The view (held, e.g., by Davidson) that the having of beliefs and desires presupposes the having of reflective capacities is sometimes supported by appealing to the idea that the concept of belief is a concept of a mental state which involves a normative aspect: beliefs can be “successful” or “unsuccessful” from the perspective of their possessors, and sometimes discarded in light of their “failure.” This naturally invites the idea that believers must be capable of reflecting on their beliefs. Desires presuppose (...) reflectivity if only in virtue of their essential linkage with beliefs. This paper suggests a sense in which mental states—including those of non-reflective creatures—can have such a normative aspect. On this suggestion, the intelligible relations that obtain between cognitive states and conative states open the door for the possibility of normativity without reflectivity. Due to these relations, a creature's beliefs can be successful or unsuccessful from its own perspective even without its conceiving of them. (shrink)

This essay sketches the potential implications of Wittgensteinian thought for conceptualizations of socalled fictive mental states, e.g. mental calculating, imagination, pretend play, as they are currently discussed in developmental psychology and philosophy of mind. In developmental psychology the young child's pretend play and make-belief are seen as a manifestation of the command of an underlying individualistic “theory of mind”. When saying “This banana is a telephone” the child's mind entertains simultaneously two mental representations, a primary or veridical representation about the (...) real properties of banana's and a pretend representation. It is the task of psychology to explain how this “double knowledge” does not result in conceptual chaos. Various sorts of internal mechanisms are postulated. In this essay it is argued that the threat of chaos is misconceived, and that the solutions are irrelevant. Following Wittgenstein's sparse remarks about the secondary sense of words, I argue that pretend language does not refer to underlying individual mental representations but to the child's creative transference of words used in one, primary, domain of application to another, secondary domain. The command and use of the secondary domain logically presupposes the command and use of the primary domain. Since the latter domain is necessarily public and social, fictive mental states cannot be dealt with purely individualistically as current mentalism assumes. (shrink)

Sherman presents a slightly revised definition of empathy, in which empathy is the cognitive ability to place oneself in the world of another, imagining all of the realities, feelings, and circumstances of that person in the context of their world.