The Myth of Mindreading
Date given: Friday, 11th February 2022
Handout for
all of The Myth of Mindreading as pdf.
(This has the same content as the web version you are reading here.)
Notes
This is a talk at the
Communicative Mind Virtual Workshop
organized by Richard Moore’s Communicative Mind group
at the University of Warwick.
Abstract
The myth is that we as researchers can rely on a shared
understanding of what we are talking about when we talk about
intentional action or about mental states like knowledge,
intention, desire, anger, surprise and the like.
This is a myth of mindreading because on any standard view,
the most sophisticated forms of everyday mindreading
involve attributing these mental states.
In this talk
I will argue that the myth is untrue.
I also will explore how
recognizing that we lack a shared understanding could
changing the way we study mindreading.
The myth of mindreading is a practical problem facing
developmental, comparative and philosophical theories of mindreading.
As will be illustrated,
when researchers appear to disagree about
understanding knowledge or intention (for example),
there seems to be no way of determining
whether they are making incompatible claims about a single notion of knowledge or intention,
or whether they are making compatible claims about different notions.
How can work around our lack of a shared understanding of
intentional action, knowledge, and the rest?
We should first renounce folk psychology.
Taking inspiration from available operationalizations,
we should then borrow or construct a variety of
incommensurable (and false) theories about minds and actions.
Using these theories to anchor our understanding
will enable us to apply the method of signature limits
to generate testable predictions about
what mindreaders understand of minds and actions.
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