Abstract

In this article I take a nativist-modularist perspective on mindreading, endorsing the hypothesis that a form of primary mindreading is not a developmental achievement, but an innate social-cognitive evolutionary adaptation implemented by neurocomputational mechanisms that come online during the first year of age. Moreover, I recommend a cognitive-constructivist stance on introspection. Expanding on Peter Carruthers’ strong case for the claim that mindreading has a functional and evolutionary priority over introspection, I maintain that mindreading is also developmentally prior to introspection. If the latter is not taken as a competence in isolation, but placed in its context of meaning, i.e., the construction and defense of subjective identity, good reasons emerge for arguing that it takes shape through the act of turning on oneself the capacity to mindread other people; and that this occurs through that socio-communicative interaction with caregivers investigated by the attachment theory.