Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-awareness and Understanding Other Minds (Oxford

Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-Awareness, and Understanding Other Minds (Oxford Cognitive Science Series) [Shaun Nichols, Stephen.
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Mindreading : an integrated account of pretence, self-awareness, and understanding other minds

Mindreading is another trailblazing volume in the prestigious interdisciplinary Oxford Cognitive Science series. Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Mindreading , please sign up. Lists with This Book.

This book is not yet featured on Listopia. At the same time, Dr. Paul Ekman struggles with the implications of his discovery of micro-expressions and the emotions they reveal see Nonverbal Messages and Telling Lies. See The Righteous Mind. Click here to read the full review. Paul Romine rated it it was ok Feb 11, Kate Devitt rated it it was amazing Jun 01, Fenja rated it liked it Aug 02, Ken Marable rated it really liked it May 28, Christopher rated it really liked it Jun 27, Jessica rated it it was amazing Nov 02, Karl Georg rated it really liked it Aug 16, Sebastian Marincolo rated it really liked it Nov 24, Les Johnson rated it did not like it Feb 10, Catalina rated it really liked it Sep 09, Pickachoo rated it liked it Dec 19, Adam Gilreath rated it it was amazing Nov 16, They defend the view that there are two or more distinct self-monitoring mechanisms, one at least for monitoring and providing self-knowledge of our own experiential states, and one for monitoring and providing self-knowledge of our own propositional attitudes.

These mechanisms are held to be distinct from one another, and also from the mind-reading system that deals with the mental states of other people. But where the previous chapters had been grounded in a rich and well-established body of experimental data, the chapter on self-awareness places considerable reliance on just a few unreplicated experimental studies.

This is unfortunate, although there is, nevertheless, much that is of value in the ensuing discussion. A number of us have defended a hybrid view, according to which our knowledge of our own experiences is semi-immediate and recognitional, whereas our knowledge of our own propositional attitudes is theoretical.

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And the first part of this view is one to which Nichols and Stich themselves should have been led, since the existence of a separate perception-monitoring mechanism is wholly unnecessary, even on their own account. To see this, one just has to notice that the overall mind-reading faculty as described in their previous chapter must be capable of receiving perceptual inputs.

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More specifically, the perception-detection mechanism must receive such inputs. It will need to receive a percept representing the relations that obtain between the target subject and its environment, for example, on which it will need to effect various computations e.

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The existence of a separate perception-self-monitoring mechanism is wholly unnecessary. Some of us who have written on this topic have talked, in this connection, about recognitional applications of theoretically embedded concepts. What we would have here is an information-rich mechanism for ascribing mental states to other people, that is also capable of self-ascribing experiences on the basis of the perceptual states that are available to it as input.

For since the evidence suggests that these phenomena utilize the very same mechanisms as do vision and speech-perception respectively, then they, too, should be available as inputs to the mind-reading faculty.

Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-Awareness, and Understanding Other Minds

For example, on such a view it should come as no surprise that high-functioning autistic subjects are able to solve certain meta-memory tasks, describing how they set about remembering a sequence of numbers. There is no support for a separate self-monitoring mechanism to be had here. It is important to note that verbalization of a propositional attitude whether overtly or in inner speech is unlikely to require higher-order knowledge that one has that attitude.

Rather, the occurrent belief that today is Monday just has to be taken as input by the language faculty and encoded into a suitable linguistic format. One of the main arguments that Nichols and Stich offer in support of their propositional self-monitoring mechanism, is that it would be trivially easy to implement: The everyday capacity to understand the mind, or 'mindreading', plays an enormous role in our ordinary lives. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich provide a detailed and integrated account of the intricate web of mental components underlying this fascinating and multifarious skill.


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The imagination, they argue, is essential to understanding others, and there are special cognitive mechanisms for understanding oneself. The account that emerges has broad implications for longstanding philosophical debates over the status of folk psychology.

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Mindreading is another trailblazing volume in the prestigious interdisciplinary Oxford Cognitive Science series. A Cognitive Theory of Pretence 3.


  • Mindreading - Paperback - Shaun Nichols; Stephen P. Stich - Oxford University Press.
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A Theory of Third-Person Mindreading 4. Reading One's Own Mind 5. Objections, Replies, and Philosophical Implications References.