Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 57, 2018

Philosophy of Mind

Perceiving Mental States: Co-presence and Constitution

Recently, some philosophers of mind have called the attention to the idea according to which we can perceive, in many cases, some mental states of others. In this paper we consider two recent proposals: the co-presence thesis (Smith, 2010) and the hybrid model (Overgaard and Krueger, 2012). We will examine the aforementioned alternatives and present some objections against both of them. Then, we will propose a way of integrating both accounts that allows us to avoid these objections. In a nutshell, our idea is that by perceiving other people’s behaviors we perceive their mental states because behaviors co-present some features of the latter that go beyond the former, and this perception of others’ minds is direct an immediate because behavior is a constitutive part of mental states.