Understanding Other Minds from the Inside

Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43:83-99 (1998)
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Abstract

Can we understand other minds ‘from the inside’? What would this mean? There is an attraction which many have felt in the idea that creatures with minds, people, invite a kind of understanding which inanimate objects such as rocks, plants and machines, do not invite and that it is appropriate to seek to understand them ‘from the inside’. What I hope to do in this paper is to introduce and defend one version of the so-called ‘simulation’ approach to our grasp and use of psychological concepts, a version which gives central importance to the idea of shared rationality, and in so doing to tease out and defend one strand in the complex of ideas which finds expression in this mysterious phrase.

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Jane Heal
Cambridge University

Citations of this work

The narrative practice hypothesis: Clarifications and implications.Daniel D. Hutto - 2008 - Philosophical Explorations 11 (3):175 – 192.
Folk psychology as a theory.Ian Martin Ravenscroft - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Delusions and the background of rationality.Lisa Bortolotti - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (2):189-208.
On thought insertion.Christoph Hoerl - 2001 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8 (2-3):189-200.
Mental Simulation, Tacit Theory, and the Threat of Collapse.Tony Stone - 2001 - Philosophical Topics 29 (1-2):127-173.

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References found in this work

Critique of Pure Reason.I. Kant - 1787/1998 - Philosophy 59 (230):555-557.
The Idea of History.R. G. Collingwood - 1946 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 17 (2):252-253.
Minimal Rationality.Christopher Cherniak - 1988 - Behaviorism 16 (1):89-92.
Without Good Reason.Edward Stein - 2000 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 60 (1):234-237.

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