Simulating Minds The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading

by Goldman, Alvin I.

• ISBN13: 9780195369830
• ISBN10: 0195369831
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-05-02
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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

Table of Contents

Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Mentalizing	p. 3
Conceptualizing Simulation Theory	p. 23
The Rationality Theory	p. 53
The Child-Scientist Theory	p. 69
The Modularity Theory	p. 95
Simulation in Low-Level Mindreading	p. 113
High-Level Simulational Mindreading	p. 147
Ontogeny, Autism, Empathy, and Evolution	p. 192
Self-Attribution	p. 223
Concepts of Mental States	p. 258
The Fabric of Social Life: Mimicry, Fantasy, Fiction, and Morality	p. 276
References	p. 305
Author Index	p. 341
Subject Index	p. 353
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