Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms.Evan Westra & Kristin Andrews - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (5):1-30.
    Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Stereotypes, theory of mind, and the action–prediction hierarchy.Evan Westra - 2019 - Synthese 196 (7):2821-2846.
    Both mindreading and stereotyping are forms of social cognition that play a pervasive role in our everyday lives, yet too little attention has been paid to the question of how these two processes are related. This paper offers a theory of the influence of stereotyping on mental-state attribution that draws on hierarchical predictive coding accounts of action prediction. It is argued that the key to understanding the relation between stereotyping and mindreading lies in the fact that stereotypes centrally involve character-trait (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   31 citations  
  • Constructing persons: On the personal–subpersonal distinction.Mason Westfall - 2024 - Philosophical Psychology 37 (4):831-860.
    What’s the difference between those psychological posits that are ‘me” and those that are not? Distinguishing between these psychological kinds is important in many domains, but an account of what the distinction consists in is challenging. I argue for Psychological Constructionism: those psychological posits that correspond to the kinds within folk psychology are personal, and those that don’t, aren’t. I suggest that only constructionism can answer a fundamental challenge in characterizing the personal level – the plurality problem. The things that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • (1 other version)The science of belief: A progress report.Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum - 2020 - WIREs Cognitive Science 1.
    The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals.Evan Westra, Simon Fitzpatrick, Sarah F. Brosnan, Thibaud Gruber, Catherine Hobaiter, Lydia M. Hopper, Daniel Kelly, Christopher Krupenye, Lydia V. Luncz, Jordan Theriault & Kristin Andrews - 2024 - Biological Reviews 1.
    Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Interpretivism and norms.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (4):905-930.
    This article reconsiders the relationship between interpretivism about belief and normative standards. Interpretivists have traditionally taken beliefs to be fixed in relation to norms of interpretation. However, recent work by philosophers and psychologists reveals that human belief attribution practices are governed by a rich diversity of normative standards. Interpretivists thus face a dilemma: either give up on the idea that belief is constitutively normative or countenance a context-sensitive disjunction of norms that constitute belief. Either way, interpretivists should embrace the intersubjective (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Mathematical Cognition: A Case of Enculturation.Richard Menary - 2015 - Open Mind.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   49 citations  
  • Morgan’s Canon, meet Hume’s Dictum: avoiding anthropofabulation in cross-species comparisons.Cameron Buckner - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (5):853-871.
    How should we determine the distribution of psychological traits—such as Theory of Mind, episodic memory, and metacognition—throughout the Animal kingdom? Researchers have long worried about the distorting effects of anthropomorphic bias on this comparative project. A purported corrective against this bias was offered as a cornerstone of comparative psychology by C. Lloyd Morgan in his famous “Canon”. Also dangerous, however, is a distinct bias that loads the deck against animal mentality: our tendency to tie the competence criteria for cognitive capacities (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   50 citations  
  • Symbolic belief in social cognition.Evan Westra - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):388-408.
    Keeping track of what others believe is a central part of human social cognition. However, the social relevance of those beliefs can vary a great deal. Some belief attributions mostly tell us about what a person is likely to do next. Other belief attributions tell us more about a person's social identity. In this paper, I argue that we cope with this challenge by employing two distinct concepts of belief in our everyday social interactions. The epistemic concept of belief is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Character and theory of mind: an integrative approach.Evan Westra - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (5):1217-1241.
    Traditionally, theories of mindreading have focused on the representation of beliefs and desires. However, decades of social psychology and social neuroscience have shown that, in addition to reasoning about beliefs and desires, human beings also use representations of character traits to predict and interpret behavior. While a few recent accounts have attempted to accommodate these findings, they have not succeeded in explaining the relation between trait attribution and belief-desire reasoning. On my account, character-trait attribution is part of a hierarchical system (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   25 citations  
  • On IQ and other sciencey descriptions of minds.Devin Sanchez Curry - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    Philosophers of mind (from eliminative materialists to psychofunctionalists to interpretivists) generally assume that a normative ideal delimits which mental phenomena exist (though they disagree about how to characterize the ideal in question). This assumption is dubious. A comprehensive ontology of mind includes some mental phenomena that are neither (a) explanatorily fecund posits in any branch of cognitive science that aims to unveil the mechanistic structure of cognitive systems nor (b) ideal (nor even progressively closer to ideal) posits in any given (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Introduction to Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches.Kristin Andrews, Shannon Spaulding & Evan Westra - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1685-1700.
    This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Free actions as a natural kind.Oisín Deery - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):823-843.
    Do we have free will? Understanding free will as the ability to act freely, and free actions as exercises of this ability, I maintain that the default answer to this question is “yes.” I maintain that free actions are a natural kind, by relying on the influential idea that kinds are homeostatic property clusters. The resulting position builds on the view that agents are a natural kind and yields an attractive alternative to recent revisionist accounts of free action. My view (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • The Folk Psychological Spiral: Explanation, Regulation, and Language.Kristin Andrews - 2015 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (S1):50-67.
    The view that folk psychology is primarily mindreading beliefs and desires has come under challenge in recent years. I have argued that we also understand others in terms of individual properties such as personality traits and generalizations from past behavior, and in terms of group properties such as stereotypes and social norms (Andrews 2012). Others have also argued that propositional attitude attribution isn’t necessary for predicting others’ behavior, because this can be done in terms of taking Dennett’s Intentional Stance (Zawidzki (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Beliefs as inner causes: the (lack of) evidence.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (6):850-877.
    Many psychologists studying lay belief attribution and behavior explanation cite Donald Davidson in support of their assumption that people construe beliefs as inner causes. But Davidson’s influential argument is unsound; there are no objective grounds for the intuition that the folk construe beliefs as inner causes that produce behavior. Indeed, recent experimental work by Ian Apperly, Bertram Malle, Henry Wellman, and Tania Lombrozo provides an empirical framework that accords well with Gilbert Ryle’s alternative thesis that the folk construe beliefs as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Interpretivism without judgement-dependence.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (2):611-615.
    In a recent article in this journal, Krzysztof Poslajko reconstructs—and endorses as probative—a dilemma for interpretivism first posed by Alex Byrne. On the first horn of the dilemma, the interpretivist takes attitudes to emerge in relation to an ideal interpreter (and thus loses any connection with actual folk psychological practices). On the second horn, the interpretivist takes attitudes to emerge in relation to individuals’ judgements (and thus denies the possibility of error). I show that this is a false dilemma. By (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • How Not to Find Over-Imitation in Animals.Kristin Andrews & Jedediah W. P. Allen - 2024 - Human Development.
    While more species are being identified as cultural on a regular basis, stark differences between human and animal cultures remain. Humans are more richly cultural, with group-specific practices and social norms guiding almost every element of our lives. Furthermore, human culture is seen as cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is grounded in the observation that human children across cultures appear to spontaneously over-imitate silly or causally irrelevant behaviors that they observe. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Factive theory of mind.Jonathan Phillips & Aaron Norby - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (1):3-26.
    Research on theory of mind has primarily focused on demonstrating and understanding the ability to represent others' non‐factive mental states, for example, others' beliefs in the false‐belief task. This requirement confuses the ability to represent a particular kind of non‐factive content (e.g., a false belief) with the more general capacity to represent others' understanding of the world even when it differs from one's own. We provide a way of correcting this. We first offer a simple and theoretically motivated account on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • (1 other version)Normative Practices of Other Animals.Sarah Vincent, Rebecca Ring & Kristin Andrews - 2018 - In Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones & Mark Timmons, Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 57-83.
    Traditionally, discussions of moral participation – and in particular moral agency – have focused on fully formed human actors. There has been some interest in the development of morality in humans, as well as interest in cultural differences when it comes to moral practices, commitments, and actions. However, until relatively recently, there has been little focus on the possibility that nonhuman animals have any role to play in morality, save being the objects of moral concern. Moreover, when nonhuman cases are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Anthropomorphism, anthropectomy, and the null hypothesis.Kristin Andrews & Brian Huss - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (5):711-729.
    We examine the claim that the methodology of psychology leads to a bias in animal cognition research against attributing “anthropomorphic” properties to animals . This charge is examined in light of a debate on the role of folk psychology between primatologists who emphasize similarities between humans and other apes, and those who emphasize differences. We argue that while in practice there is sometimes bias, either in the formulation of the null hypothesis or in the preference of Type-II errors over Type-I (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • Various Ways to Understand Other Minds: Towards a Pluralistic Approach to the Explanation of Social Understanding.Anika Fiebich & Max Coltheart - 2015 - Mind and Language 30 (3):235-258.
    In this article, we propose a pluralistic approach to the explanation of social understanding that integrates literature from social psychology with the theory of mind debate. Social understanding in everyday life is achieved in various ways. As a rule of thumb we propose that individuals make use of whatever procedure is cognitively least demanding to them in a given context. Aside from theory and simulation, associations of behaviors with familiar agents play a crucial role in social understanding. This role has (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  • How beliefs are like colors.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7889-7918.
    Double dissociations between perceivable colors and physical properties of colored objects have led many philosophers to endorse relationalist accounts of color. I argue that there are analogous double dissociations between attitudes of belief—the beliefs that people attribute to each other in everyday life—and intrinsic cognitive states of belief—the beliefs that some cognitive scientists posit as cogs in cognitive systems—pitched at every level of psychological explanation. These dissociations provide good reason to refrain from conflating attitudes of belief with intrinsic cognitive states (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Making Ranking Theory Useful for Psychology of Reasoning.Niels Skovgaard Olsen - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Konstanz
    An organizing theme of the dissertation is the issue of how to make philosophical theories useful for scientific purposes. An argument for the contention is presented that it doesn’t suffice merely to theoretically motivate one’s theories, and make them compatible with existing data, but that philosophers having this aim should ideally contribute to identifying unique and hard to vary predictions of their theories. This methodological recommendation is applied to the ranking-theoretic approach to conditionals, which emphasizes the epistemic relevance and the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Street smarts.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):161-180.
    A pluralistic approach to folk psychology must countenance the evaluative, regulatory, predictive, and explanatory roles played by attributions of intelligence in social practices across cultures. Building off of the work of the psychologist Robert Sternberg and the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Daniel Dennett, I argue that a relativistic interpretivism best accounts for the many varieties of intelligence that emerge from folk discourse. To be intelligent is to be comparatively good at solving intellectual problems that an interpreter deems worth solving.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Enculturating folk psychologists.Victoria McGeer - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1039-1063.
    This paper argues that our folk-psychological expertise is a special case of extended and enculturated cognition where we learn to regulate both our own and others’ thought and action in accord with a wide array of culturally shaped folk-psychological norms. The view has three noteworthy features: it challenges a common assumption that the foundational capacity at work in folk-psychological expertise is one of interpreting behaviour in mentalistic terms, arguing instead that successful mindreading is largely a consequence of successful mindshaping; it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • (1 other version)Regulation, Normativity and Folk Psychology.Victor Fernandez Castro - 2020 - Topoi 39 (1):57-67.
    Recently, several scholars have argued in support of the idea that folk psychology involves a primary capacity for regulating our mental states and patterns of behavior in accordance with a bunch of shared social norms and routines :259–281, 2015; Zawidzki, Philosophical Explorations 11:193–210, 2008; Zawidzki, Mindshaping: A new framework for understanding human social cognition, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2013). This regulative view shares with the classical Dennettian intentional stance its emphasis on the normative character of human socio-cognitive capacities. Given those similarities, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Communication before communicative intentions.Josh Armstrong - 2021 - Noûs 57 (1):26-50.
    This paper explores the significance of intelligent social behavior among non-human animals for philosophical theories of communication. Using the alarm call system of vervet monkeys as a case study, I argue that interpersonal communication (or what I call “minded communication”) can and does take place in the absence of the production and recognition of communicative intentions. More generally, I argue that evolutionary theory provides good reasons for maintaining that minded communication is both temporally and explanatorily prior to the use of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Folk psychology as a theory.Ian Martin Ravenscroft - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Many philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that our everyday or "folk" understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. That theory is widely called "folk psychology" (sometimes "commonsense" psychology). The terms in which folk psychology is couched are the familiar ones of "belief" and "desire", "hunger", "pain" and so forth. According to many theorists, folk psychology plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behavior of ourselves and others. However, the nature and status of folk (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • (1 other version)Animal consciousness.Colin Allen & Michael Trestman - 2005 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Self-Interpretation as First-Person Mindshaping: Implications for Confabulation Research.Derek Strijbos & Leon de Bruin - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (2):297-307.
    It is generally acknowledged that confabulation undermines the authority of self-attribution of mental states. But why? The mainstream answer is that confabulation misrepresents the actual state of one’s mind at some relevant time prior to the confabulatory response. This construal, we argue, rests on an understanding of self-attribution as first-person mindreading. Recent developments in the literature on folk psychology, however, suggest that mental state attribution also plays an important role in regulating or shaping future behaviour in conformity with normative expectations. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • What Is Minimally Cooperative Behavior?Kirk Ludwig - 2020 - In Anika Fiebich, Minimal Cooperation and Shared Agency. Springer. pp. 9-40.
    Cooperation admits of degrees. When factory workers stage a slowdown, they do not cease to cooperate with management in the production of goods altogether, but they are not fully cooperative either. Full cooperation implies that participants in a joint action are committed to rendering appropriate contributions as needed toward their joint end so as to bring it about, consistently with the type of action and the generally agreed upon constraints within which they work, as efficiently as they can, where their (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • (1 other version)Animal cognition.Kristin Andrews - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Entry for the Stanford Encylcopedia of Philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Science, sentience, and animal welfare.Robert C. Jones - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (1):1-30.
    I sketch briefly some of the more influential theories concerned with the moral status of nonhuman animals, highlighting their biological/physiological aspects. I then survey the most prominent empirical research on the physiological and cognitive capacities of nonhuman animals, focusing primarily on sentience, but looking also at a few other morally relevant capacities such as self-awareness, memory, and mindreading. Lastly, I discuss two examples of current animal welfare policy, namely, animals used in industrialized food production and in scientific research. I argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Empathy and morality in behaviour readers.Susana Monsó - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (5):671-690.
    It is tempting to assume that being a moral creature requires the capacity to attribute mental states to others, because a creature cannot be moral unless she is capable of comprehending how her actions can have an impact on the well-being of those around her. If this assumption were true, then mere behaviour readers could never qualify as moral, for they are incapable of conceptualising mental states and attributing them to others. In this paper, I argue against such an assumption (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Justification, Conversation, and Folk Psychology.Víctor Fernández Castro - 2019 - Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 34 (1):73-88.
    The aim of this paper is to offer a version of the so-called conversational hypothesis of the ontogenetic connection between language and mindreading (Harris 1996, 2005; Van Cleave and Gauker 2010; Hughes et al. 2006). After arguing against a particular way of understanding the hypothesis (the communicative view), I will start from the justificatory view in philosophy of social cognition (Andrews 2012; Hutto 2004; Zawidzki 2013) to make the case for the idea that the primary function of belief and desire (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Theories of understanding others: the need for a new account and the guiding role of the person model theory.Sabrina Coninx & Albert Newen - 2018 - Belgrade Philosophical Annual 31 (31):127-153.
    What would be an adequate theory of social understanding? In the last decade, the philosophical debate has focused on Theory Theory, Simulation Theory and Interaction Theory as the three possible candidates. In the following, we look carefully at each of these and describe its main advantages and disadvantages. Based on this critical analysis, we formulate the need for a new account of social understanding. We propose the Person Model Theory as an independent new account which has greater explanatory power compared (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • We read minds to shape relationships.Vivian Bohl - 2015 - Philosophical Psychology 28 (5):674-694.
    Mindreading is often considered to be the most important human social cognitive skill, and over the past three decades, several theories of the cognitive mechanisms for mindreading have been proposed. But why do we read minds? According to the standard view, we attribute mental states to individuals to predict and explain their behavior. I argue that the standard view is too general to capture the distinctive function of mindreading, and that it does not explain what motivates people to read minds. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • 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, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Normative practices of other animals.Sarah Vincent, Rebecca Ring & Kristin Andrews - 2018 - In Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones & Mark Timmons, Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 57-83.
    Traditionally, discussions of moral participation – and in particular moral agency – have focused on fully formed human actors. There has been some interest in the development of morality in humans, as well as interest in cultural differences when it comes to moral practices, commitments, and actions. However, until relatively recently, there has been little focus on the possibility that nonhuman animals have any role to play in morality, save being the objects of moral concern. Moreover, when nonhuman cases are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The impact of culture on mindreading.Jane Suilin Lavelle - 2019 - Synthese 198 (7):6351-6374.
    The role of culture in shaping folk psychology and mindreading has been neglected in the philosophical literature. This paper shows that there are significant cultural differences in how psychological states are understood and used by drawing on Spaulding’s recent distinction between the ‘goals’ and ‘methods’ of mindreading to argue that the relations between these methods vary across cultures; and arguing that differences in folk psychology cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the cognitive architecture that facilitates our understanding of psychological states. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • (1 other version)Social Cognition: a Normative Approach.Víctor Fernández Castro & Manuel Heras-Escribano - 2019 - Acta Analytica 35 (1):75-100.
    The main aim of this paper is to introduce an approach for understanding social cognition that we call the normative approach to social cognition. Such an approach, which results from a systematization of previous arguments and ideas from authors such as Ryle, Dewey, or Wittgenstein, is an alternative to the classic model and the direct social perception model. In section 2, we evaluate the virtues and flaws of these two models. In section 3, we introduce the normative approach, according to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • The personal and the subpersonal in the theory of mind debate.Kristina Musholt - 2018 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (2):305-324.
    It is a widely accepted assumption within the philosophy of mind and psychology that our ability for complex social interaction is based on the mastery of a common folk psychology, that is to say that social cognition consists in reasoning about the mental states of others in order to predict and explain their behavior. This, in turn, requires the possession of mental-state concepts, such as the concepts belief and desire. In recent years, this standard conception of social cognition has been (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Eliminativism Redux: Are Quotidian Pains Hurting Science?Nada Gligorov - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    Scientific inquiry has revealed that pain is a complex and heterogonous phenomenon that is neither localized to a circumscribed region in the brain nor realized by a unique neurological mechanism. This discovery has inspired the application of a new version of eliminativism–scientific eliminativism–to pain. Based on this view, pain is not a natural kind and should be eliminated from scientific theorizing. Scientific eliminativism applied to pain is purportedly distinct from eliminative materialism because the former does not require elimination of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Getting It Together: Psychological Unity and Deflationary Accounts of Animal Metacognition.Gary Comstock & William A. Bauer - 2018 - Acta Analytica 33 (4):431-451.
    Experimenters claim some nonhuman mammals have metacognition. If correct, the results indicate some animal minds are more complex than ordinarily presumed. However, some philosophers argue for a deflationary reading of metacognition experiments, suggesting that the results can be explained in first-order terms. We agree with the deflationary interpretation of the data but we argue that the metacognition research forces the need to recognize a heretofore underappreciated feature in the theory of animal minds, which we call Unity. The disparate mental states (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations