work on shared intentionality and discourse. This chapter reviews current theoretical concepts and empirical findings in order to provide a structured overview of the state of the art in joint action research. We (...) distinguish between planned and emergent coordination. In planned coordination, agents' behavior is driven by representations that specify the desired outcomes of joint action and the agent's own part in achieving these outcomes. In emergent coordination, coordinated behavior occurs due to perception action couplings that make multiple individuals act in similar ways, independently of joint plans. We review evidence for the two types of coordination and discuss potential synergies between them. (shrink)

Modules are widely held to play a central role in explaining mental development and in accounts of the mind generally. But there is much disagreement about what modules are, which shows that we do not adequately understand modularity. This paper outlines a Fodoresque approach to understanding one type of modularity. It suggests that we can distinguish modular from nonmodular cognition by reference to the kinds of process involved, and that modular cognition differs from nonmodular forms of cognition in being a (...) special kind of computational process. The paper concludes by considering implications for the role of modules in explaining mental development. (shrink)

It is consistent with the evidence in The Origin of Concepts to conjecture that infants' causal representations, like their numerical representations, are not continuous with adults', so that bootstrapping is needed in both cases.

Editorial: Joint Action: What Is Shared? Content Type Journal Article Pages 137-146 DOI 10.1007/s13164-011-0062-3 Authors Stephen A. Butterfill, Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Natalie Sebanz, Centre for Cognition, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, & Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Journal Review of Philosophy and Psychology Online ISSN 1878-5166 Print ISSN 1878-5158 Journal Volume Volume 2 Journal Issue Volume 2, Number 2.

Shared Emotions, Joint Attention and Joint Action, Centre for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University, Denmark, 26 October 2010.

Anyone who has ever walked, cooked or crafted with a friend is in a position to know that acting jointly is not just acting side-by-side. But what distinguishes acting jointly from acting in parallel yet merely individually? Four decades of philosophical research have yielded broad consensus on a strategy for answering this question. This strategy is \emph{mechanistically committed}; that is, it hinges on invoking states of the agents who are acting jointly (often dubbed ‘shared’, ‘we-’ or ‘collective’ intentions). Despite the (...) consensus, enduring disagreement remains. The disagreement may be a consequence of the strategy; at least this is plausible enough to motivate considering the prospects for an alternative. Our aim is therefore to draw attention to a coherent alternative that is present in the literature but often overlooked. This alternative is \emph{mechanistically neutral}: it avoids invoking states of agents. Implementing the alternative, we introduce the notion of a collective goal and a characterisation of acting jointly which meets criteria standardly used in evaluating other accounts and may have some advantages over those accounts. (shrink)

Anticipatory looking on mindreading tasks can indicate our expectation of an agent's action. The challenge is that social situations are often more complex, involving instances where we need to track an agent's false belief to successfully identify the outcome to which an action is directed. If motor processes can guide how action goals are understood, it is conceivable— where that kind of goal ascription occurs in false-belief tasks— for motor representations to account for someone's belief-like state. Testing adults (N = (...) 42) in a real-time interactive helping scenario, we discovered that participants' early mediolateral motor activity (leftwards– rightwards leaning on balance board) foreshadowed the agent's belief-based action preparation. These results suggest fast belief-tracking can modulate motor representations generated in the course of one's interaction with an agent. While adults' leaning, and anticipatory looking, revealed the contribution of fast false-belief tracking, participants did not correct the agent's mistake in their final helping action. These discoveries suggest that adults may not necessarily use another's belief during overt social interaction or find reflecting on another's belief as being normatively relevant to one's own choice of action. Our interactive task design offers a promising way to investigate how motor and mindreading processes may be variously integrated. (shrink)

The authors examined cue competition effects in young children using the blicket detector paradigm, in which objects are placed either singly or in pairs on a novel machine and children must judge which objects have the causal power to make the machine work. Cue competition effects were found in a 5- to 6-year-old group but not in a 4-year-old group. Equivalent levels of forward and backward blocking were found in the former group. Children's counterfactual judgments were subsequently examined by asking (...) whether or not the machine would have gone off in the absence of I of 2 objects that had been placed on it as a pair. Cue competition effects were demonstrated only in 5- to 6-year-olds using this mode of assessing causal reasoning. (shrink)

Reflection on testimony provides novel arguments for anti-individualism. What is anti-individualism? Sanford Goldberg's book defends three main claims under this heading: first, facts about the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers ; second, an individual's epistemic entitlement to accept a piece of testimony depends on facts about her peers ; third, processes by which some humans acquire knowledge from testimony includes activities performed for them by others . Each of these three claims is argued (...) for separately from premises about the ways in which humans, adult and child, succeed in gaining knowledge by testimony. The three arguments provide the structure for Anti-Individualism.Goldberg's argument for the first claim – that the contents of beliefs do not supervene on individualistic facts about the believers – begins from uncontroversial facts about testimony. Gaining knowledge by testimony depends on knowing the meanings of some utterances, and it is possible to know the meaning of a person's utterance while knowing little that would distinguish this person from anyone else . The best explanation of how this is possible involves postulating linguistic norms which entail facts about the linguistic meanings of utterances . Now in some cases of testimony, a hearer acquires a belief whose content is the linguistic meaning of a speaker's utterance, where the linguistic meaning of this utterance is determined by linguistic norms . But linguistic norms might have been different from what they are even while the person's and her audience's non-relational properties remained unaltered . And in such a case, the hearer would have acquired a belief with a different content . Therefore, ‘Psychological facts such as believing that p do not supervene on the individualistic facts regarding the subject’ …. (shrink)

Joint actions often require agents to track others’ actions while planning and executing physically incongruent actions of their own. Previous research has indicated that this can lead to visuomotor interference effects when it occurs outside of joint action. How is this avoided or overcome in joint actions? We hypothesized that when joint action partners represent their actions as interrelated components of a plan to bring about a joint action goal, each partner’s movements need not be represented in relation to distinct, (...) incongruent proximal goals. Instead they can be represented in relation to a single proximal goal – especially if the movements are, or appear to be, mechanically linked to a more distal joint action goal. To test this, we implemented a paradigm in which participants produced finger movements that were either congruent or incongruent with those of a virtual partner, and either with or without a joint action goal (the joint flipping of a switch, which turned on two light bulbs). Our findings provide partial support for the hypothesis that visuomotor interference effects can be reduced when two physically incongruent actions are represented as mechanically interdependent contributions to a joint action goal. (shrink)

People walk, build, paint and otherwise act together with a purpose in myriad ways. What is the relation between the actions people perform in acting together with a purpose and the outcome, or outcomes, to which their actions are directed? We argue that fully characterising this relation will require appeal not only to intention, knowledge and other familiar philosophical paraphernalia but also to another kind of representation involved in preparing and executing actions, namely motor representation. If we are right, motor (...) representation plays a central role in the story of acting together. (shrink)

This chapter begins with a discussion of the significance of studies of aspects of tool use in understanding causal cognition. It argues that tool use studies reveal the most basic type or causal understanding being put to use, in a way that studies that focus on learning statistical relationships between cause and effect or studies of perceptual causation do not. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Psychological research into children’s sensitivity to testimony has primarily focused on their ability to judge the likely reliability of speakers. However, verbal testimony is only one means by which children learn from others. We review recent research exploring children’s early social referencing and imitation, as well as their sensitivity to speakers’ knowledge, beliefs, and biases, to argue that children treat information and informants with reasonable scepticism. As children’s understanding of mental states develops, they become ever more able to critically evaluate (...) whether to believe new information. (shrink)

Our motor system can generate representations which carry information about the goals of another agent's actions. However, it is not known whether motor representations play a deeper role in social understanding, and, in particular, whether they enable tracking others' beliefs. Here we show that, for adult observers, reliably manifesting an ability to track another's false belief critically depends on representing the agent's potential actions motorically. One signature of motor representations is that they can be disrupted by constraints on an observed (...) agent's action capacities. We therefore used a `mummification' technique to manipulate whether the agent in a visual ball-detection task was free to act or whether he was visibly constrained from acting. Adults' reaction times reliably reflected the agent's beliefs only when the agent was free to act on the ball and not when the agent was visibly constrained from acting. Furthermore, it was the agent's constrained action capabilities, rather than any perceptual novelty, that determined whether adult observers' reaction times reliably reflected the agent's beliefs. These findings signal that our motor system may underpin more of social cognition than previously imagined, and, in particular, that motor representations may underpin automatic false-belief tracking. (shrink)

What could someone represent that would enable her to track, at least within limits, others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs including false beliefs? An obvious possibility is that she might represent these very attitudes as such. It is sometimes tacitly or explicitly assumed that this is the only possible answer. However, we argue that several recent discoveries in developmental, cognitive, and comparative psychology indicate the need for other, less obvious possibilities. Our aim is to meet this need by describing the (...) construction of a minimal theory of mind. Minimal theory of mind is rich enough to explain systematic success on tasks held to be acid tests for theory of mind cognition including many false belief tasks. Yet minimal theory of mind does not require representing propositional attitudes, or any other kind of representation, as such. Minimal theory of mind may be what enables those with limited cognitive resources or little conceptual sophistication, such as infants, chimpanzees, scrub‐jays and human adults under load, to track others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs. (shrink)

In Experience and Nature, John Dewey writes, "Every existence is an event." This dissertation begins by taking this claim seriously and asking what it would mean for understanding and reconstructing individuality and democracy. If we think of ourselves, our social institutions, and our very understanding of experience as temporally developing, we will understand that ongoing experimentation and reconstructive growth must be central concerns in a pragmatic political philosophy. Individuality becomes an element of unique and unpredictable behavior within a system of (...) habits and customs. Individuality also operates at a variety of levels of organization---within a self as an impulse, within a community as a creative and dynamic person, and within larger political units as communities of shared and communicated ways of life. If every existence is an event, then democracy cannot be an attempt to guarantee timeless truths. Instead, it must be a method, a continual concern with freeing possibilities and developing the means by which we may continue to grow our experiences through reconstructive and experimental activity. My primary task will be to establish continuities among Dewey's work on the temporal development of individuals and the experimental nature of democracy. These continuities will include the ways in which individuality as a temporally reconstructive phenomenon causes prior habits and customs to be brought into question; the ways that reconstructive activity always works within a nexus of social and historical forces; and the ways that experimental activity in democracy takes place on a variety of levels of organization---within selves, among selves, among communities, and among states and nations. By establishing and exploring these continuities, I will offer a Deweyan understanding of the rich nature of growth in personal and political life, open up new democratic and experimental possibilities, and explore important ways in which democratic life may be experienced both deeply and broadly. (shrink)

The task of this project is to explore and explicate the notion of growth as expressed in the philosophical works of American philosopher and educator John Dewey. Specifically, I shall address the importance of our everyday aesthetic experience as it is embodied in our struggles to come to understand our world and each other. These sorts of moments can be pivotal, in that they are opportunities for us not only 'to learn,' as that phrase is traditionally understood, but to be (...) transformed by the continual play between our environing conditions and ourselves. Educative experiences are many and varied, but are not ever-present and are not always fully undergone even when they do avail themselves to us. They exist at least as often in failures and sufferings as in moments of understanding and satisfaction. Furthermore, not all experiences are educative. I shall explore and evaluate the criteria for educative experience which Dewey presents, paying special attention to the continuities which exist within and among our moments of development and transformation. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of the moral thought of Marius Victorinus the pagan Neoplatonist and teacher of rhetoric who converted to Christianity in the mid-fourth century and wrote the first Latin commentaries on the epistles of St. Paul. The study proceeds by a translation and analysis of his commentary on Ephesians, comparing his moral thought with that of the Latin rhetorical schools , of Plotinus ad Porphyry, and of the other Christian commentators on the Pauline epistles. The impact of (...) the moral psychology of the rhetorical tradition as well as the influence of the spiritual ethics of Neoplatonism were duly noted. Victorinus comments on Ephesians using the literary techniques of the rhetorical schools and adopts the homiletic standpoint of that letter, instructing his readers in the doctrinal and moral principles of Christianity. He bases his ethics on the notion of the church as the body of Christ with many members who enter into a new form of social relationship with each other that is consonant with their spiritual origin and destiny. His thought presents an extraordinary amalgam of Neoplatonic and Pauline conceptions. (shrink)

Marius Victorinus was the first Latin Christian of the fourth century to show the influence of Neoplatonism (Plotinus and Porphyry). As a convert from paganism, Victorinus' version of Christianity offers the student of Late Antiquity a window for understanding the conversion of the upper classes in the Western Roman Empire to Christianity. Because he was a professional rhetorician, an analysis of the exegetical work enables us to see how the moral mindset of the rhetorical schools found itself at home within (...) Christianity. The Neoplatonic influences in the works of Ambrose and Augustine can be appreciated better when understood in relation to the intellectual circles that preceded them, Victorinus being the most well documented figure of this milieu. (shrink)

Since Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), historians and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the implications of disciplinarity. In this chapter we consider restrictions posed to interdisciplinary exchange between ecology and economics that result from a particular kind of commitment to the ideal of disciplinary purity, that is, that each discipline is defined by an appropriate, unique set of objects, methods, theories, and aims. We argue that, when it comes to the objects of study in (...) ecology and economics, ideas of disciplinary purity have been underwritten by the artificial-natural distinction. We then problematize this distinction, and thus disciplinary purity, both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, the distinction is no longer tenable. Empirically, recent interdisciplinary research has shown the epistemological and policy-oriented benefits of dealing with models which explicitly link anthropogenic (i.e., “artificial”) and non-anthropogenic factors (i.e., “natural”). We conclude that, in the current age of the Anthropocene, it is to be expected that without interdisciplinary exchange, ecology and economics may relinquish global relevance because the distinct and separate systems to which each “pure” science was originally made to apply will only diminish over time. (shrink)

This essay in epistemology focuses on issues associated with belief in God, understood as belief in the existence of the God of orthodox monotheism and in the truth of related theistic claims. What type of belief is belief in God, and under what general conditions is such belief epistemically justified? I consider various answers to these questions, I offer some answers of my own, and I suggest some consequences of the latter for several important issues in the epistemology of religion. (...) ;I defend a version of evidentialism about belief in God. I argue that theism is in essential respects a theory, making theistic belief what I call a "theoretical" belief, one sort of belief whose epistemic justification depends on the existence of evidence for the truth of the belief. This fact about theism has important consequences for, among other things: the thesis of so-called "Reformed epistemology" ; the function of epistemic probability in the acceptance of religious creeds; and the place of subjective certainty in theistic belief. I conclude by briefly discussing the epistemic impact of some important kinds of theistic and anti-theistic evidence, and I offer some further speculations about the role of religious faith in supplementing, rather than supplanting, reason. (shrink)

Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, Department of Philosophy.

Studying moral development requires first that we understand and are able to adequately conceptualize moral experience in the present before moving to theorize development of that experience over time. I contend that the present state of moral development research is lacking in just such a conceptualization. This thesis develops the concept moral sensibility as an integrative psychological function engaging the various ways of knowing moral contexts that constitute moral experience. These include a person's sense of agency, relational understanding self awareness, (...) values, feelings, emotional responsiveness, reasoning, imagination, and identity. This concept integrates the perceptual abilities of the senses we use to know moral contexts with the sense we make of this knowledge, forming a holistic psychological dynamic. I also introduce the concept moral wisdom as a non-linear metaphor for reconceptualizing moral development This model of moral experience coordinates a relational and psychologically holistic understanding of self and moral being with a relational moral philosophy focusing on moral agent's perception and attention to particularity. ;This theoretical thesis is grounded in a study of young children in kindergarten, first and second grade. I spent one school year observing and interviewing them, exploring their stories and understandings of hurt and conflict in their personal relationships. Using narrative and categorical analyses of interview texts I present six case studies. I convey their stories, their moral concerns, abilities, behavior and insights in detail, letting their experiences and insights embody and enliven my conceptualization of moral sensibility. ;My findings support several of the points I argued conceptually: that an expanded lense and conceptual frame allows one to witness complex and detailed moral perception even in young children; that these abilities are engaged in intimate relationship, and best conveyed through stories about those relationships; and that the many aspects of that moral experience can be seen to be mutually dependent and interdefining. Therefore, any theory of moral experience or development must address and accommodate these realities of moral experience. (shrink)

This dissertation offers an exposition of a most intriguing passage in the Aristotelian corpus, where Aristotle's most extended treatment of tyranny proves to be a two-fold account of the means of its preservation. Unfortunately, Politics V, 11 has been treated for the most part as little more than a catalogue of despicable tyrannical practices and of Aristotle's "kingly" countermeasures. A careful reading, however, reveals a multifaceted argument intended to educate philosophers, gentlemen, and tyrants towards understanding and embracing political rule. ;Aristotle (...) reveals the precise philosophic limits of political and tyrannical rule, where at the edges they blur together. Furthermore he reveals the problematic character of uncultivated human nature for pursuing virtue as the end of politics: It proves in no politically reliable sense impelled towards virtue. ;If then citizens are to embrace virtue through political persuasion, their character must be cultivated. Aristotle takes advantage of this tyrannical context to educate ambitious and decent gentlemen, no less than tyrants, to reject and resist tyrannical rule and to embrace just political rule for their own respective advantages. Through his account of traditional tyranny he invites gentlemen to direct their own spiritedness against the full manifestation of spiritedness in the warmongering tyrant. Next he carefully channels the ambition and decency of gentlemen towards rejecting tyranny as base and contemptuous, and actively resisting tyranny as mortally threatening. Finally, Aristotle addresses tyrants, artfully earning their confidence in order to direct them to embrace justice as their own private advantage. In doing so he appeals to their desire for companionship and nobility of rule, without losing sight of the premium placed on security. ;In short, Aristotle educates philosophers, gentlemen, and tyrants to understand and embrace political rule, and offers a beaten path of excellence for others to imitate, should another find it prudent or necessary. (shrink)

The general aim of the study is to critically evaluate the concept of emotion employed in psychology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The modern idea of emotion is shown to emerge in the wake of Darwinian biology, physiological psychology and psychoanalysis, which frame it as a natural, biologically based occurrence: innate reflex, psycho-physiological disturbance or discharge of drive energy. But emotion is less a natural datum than a metaphysical idea: to understand human behavior as emotive is necessarily to place it within a (...) particular picture of subjectivity and sociality. However outwardly neutral and descriptive, a theory of emotion conceals a philosophical anthropology. I argue that the dominant picture underlying theoretical discourse on emotion is subjectivist, functionalist, and voluntarist. My constructive aim is to outline a more adequate picture of emotive subjectivity by exploiting neglected resources of social anthropology and psychoanalysis. The main features of this picture are specified in terms of allocutive intentionality, social integration and vulnerability. Emotive experience is allocutive in that it is necessarily expressed in view of and recognized by other persons; it is social in that it derives from a fundamental attachment and dependency on others that is subsequently oriented by collective norms and symbolic roles; and it testifies to vulnerability in that in emotion one feels the claim of another beyond one's will or understanding. These ideas are developed through a detailed examination of Freud's pre-psychoanalytic understanding of affect and Lacan's critique of emotion. (shrink)

I aim to construct a partial account of inferential epistemic justification, the process by which epistemic justification is "transferred" from an evidentiary belief to some further belief via inferential connections. The account focuses on two necessary conditions, similar versions of which have been widely discussed in the epistemological literature. The bulk of my dissertation is devoted to providing more detailed and exact formulations of these conditions than have previously been offered. Each is presented in an intuitive and rough formulation, meant (...) to capture the spirit of the condition as discussed in the literature, and is then honed into a more precise and acceptable shape. The first condition, which I call the Basis Condition, requires in its rough and initial formulation that a subject's belief be correctly inferentially based on its evidentiary beliefs if the latter are to confer justification on it; the condition requires an actual, psychologically instantiated inference process which generates the belief from its evidence. I thus agree with recent "naturalized epistemologists" who argue that mere possession of evidence which supports a belief is not sufficient for that belief to be inferentially justified; one must actually use the evidence in forming the belief in question. I call the second condition which I take to be necessary for inferential justification the Access Condition. It requires of a subject that she not simply hold her belief on the basis of adequate evidence, but that she be able to tell on reflection that her belief is evidentially supported and casually sustained by that evidence. Antecedents of the Access Condition have been championed by so-called internalist epistemologists who hold that a belief is epistemically justified only if at least some of the factors responsible for its justification are available or accessible to the subject on reflection. The account of inferential justification which I offer can therefore be thought of as an attempt to make sense of internalism within the framework of naturalized epistemology. (shrink)

The central thesis of my dissertation is that theories of the justification of legal punishment should take into account the effects of punishment on the characters of offenders and society as a whole. I maintain that punishments should not "make people worse" by damaging the characters of offenders or those who administer punishments, a concern that is especially acute in the case of incarceration. This project contributes to the understanding of the ethics of punishment by illuminating some of the moral (...) costs of punishment that have been overlooked by philosophical justifications of punishment and by extending the scope of punishment theory beyond standard concerns about proportionate retribution and effective deterrence. ;The philosophical task of my dissertation is to provide a plausible account of the role of character as part of a broader conceptual framework within which theories of punishment are elaborated. I argue that although it is an important feature of the Anglo-American legal tradition that punishments be administered for deeds, and not for bad motives or vices, concerns about character are relevant to the severity and type of punishments that are justifiable. I propose that to the greatest extent possible, punishments should minimize damage to the characters of all those affected by them. I claim that such a character constraint on punishment is justified on the intuitive basis that some kinds of punitive treatment are incompatible with the value of human dignity. Further, I contend that because certain virtues of character like self-respect and a sense of justice are integral to sustaining just social and political institutions, punishments that severely harm these capacities are inconsistent with widely acknowledged principles of justice. I do not defend a comprehensive or even partial justification of punishment, nor do I conclude that acknowledging the value of character should lead us to abolish or dismantle all of our institutions of punishment. I argue that although a concern with character may conflict with certain approaches to the justification of punishment, many utilitarians and retributivists can adopt a character constraint on punishment without seriously compromising their theories. (shrink)

What could someone represent that would enable her to track, at least within limits, others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs including false beliefs? An obvious possibility is that she might represent these very attitudes as such. It is sometimes tacitly or explicitly assumed that this is the only possible answer. However, we argue that several recent discoveries in developmental, cognitive, and comparative psychology indicate the need for other, less obvious possibilities. Our aim is to meet this need by describing the (...) construction of a minimal theory of mind. Minimal theory of mind is rich enough to explain systematic success on tasks held to be acid tests for theory of mind cognition including many false belief tasks. Yet minimal theory of mind does not require representing propositional attitudes, or any other kind of representation, as such. Minimal theory of mind may be what enables those with limited cognitive resources or little conceptual sophistication, such as infants, chimpanzees, scrub-jays and human adults under load, to track others' perceptions, knowledge states and beliefs. (shrink)