This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

People are minded creatures; we have thoughts, feelings and emotions. More intriguingly, we grasp our own mental states, and conduct the business of ascribing them to ourselves and others without instruction in formal psychology. How do we do this? And what are the dimensions of our grasp of the mental realm? In this book, Alvin I. Goldman explores these questions with the tools of philosophy, developmental psychology, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He refines an approach called simulation theory, which starts (...) from the familiar idea that we understand others by putting ourselves in their mental shoes. Can this intuitive idea be rendered precise in a philosophically respectable manner, without allowing simulation to collapse into theorizing? Given a suitable definition, do empirical results support the notion that minds literally create surrogates of other peoples mental states in the process of mindreading? Goldman amasses a surprising array of evidence from psychology and neuroscience that supports this hypothesis. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This chapter considers how imagination generates emotion. ‘Supposition-imagination’ (S-imagination) is distinguished from ‘enactment-imagination’ (E-imagination). The former kind of imagination involves entertaining or supposing various hypothetical scenarios; with the latter kind of imagination, one tries to create a kind of facsimile of a mental state. Thus, one might try to create a perception-like state as in visual imagination or motoric imagination. It is argued that this much richer form of imagination generates typical emotional reactions to fiction. Emotional reactions to fiction are (...) generated in several different ways, including a process in which we E-imagine being a hypothetical reader or observer of fact. (shrink)

Attribuiamo l’esercizio dell’immaginazione a ogni genere di persona, in ogni tipo di circostanza e per ogni sorta di ragione. Le ipotesi e gli esperimenti men- tali dello scienziato, le visioni del folle, le fantasie quotidiane, le costruzioni del metafisico, il romanzo – sia per quanto riguarda l’autore che per quanto riguar- da il lettore –: in ognuno di questi casi riconosciamo di solito l’attività dell’im- maginazione. Così, tutto sembra indicare che l’unità dell’immaginazione sia qualcosa di davvero labile, se non addirittura (...) un’illusione. (shrink)

You’re imagining, in the course of a different game of make-believe, that you’re a bank robber. You don’t believe that you’re a bank robber. You are moved to point your finger, gun-wise, at the person pretending to be the bank teller and say, “Stick ‘em up! This is a robbery!”.