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Understanding Other Minds from the Inside

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Jane Heal
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Extract

Can we understand other minds ‘from the inside’? What would this mean? There is an attraction which many have felt in the idea that creatures with minds, people (and perhaps animals), invite a kind of understanding which inanimate objects such as rocks, plants and machines, do not invite and that it is appropriate to seek to understand them ‘from the inside’. What I hope to do in this paper is to introduce and defend one version of the so-called ‘simulation’ approach to our grasp and use of psychological concepts, a version which gives central importance to the idea of shared rationality, and in so doing to tease out and defend one strand in the complex of ideas which finds expression in this mysterious phrase.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 43 , March 1998 , pp. 83 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1998

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References

1 Talk of persons ‘having a point of view’ and of there being such a thing as ‘what it is like to be that person’ are also parts of the same set of ideas. But I would like to stress that the whole issue of the existence of ‘qualia’ is not touched on at all in what follows.

2 For more on this see Davies, M., in this volume and also the two collections Folk Psychology and Mental Simulation, ed. Davies, M. and Stone, T. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)Google Scholar and Theories of Theories of Mind, ed. Carruthers, P. and Smith, P. K. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For a collection which includes many of the classic papers arguing for this view see Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. Block, N. (Cambridge MA., Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

4 Berlin, I., Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, Norman Kemp (London: Macmillan, 1953), p. 336Google Scholar; Dilthey, W., Selected Writings, Rickman, H. P. (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), esp. pp. 282–302Google Scholar.

5 These themes are all illustrated in the collections mentioned above in footnote 2.

6 Some simulation theories do postulate a natural tendency to ‘catch’ others' mental states. For example in normal infants we find very early a disposition to attend to what others attend to, to be frightened if adults in their company are frightened and the like. It is extremely plausible that we do have some such basic pattern of response and that this is central to our ability to understand other minds. The point I am emphasizing, however, is that this does not take us very far. How we build on it to arrive at interpretations in the more complex cases is something about which simulationists have some proposals but not fully worked out ideas. See the papers by Gordon, Goldman and Heal in the Davies and Stone collections.

7 See, e.g. the paper by Nichols et al. In Theories of Theories of Mind, ed. Carruthers and Smith.

8 Two excellent books, the second of which also provides references to much other recent work, are Cherniak, C., Minimal Rationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986)Google Scholar and Stein, E., Without Good Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.