Unknown Minds, Shared Norms: Where Do Standards for Attributing Mental States and Agency Come From?

These are slides and notes based on work in progress for a talk at the Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience (PPN) Research Seminar, University of Glasgow on September 28, 2026.

Abstract

We often agree, confidently, on which things are agents, and on what someone feels, knows or is doing. ‘Of course they knew that! How could they not?’ Yet such judgements vary between individuals, cultures and experts. How do we often reach confident agreement locally while outsiders make equally confident but inconsistent attributions?

Ordinary mindreading is theoretically underdetermined by observation and lacks universal rules for accommodating irrationality. Attributions therefore depend on background standards. To understand both agreement and variation, we need to know where these standards come from.

My proposal starts from a recent conjecture: mindreading is asynchronous coordination. On this conjecture, success in mindreading involves generating and selecting attributions which others would recognise as plausible and appropriate. Acquiring this skill requires coordinating with others; but, once learned, it can be exercised alone. This conjecture, if true, might explain small-scale, short-term agreement and variation.

An observation about social norms suggests a way to extend this proposal. Explicit attitudes sometimes decouple from the behaviours that uphold norm-like patterns in our activities. Such norm-like patterns can acquire a life of their own, and may later become linked to new explicit attitudes. If mindreading standards can be upheld in this way, they need not be things we know (and could even be inconsistent with our beliefs). Instead, the standards that make minds intelligible are implicitly maintained, variable—and to us as researchers, largely unknown.