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Philosophy of Cognitive Science > Philosophy of Psychology > Theory of Mind and Folk Psychology > Mindreading
Mindreading
Edited by Maushumi Guha (Jadavpur University)
Assistant editor: Annie Mukherjee (Jadavpur University)
About this topic
| Summary | 'Mindreading', like 'theory of mind', represents a domain of research as well as a special skill that is marked by the attribution of mental states to others as well as to oneself. In reading other minds, we deploy multiple capacities that may involve language, perception, conception, motor skills, imagery and many others. Naturally therefore, as a research domain it is largely multidisciplinary, though Philosophy and its allied disciplines (like Psychology, Cognitive Science etc.) are the most dominant ones, providing the basic conceptual and research structure within which any empirical investigation related to mindreading may be conducted. 'Mindreading', 'folk psychology', 'third-person ascription', 'mentalising', 'social cognition', 'theory of mind' among others, are family resemblance terms that are often used interchangeably. Among the dominant philosophical perspectives on mindreading are the Theory Theory and the Simulation Theory and their various strands. But other than these, there are works on the nature of empathy from the side of cognitive science, phenomenology and even neuroscience and computer science, that build into the literature on mindreading. How we understand each other's minds and attribute behavioural and mental states to one another and navigate the social world are issues covered by the various papers in this category. |
| Key works | Goldman 2006 and Nichols & Stich 2003 are the two most comprehensive introductions from two sides of the debate about mindreading - the simulation side and the theory side. Two more recent discussions that ramify the discussion beyond the theory-simulation debate are to be found in Spaulding 2018 and Maibom 2017. Davies & Stone 1995, Davies & Stone 1995, and Carruthers & Smith 1996 contain the original articles written on this issue by the pioneers of the theory-simulation debate. Apperly 2011 and Lavelle 2022 are more contemporary introductions to this area. In contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science, mindreading is perhaps the domain which has received maximum concentrated focus and as a result the literature is vast and varied. These resources can more or less direct the earnest reader to a comprehensive bibliography of the domain of mindreading. |
| Introductions | Cruz & Gordon 2003 Heal 1998 Shannon 2017 Maibom 2009 Goldman & Jordan 2013 |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- The Nature of Folk Psychology (457)
- The Theory Theory (101)
- The Simulation Theory (276)
- Development of Theory of Mind (325)
- Theory of Mind and Folk Psychology, Misc (311)
- Folk Concepts and Folk Intuitions (210)
- Eliminativism about Propositional Attitudes (173)
See also
- Theory of Mind and Folk Psychology (1,915 | 62)
Contents
173 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 173 |
- Mindshaping in nonhuman great apes.Simon Fitzpatrick - forthcoming - In Tad Zawidzki, Routledge Handbook of Mindshaping.The mindshaping hypothesis proposes a “de-intellectualized” explanation for human unique cooperation. In contrast to standard mindreading accounts, which emphasize the evolution of sophisticated reasoning about others’ propositional attitudes to explain how our ancestors became hyper cooperators, the hypothesis holds that sophisticated mindreading was a late-arriving product of our ancestors becoming better cooperators via the evolution of mechanisms that shape and regulate the minds of members of human groups to be suited to cooperation. Comparative research with nonhumans, especially our closest living (...)
- Representation and Misrepresentation of Knowledge.Mikkel Gerken - forthcoming - Behavioral and Brain Sciences.I argue for three points: First, evidence of the primacy of knowledge representation is not evidence of primacy of knowledge. Second, knowledge-oriented mindreading research should also focus on misrepresentations and biased representations of knowledge. Third, knowledge-oriented mindreading research must confront the problem of the gold standard that arises when disagreement about knowledge complicates the interpretation of empirical findings.
- Psychotherapy as a folk-psychological practice: Therapeutic mindreading and mindshaping.J. P. Grodniewicz - forthcoming - In Tad Zawidzki, Routledge Handbook of Mindshaping.Most psychotherapeutic approaches are, to a greater or lesser extent, rooted in the theories and principles of scientific psychology. Nevertheless, in-session psychotherapeutic interaction between a therapist and a client is, at its core, a folk-psychological practice. As such, it is based on folk-psychological skills and competencies. But which ones exactly? This chapter argues that, while we may initially be inclined to perceive the practice of psychotherapy as primarily involving sophisticated mindreading on the part of both the therapist and the client/patient, (...)
- The distinctive character of knowledge.Jennifer Nagel - forthcoming - Behavioral and Brain Sciences.Because knowledge entails true belief, it is can be hard to explain why a given action is naturally seen as driven by one of these states as opposed to the other. A simpler and more radical characterization of knowledge helps to solve this problem while also shedding some light on what is special about social learning.
- Factive Mindreading in the Folk Psychology of Action.Carlotta Pavese - forthcoming - In Artūrs Logins & Jacques Henri Vollet, Putting Knowledge to Work: New Directions for Knowledge-First Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.In the recent literature, several authors have argued that the capacity to track factive mental states plays a central role in explaining our ability to understand and predict people’s behavior (Nagel 2013; Nagel 2017; Phillips & Norby 2019; Phillips et al. 2020; Westra & Nagel 2021). The topic of this chapter is whether this capacity also enters into an explanation of our ability to track skilled and intentional actions.
- Politicizing Mindshaping.Uwe Peters - forthcoming - In Tad Zawidzki, Routledge Handbook of Mindshaping.To better navigate social interactions, we routinely (consciously or unconsciously) categorize people based on their distinctive features. One important way we do this is by ascribing political orientations to them. For example, based on certain behavioral cues, we might perceive someone as politically liberal, progressive, conservative, libertarian, Marxist, anarchist, or fascist. Although such ascriptions may appear to be mere descriptions, I argue that they can have deeper, regulative effects on their targets, potentially politicizing and polarizing them in ways that remain (...)
- Implicit Social Cognition.Shannon Spaulding - forthcoming - In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Implicit Cognition. Routledge.Positing implicit social cognitive processes is common in the social cognition literature. We see it in discussions of theories of mentalizing, empathy, and infants' social-cognitive capacities. However, there is little effort to articulate what counts as implicit social cognition in general, so theorizing about implicit social cognition is extremely disparate across each of these sub-domains. In this paper, I argue that Michael Brownstein’s account of implicit cognition promises to be a fruitful, unifying account of implicit cognition in general, and it (...)
- Why is knowledge faster than (true) belief?Evan Westra - forthcoming - Behavioral and Brain Sciences.Phillips and colleagues convincingly argue that knowledge attribution is a faster, more automatic form of mindreading than belief attribution. However, they do not explain what it is about knowledge attribution that lends it this cognitive advantage. I suggest an explanation of the knowledge-attribution advantage that would also help to distinguish it from belief-based and minimalist alternatives.
- Beyond avatars and arrows: Testing the mentalizing and submentalizing hypotheses with a novel entity paradigm.Evan Westra, Brandon F. Terrizzi, Simon T. van Baal, Jonathan S. Beier & John Michael - forthcoming - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalizing” processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate (...)
- How I Know What You Know.Shannon Spaulding - 2025 - In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn, Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.Mentalizing is our ability to infer agents’ mental states. Attributing beliefs, knowledge, desires, and intentions are frequently discussed forms of mentalizing. Attributing mentalistically loaded stereotypes, personality traits, and evaluating others’ rationality are forms of mentalizing, as well. This broad conception of mentalizing has interesting and important implications for social epistemology. Several topics in social epistemology involve judgments about others’ knowledge, rationality, and competence, e.g., peer disagreement, epistemic injustice, and identifying experts. Mentalizing is at the core of each of these debates. (...)$226.00 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation
Bookmark - Cultural evolutionary pragmatics: Investigating the codevelopment and coevolution of language and social cognition.Paula Rubio-Fernandez - 2024 - Psychological Review 131 (1):18-35.
- Thinking about Past Minds: Cognitive Science as Philosophy of Historiography.Adam Michael Bricker - 2023 - Journal of the Philosophy of History 17 (2):219-242.This paper outlines the case for a future research program that uses the tools of experimental cognitive science to investigate questions that traditionally fall under the remit of the philosophy of historiography. The central idea is this – the epistemic profile of historians’ representations of the past is largely an empirical matter, determined in no small part by the cognitive processes that produce these representations. However, as the philosophy of historiography is not presently equipped to investigate such cognitive questions, legitimate (...)
- Morgan’s Quaker gun and the species of belief.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):119-144.In this article, I explore how researchers’ metaphysical commitments can be conducive—or unconducive—to progress in animal cognition research. The methodological dictum known as Morgan’s Canon exhorts comparative psychologists to countenance the least mentalistic fair interpretation of animal actions. This exhortation has frequently been misread as a blanket condemnation of mentalistic interpretations of animal behaviors that could be interpreted behavioristically. But Morgan meant to demand only that researchers refrain from accepting default interpretations of (apparent) actions until other fair interpretations have been (...)
- Outcome Effects, Moral Luck and the Hindsight Bias.Markus Kneer & Iza Skoczeń - 2023 - Cognition 232.In a series of ten preregistered experiments (N=2043), we investigate the effect of outcome valence on judgments of probability, negligence, and culpability – a phenomenon sometimes labelled moral (and legal) luck. We found that harmful outcomes, when contrasted with neutral outcomes, lead to increased perceived probability of harm ex post, and consequently to increased attribution of negligence and culpability. Rather than simply postulating a hindsight bias (as is common), we employ a variety of empirical means to demonstrate that the outcome-driven (...)
- A view from mindreading on fast-and-slow thinking.Jason Low, Stephen A. Butterfill & John Michael - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e130.De Neys's incisive critique of empirical and theoretical research on the exclusivity feature underscores the depth of the challenge of explaining the interplay of fast and slow processes. We argue that a closer look at research on mindreading reveals abundant evidence for the exclusivity feature – as well as methodological and theoretical perspectives that could inform research on fast and slow thinking.
- Do I Really Believe That? A Mindreading Account of Belief Self-Ascription.Sylvain Montalvo - 2023 - In Teresa Lopez-Soto, Alvaro Garcia-Lopez & Francisco J. Salguero-Lamillar, The Theory of Mind Under Scrutiny: Psychopathology, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind and Artificial Intelligence. Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 469-491.Philosophers often treat beliefs as propositional attitudes that entail taking the content as true. However, there exist certain mental states, such as delusions, that challenge this dogmatic norm, leading some researchers to question its validity. This chapter delves into that philosophical inquiry that surrounds the nature of beliefs and establishes a contrastive perspective in cases of delusion, self-deception, sectarian influence, and scientific negationism. We should explore the notion of privileged access to our own mental states acknowledging the importance of self-ascription (...)
- Mindreading in context.Emma Rose Otterski - 2023 - Dissertation, University of EdinburghThis thesis concerns mindreading, the ability to attribute mental states to others. The standard conception of mindreading emerged from philosophical debates about our everyday use of mental-state terms and experiments in psychology. Underlying this conception, I suggest, are three assumptions: that mindreading is fundamental to our social understanding, that it is (solely) aimed at accuracy, and that its purpose is to explain and predict others’ behaviour. While the core chapters of this thesis were conceived of separately, they each challenge one (...)
- How Algorithm Improves Mindreading Capacity?Rr Yudiswara Ayu Permatasari & Nadia Elasalama - 2023 - Asean Journal of Ci-El and Applied Philosophy 1 (1).Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Empathy Skills and Habits.Shannon Spaulding - 2023 - In Christiana Werner, Empathy's Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art. New York, NY: Routledge.Psychologists have long noted the correlation between empathy and prosocial outcomes. Empathetic people are happier, healthier, more cooperative, and more altruistic than people who are less empathetic. However, empathy is not a panacea for all social ills. Critics argue that empathy is idiosyncratic, easily manipulated, biased in favor of one's in-group, and exacerbates rather than relieves underlying inequalities. The praise and critique of empathy raise an interesting question: Can we improve empathy? It depends on what kind of capacity empathy is. (...)
- Empathy Skills and Habits.Shannon Spaulding - 2023 - In Christiana Werner, Empathy's Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art. New York, NY: Routledge.Psychologists have long noted the correlation between empathy and pro-social outcomes. Empathetic people are happier, healthier, more cooperative, and more altruistic than people who are less empathetic. However, empathy is not a panacea for all social ills. Critics argue that empathy is idiosyncratic, easily manipulated, biased in favour of one’s in-group, and exacerbates rather than relieving underlying inequalities. The praise and critique of empathy raise an interesting question: can we improve empathy? It depends on what kind of capacity empathy is. (...)
- (1 other version)Rethinking Integration of Epistemic Strategies in Social Understanding: Examining the Central Role of Mindreading in Pluralist Accounts.Julia Wolf, Sabrina Coninx & Albert Newen - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (7):2967-2995.In recent years, theories of social understanding have moved away from arguing that just one epistemic strategy, such as theory-based inference or simulation constitutes our ability of social understanding. Empirical observations speak against any monistic view and have given rise to pluralistic accounts arguing that humans rely on a large variety of epistemic strategies in social understanding. We agree with this promising pluralist approach, but highlight two open questions: what is the residual role of mindreading, i.e. the indirect attribution of (...)
- Empathy and the Value of Humane Understanding.Olivia Bailey - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1):50-65.Empathy is a form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective‐taking. It is also the unique source of a particular form of understanding, which I will call humane understanding. Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. In this paper, I focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non‐instrumentally valuable to its recipients. People have a complex but profound need to be (...)
- Diversity and Moral Address.Daphne Brandenburg - 2022 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 39 (4):631-644.This article evaluates communicative approaches to responsibility within the Strawsonian tradition. These approaches consider reactive attitudes to be forms of moral address and consider responsiveness to moral address a condition on responsible agency. The article consists of a critical and a positive part. In the first part, I identify a risk for these theories. They often provide an overly narrow account of how we can communicate with others about perceived moral disregard. I argue that, when read this way, a conversational (...)
- The paradox of social interaction : shared intentionality, we-reasoning and virtual bargaining.Nick Chater, Hossam Zeitoun & Tigran Melkonyan - 2022 - Psychological Review 129 (3):415-437.Social interaction is both ubiquitous and central to understanding human behavior. Such interactions depend, we argue, on shared intentionality: the parties must form a common understanding of an ambiguous interaction (e.g., one person giving a present to another requires that both parties appreciate that a voluntary transfer of ownership is intended). Yet how can shared intentionality arise? Many well-known accounts of social cognition, including those involving “mind-reading,” typically fall into circularity and/or regress. For example, A’s beliefs and behavior may depend (...)
- A tragic coalition of the rational and irrational: a threat to collective responses to COVID-19.Marinus Ferreira, Marc Cheong, Colin Klein & Mark Alfano - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology (6).There is not as much resistance to COVID-19 mitigation as there seems, but there are structural features that make resistance seem worse than it is. Here we describe two ways that the problem seeming to be worse than it is can make it worse. First, visible hesitation to implement COVID-19 responses signals to the wider society that mitigation measures may not succeed, which undermines people’s conditional willingness to join in on those efforts. Second, our evaluations of others’ willingness to implement (...)
- Mindreading and Social Cognition.Jane Suilin Lavelle - 2022 - Cambridge University Press.The cognitive ability to think about other people's psychological states is known as `mindreading'. This Element critiques assumptions that have been formative in shaping philosophical theories of mindreading: that mindreading is ubiquitous, underpinning the vast majority of our social interactions; and that its primary goal is to provide predictions and explanations of other people's behaviour. It begins with an overview of key positions and empirical literature in the debate. It then introduces and motivates the pluralist turn in this literature, which (...)
- The difference between metacognition and mindreading: Evidence from functional near-infrared spectroscopy.Zhaolan Li, Wenwu Dai & Ning Jia - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.The relationship between metacognition and mindreading was investigated by examining how well one can monitor their own learning compared to another person’s learning. Here, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to systematically investigate the brain area activation during metacognition and mindreading. The evidence indicated that metacognition and mindreading are underpinned by distinct neural systems. Metacognition is associated with activation in brain regions important for memory retrieval, such as the fusiform gyrus, while mindreading is associated with activation in brain regions important for (...)
- Chimpanzees are mindreaders: On why they attribute seeing rather than sensing.Robert Lurz & Vincent Andreassi - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (6):814-841.
- Reclaiming Control: Extended Mindreading and the Tracking of Digital Footprints.Uwe Peters - 2022 - Social Epistemology 36 (3):267-282.It is well known that on the Internet, computer algorithms track our website browsing, clicks, and search history to infer our preferences, interests, and goals. The nature of this algorithmic tracking remains unclear, however. Does it involve what many cognitive scientists and philosophers call ‘mindreading’, i.e., an epistemic capacity to attribute mental states to people to predict, explain, or influence their actions? Here I argue that it does. This is because humans are in a particular way embedded in the process (...)
- Face perception and mind misreading.Joulia Smortchkova - 2022 - Topoi 41 (4):685-694.What is the role of face perception in mindreading? I explore this question by focusing on our quick impressions of others when we look at their faces. Drawing on a contrast between quick impressions of emotional expressions and quick impressions of character traits, I suggest that face perception can be a double-edged sword for mindreading: in some cases, it can correctly track some aspects of the mental life of others, while in other cases it can give rise to visual illusions (...)
- Self and Other Mentalizing Polarities and Dimensions of Mental Health: Association With Types of Symptoms, Functioning and Well-Being.Sergi Ballespí, Jaume Vives, Carla Sharp, Lorena Chanes & Neus Barrantes-Vidal - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12.Research suggests that the ability to understand one’s own and others’ minds, or mentalizing, is a key factor for mental health. Most studies have focused the attention on the association between global measures of mentalizing and specific disorders. In contrast, very few studies have analyzed the association between specific mentalizing polarities and global measures of mental health. This study aimed to evaluate whether self and other polarities of mentalizing are associated with a multidimensional notion of mental health, which considers symptoms, (...)
- „Das Wissen von fremden Ichen“: Mindreading und Einfühlung unter Berücksichtigung von Theodor Lipps.Faustino Fabbianelli - 2021 - In Laura Follesa & Federico Vercellone, Bilddenken und Morphologie: Interdisziplinäre Studien über Form und Bilder im philosophischen und wissenschaftlichen Denken. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 181-196.
- The Role of Executive Function and Theory of Mind in Pragmatic Computations.Sarah Fairchild & Anna Papafragou - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (2):e12938.In sentences such as “Some dogs are mammals,” the literal semantic meaning (“Some and possibly all dogs are mammals”) conflicts with the pragmatic meaning (“Not all dogs are mammals,” known as a scalar implicature). Prior work has shown that adults vary widely in the extent to which they adopt the semantic or pragmatic meaning of such utterances, yet the underlying reason for this variation is unknown. Drawing on theoretical models of scalar implicature derivation, we explore the hypothesis that the cognitive (...)
- Joint attention without recursive mindreading: On the role of second-person engagement.Felipe León - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (4):550-580.On a widely held characterization, triadic joint attention is the capacity to perceptually attend to an object or event together with another subject. In the last four decades, research in developmental psychology has provided increasing evidence of the crucial role that this capacity plays in socio-cognitive development, early language acquisition, and the development of perspective-taking. Yet, there is a striking discrepancy between the general agreement that joint attention is critical in various domains, and the lack of theoretical consensus on how (...)
- Mindreading in conversation.Evan Westra & Jennifer Nagel - 2021 - Cognition 210 (C):104618.How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled (...)
- (1 other version)Rethinking Integration of Epistemic Strategies in Social Understanding: Examining the Central Role of Mindreading in Pluralist Accounts.Julia Wolf, Sabrina Coninx & Albert Newen - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (7):1-29.In recent years, theories of social understanding have moved away from arguing that just one epistemic strategy, such as theory-based inference or simulation constitutes our ability of social understanding. Empirical observations speak against any monistic view and have given rise to pluralistic accounts arguing that humans rely on a large variety of epistemic strategies in social understanding. We agree with this promising pluralist approach, but highlight two open questions: what is the residual role of mindreading, i.e. the indirect attribution of (...)
- The neural and cognitive mechanisms of knowledge attribution: An EEG study.Adam Michael Bricker - 2020 - Cognition 203 (C):104412.Despite the ubiquity of knowledge attribution in human social cognition, its associated neural and cognitive mechanisms are poorly documented. A wealth of converging evidence in cognitive neuroscience has identified independent perspective-taking and inhibitory processes for belief attribution, but the extent to which these processes are shared by knowledge attribution isn't presently understood. Here, we present the findings of an EEG study designed to directly address this shortcoming. These findings suggest that belief attribution is not a component process in knowledge attribution, (...)
- How Mindreading Might Mislead Cognitive Science.P. Carruthers - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (7-8):195-219.This article explores three ways in which a cognitively entrenched mindreading (or 'theory of mind') system may bias our thinking as cognitive scientists. One issues in a form of tacit dualism, impacting scientific debates about phenomenal consciousness. Another leads us to think that our own minds are easier to know than they really are, influencing debates about self-knowledge, and about mindreading itself. And the third results in a bias in favour of empiricist over nativist accounts of cognitive development. The discussion (...)
- Do Competitive Contexts Affect Mindreading Performance?Livia Colle, Giancarlo Dimaggio, Antonino Carcione, Giuseppe Nicolò, Antonio Semerari & Claudia Chiavarino - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11.
- Explaining or redefining mindreading?Krzysztof Dołęga, Tobias Schlicht & Daniel C. Dennett - 2020 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43.Veissière et al. disrupt current debates over the nature of mindreading by bringing multiple positions under the umbrella of free-energy. However, it is not clear whether integrating the opposing sides under a common formal framework will yield new insights into how mindreading is achieved, rather than offering a mere redescription of the target phenomenon.
- (1 other version)The origins of mindreading: how interpretive socio-cognitive practices get off the ground.Marco Fenici & Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki - 2020 - Synthese (9):1-23.Recent accounts of mindreading—i.e., the human capacity to attribute mental states to interpret, explain, and predict behavior—have suggested that it has evolved through cultural rather than biological evolution. Although these accounts describe the role of culture in the ontogenetic development of mindreading, they neglect the question of the cultural origins of mindreading in human prehistory. We discuss four possible models of this, distinguished by the role they posit for culture: the standard evolutionary psychology model, the individualist empiricist model, the cultural (...)
- How Might Simulation-Based Accounts of Mindreading Explain Pragmatic Interpretation?Ali Yousefi Heris - 2020 - Phenomenology and Mind 19 (19):226.This paper examines the role of simulational mindreading in pragmatic interpretation (conceived of in a Gricean manner). There are two parts to this paper. In part one, I argue that mirroring, in the form of direct or indirect simulation, underdetermines pragmatic interpretation. Nevertheless, to deliver a unique interpretation, mirroring can contribute either by reducing the number of salient interpretations or to be accompanied by theoretical considerations. This results in a hybrid view in which theory and simulation cooperate. The second part (...)
- Metacognition and mindreading in young children: A cross-cultural study.Sunae Kim, Beate Sodian, Markus Paulus, Atsushi Senju, Akiko Okuno, Mika Ueno, Shoji Itakura & Joélle Proust - 2020 - Consciousness and Cognition 85 (C):103017.
- Intentional-reading en Tomasello: ¿Una teoría de adquisición de lenguaje alternativa no tan alternativa?Rodrigo Silva-Cobarrubias - 2020 - Dissertation, University of ChileEn la presente tesis de titulación se ha propuesto investigar el concepto de intention-reading de Michael Tomasello con el fin de aclarar su caracterización dentro del contexto de su teoría de adquisición del lenguaje. En segundo lugar, tomando como base lo anterior, se quiere identificar los supuestos que adopta Tomasello en la descripción de este proceso para así poder relacionar su teoría del aprendizaje del lenguaje con alguna arquitectura cognitiva. La motivación principal para escoger este tópico es precisar la relación (...)
- Does empirical evidence support perceptual mindreading?Joulia Smortchkova - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (4):298-306.According to perceptual accounts of mindreading, we can see, rather than cognize, other people's mental states. On one version of this approach, certain mental properties figure in the contents of our perceptual experiences. In a recent paper, Varga has appealed to empirical research to argue that intentions and emotions can indeed be seen, rather than cognized. In this paper, I argue that none of the evidence adduced to support the perceptual account of mindreading shows that we see mental properties, as (...)
- Folk personality psychology: mindreading and mindshaping in trait attribution.Evan Westra - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8213-8232.Character-trait attribution is an important component of everyday social cognition that has until recently received insufficient attention in traditional accounts of folk psychology. In this paper, I consider how the case of character-trait attribution fits into the debate between mindreading-based and broadly ‘pluralistic’ approaches to folk psychology. Contrary to the arguments of some pluralists, I argue that the evidence on trait understanding does not show that it is a distinct, non-mentalistic mode of folk-psychological reasoning, but rather suggests that traits are (...)
- When is mindreading accurate? A commentary on Shannon Spaulding’s How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition. [REVIEW]Evan Westra - 2020 - Philosophical Psychology 33 (6):868-882.In How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition, Shannon Spaulding develops a novel account of social cognition with pessimistic implications for mindreading accuracy: according to Spaulding, mistakes in mentalizing are much more common than traditional theories of mindreading commonly assume. In this commentary, I push against Spaulding’s pessimism from two directions. First, I argue that a number of the heuristic mindreading strategies that Spaulding views as especially error prone might be quite reliable in practice. Second, I argue that current (...)
- A computational model of the cultural co-evolution of language and mindreading.Marieke Woensdregt, Chris Cummins & Kenny Smith - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1347-1385.Several evolutionary accounts of human social cognition posit that language has co-evolved with the sophisticated mindreading abilities of modern humans. It has also been argued that these mindreading abilities are the product of cultural, rather than biological, evolution. Taken together, these claims suggest that the evolution of language has played an important role in the cultural evolution of human social cognition. Here we present a new computational model which formalises the assumptions that underlie this hypothesis, in order to explore how (...)
- How is mindreading really like reading?Ian A. Apperly - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42.I suggest an alternative basis for Heyes’ analogy between cultural learning of mindreading and text reading. Unlike text reading, mindreading does not entail decoding of observable stimuli. Like text reading, mindreading requires relevant inferences. Identification of relevant inferences is a deeply challenging problem, and the most important contribution of cultural learning to mindreading may be an apprenticeship in thinking like a mindreader.
- You are just being emotional! Testimonial injustice and folk-psychological attributions.Rodrigo Díaz & Manuel Almagro - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5709-5730.Testimonial injustices occur when individuals from particular social groups are systematically and persistently given less credibility in their claims merely because of their group identity. Recent “pluralistic” approaches to folk psychology, by taking into account the role of stereotypes in how we understand others, have the power to explain how and why cases of testimonial injustice occur. If how we make sense of others’ behavior depends on assumptions about how individuals from certain groups think and act, this can explain why (...)
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