Mindreading beyond belief: A more comprehensive conception of how we understand others

Abstract

Traditional theories of mindreading tend to focus exclusively on attributing beliefs and desires to other agents.The literature emphasizes belief attribution in particular, with numerous debates over when children develop the concept of belief, how neurotypical adult humans attribute beliefs to others, whether non-human animals have the concept of belief, etc. I describe a growing school of thought that the heavy focus on belief leaves traditional theories of mindreading unable to account for the complexity, diversity, and messiness of ordinary social interactions. I present a few broader, more comprehensive conceptions of mindreading that take into account how stereotypes, character trait inferences, social biases, and more influence how we understand and interact with others. These broader conceptions of mindreading promise to be more empirically adequate and have fruitful application to various debates in philosophy and cognitive science. | INTRODUCTIONIn our ordinary lives, we regularly think about what others are thinking and doing. I try to figure out why my mother never picks up on my sometimes not-so-subtle signals that I need to work rather than chat, I wonder what my daughter's preschool teacher thinks about her, or I think about how a friend will handle an impending divorce. We think about others ' beliefs, desires, intentions, preferences, character traits, values, etc. all the time in part because we find this intrinsically interesting but also because we find this useful for understanding what others' will do and perhaps how we can manipulate the situation for our own purposes. Our ordinary ways of understanding what others think and do is called folk psychology. The specific practice of attributing mental states to others in order to explain ---

Conceptual Analysis and Empirical Observations of Animal Minds

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You are just being emotional! Testimonial injustice and folk-psychological attributions

“…In a recent book, Shannon Spaulding (2018a) makes the abovementioned connection between (pluralistic) folk psychological attributions and epistemic injustice, and incorporates this into a comprehensive account of mindreading called Model Theory. In a nutshell, Model Theory posits that folk psychology works by using models, i.e., simple representations of the general structure and properties of other minds.…”