Description
Book SynopsisWe all take it for granted that we are typically in a position to know about the thoughts and feelings of other people. But we might naturally wonder how we acquire this kind of knowledge. Knowing Other Minds brings together ten original chapters, written by internationally renowned researchers, on questions that arise from our everyday social interaction with others. Can we have direct perceptual knowledge of another person''s thoughts? How do we acquire general conceptions of mental states? What lessons can be drawn from experimental work in developmental psychology? Are there fundamental differences between the ways in which we acquire knowledge of our own minds and the ways in which we acquire knowledge of someone else''s mind? What sort of cognitive processing underlies our everyday social understanding? How should we best think of the relationship between our complex social life and moral value? The chapters in this volume convey a variety of different perspectives and make a number of novel contributions to the existing literature on these questions, thereby opening up new avenues of inquiry. Furthermore, they illustrate how questions in philosophy and questions from empirical cognitive science overlap and mutually inform one another.
Trade ReviewAll of the contributions are of uniformly high quality . . . it's clear that any reader interested in learning about the current state of play in the other minds debate will benefit from reading the volume. * Amy Kind, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
Table of Contents1: Matthew Parrott: Enquiries Concerning the Minds of Others 2: Paul Snowdon: The Problem of Other Minds, Some Preliminaries 3: Åsa Wikforss: Knowledge, Belief, and The Asymmetry Thesis 4: Shaun Gallagher and Anika Fiebich: Being Pluralist About Understanding Others: Contexts and Communicative Practices 5: Pierre Jacob: Challenging the Two-Systems Model of Mindreading 6: Anita Avramides: Perception, Reliability, and Other Minds 7: Søren Overgaard: Embodiment and Social Perception 8: Anil Gomes: Perception, Evidence, and Our Expressive Knowledge of Others Minds 9: Will E. S. McNeill: Expressions, Looks, and Others Minds 10: Jane Heal: Other Minds, Facts, and Values
