Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading

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Oxford University Press, 2006 M07 6 - 384 páginas
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 (or attempt to 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.
 

Contenido

Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Mentalizing
3
Conceptualizing Simulation Theory
23
The Rationality Theory
53
The ChildScientist Theory
69
The Modularity Theory
95
Simulation in LowLevel Mindreading
113
HighLevel Simulational Mindreading
147
Ontogeny Autism Empathy and Evolution
192
SelfAttribution
223
Concepts of Mental States
258
The Fabric of Social Life Mimicry Fantasy Fiction and Morality
276
References
305
Author Index
341
Subject Index
353
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Página 5 - I try to show that when we describe people as exercising qualities of mind, we are not referring to occult episodes of which their overt acts and utterances are effects; we are referring to those overt acts and utterances themselves.
Página 8 - Add also all the platitudes to the effect that one mental state falls under another — 'toothache is a kind of pain', and the like. Perhaps there are platitudes of other forms as well. Include only platitudes which are common knowledge among us — everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on.

Acerca del autor (2006)

Alvin I. Goldman is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

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