Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of MindreadingPeople are "minded" creatures; we have thoughts, feelings and emotions. More intriguingly, we are "meta-minded" creatures: we ascribe mental states to ourselves and to others. How do we manage this without instruction in formal psychology? Alvin Goldman explores this question with the tools of philosophy, developmental and social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. His specific approach is the simulation theory, which elaborates the intuitive idea that we understand others by putting ourselves in their mental "shoes." An early developer of this approach, Goldman shows how to render it philosophically respectable and how recent empirical results in psychology and neuroscience support the hypothesis that the mind literally creates (or attempts to create) surrogates of other people's mental states in the process of mindreading. Goldman unveils a refined, hybrid version of simulationism that posits two distinct levels of simulative processing: low-level and high-level. From the discovery of mirror neurons to the study of imagery and imagination, the author finds that the mind engages in intensive "replicative" activity. Reading an emotion in someone's face activates the same emotion in the observer. Looking at someone else being touched activates tactile empathy in the observer's brain. Includes information on autism, child-scientist theory, egocentric bias, emotion, empathy, enactment imagination, face-based emotion recognition, false belief tasks, first-person mindreading, folk psychological laws, imagination, mimicry, mirroring, modularity theory, projection, introspection, , etc. |
Contents
Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Mentalizing | 3 |
Conceptualizing Simulation Theory | 23 |
The Rationality Theory | 53 |
Copyright | |
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4-year-olds action activity amygdala approach argue attributor autism Baron-Cohen behavior belief brain causal chapter child child-scientist cognitive cortex desire disgust distinctive domain dopamine E-imagination emotion recognition empathy evidence example experience explain FaBER facial expressions false-belief tasks fear first-person Fodor Fodorian folk psychology functional Gallese Gopnik Hebbian learning high-level imagery imagination impaired impute infants inference inhibitory control input intentional intentional stance interpretation introspection involves knowledge Leslie mechanism Meltzoff mental concepts mental simulation mental-state concepts metarepresentation method mindreading mirror neurons modularity module motor motor imagery neural Nichols and Stich normal object observed one's paired deficit perception philosophers predict pretend problem properties proposal propositional attitudes psychology question rationality reasoning representations role sense similar simulation heuristic simulation theory simulationist specific story subjects target theoretical theorists theory of mind theory-theorist thesis third-person attribution token ToMM visual Williams syndrome