Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading

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Oxford University Press, Jul 6, 2006 - Philosophy - 384 pages
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.

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Contents

Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Mentalizing
3
Conceptualizing Simulation Theory
23
The Rationality Theory
53
The ChildScientist Theory
69
The Modularity Theory
95
Simulation in LowLevel Mindreading
113
HighLevel Simulational Mindreading
147
Ontogeny Autism Empathy and Evolution
192
SelfAttribution
223
Concepts of Mental States
258
The Fabric of Social Life Mimicry Fantasy Fiction and Morality
276
References
305
Author Index
341
Subject Index
353
Copyright

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Page 17 - When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.
Page 17 - When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself.
Page 17 - When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation.
Page 280 - When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion.
Page 5 - I try to show that when we describe people as exercising qualities of mind, we are not referring to occult episodes of which their overt acts and utterances are effects; we are referring to those overt acts and utterances themselves.
Page 315 - Gallagher, HL. Happe, F, Brunswick, N., Fletcher, PC, Frith, U.. and Frith, CD 2000. Reading the mind in cartoons and stories: An fMRI study of Theory of Mind in verbal and nonverbal tasks.
Page 142 - When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.
Page 17 - No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.
Page 8 - Add also all the platitudes to the effect that one mental state falls under another — 'toothache is a kind of pain', and the like. Perhaps there are platitudes of other forms as well. Include only platitudes which are common knowledge among us — everyone knows them, everyone knows that everyone else knows them, and so on.

About the author (2006)

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

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