20.05 Wykład prof. Emmy Borg o mindreadingu

W środę,  20.05. o godz. 13:15 w sali 4 prof. Emma Borg wygłosi wykład pt:

Does understanding what someone is doing involve knowing what they’re thinking?

Abstrakt:

Say that you see someone reaching towards a bottle: how do you make sense of their movements or predict what they will do next? A standard view in philosophy – ‘Folk’ or ‘Common-sense’ Psychology – holds that understanding the actions of others involves attributing suitable mental states (including propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires) and reasoning about what actions those mental states should lead to in the target’s environment (you think, say, that the person wants something to drink and believes the bottle contains water). This kind of explanation works, according to Common-sense Psychology, because human actions are, typically, rational responses to the reasons (mental states) a person has: their reaching for the bottle was caused by their wanting a drink and that’s why attributing this mental state allows for successful prediction and explanation.

This picture faces two core challenges. First, that action understanding does not typically involve attribution of mental states. Second, that although action understanding does involve mental state attribution, this is not because those states are the causes of action. The former constitutes a deflationary challenge to Common-sense Psychology (holding that we understand other people’s actions via a less demanding route than mental state attribution). The second constitutes a non-realist challenge to Common-sense Psychology (denying the existence of causally relevant belief/desire states). My aim in this talk is to defend Common-sense Psychology from both these challenges. Responding to the deflationary challenge requires exploring some relevant experimental evidence from comparative and developmental studies and I will argue that the same evidence also turns out to be important when considering the (philosophically better known) non-realist challenge as well.