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Humans understand the mental states of others by using th... — Carmelics

Home/Consciousness & Mind

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Humans understand the mental states of others by using their own mental systems to simulate the thoughts and decisions of those others.

Consciousness & Mind

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1 reason for

2 reasons against

Reasons For

1 perspective

Reason for

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1.We have a capacity to run our own inferential and decision-making systems offline.
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2.Running these systems offline allows us to model or simulate another person's reasoning.
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Reasons Against

2 perspectives

Reason against 1 of 2

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1.Folk psychological understanding of others proceeds primarily via inference to theoretical generalizations about behavior, not simulation (Fodor, 1987).
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2.If simulation were the primary mechanism, we would expect systematic failures when simulating radically different minds, yet theory-like generalizations succeed cross-culturally.
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Reason against 2 of 2

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1.Simulation theory presupposes we already know which mental states to feed as inputs, requiring prior theoretical knowledge of others' minds (Stich & Nichols, 1992).
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2.This bootstrapping problem entails that simulation is derivative of, not prior to, theoretical understanding of mental state categories.
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Consciousness & Mind

Related

Folk psychological understanding of others proceeds primarily via inference to t...If simulation were the primary mechanism, we would expect systematic failures wh...Running these systems offline allows us to model or simulate another person's re...Simulation theory presupposes we already know which mental states to feed as inp...

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This bootstrapping problem entails that simulation is derivative of, not prior t...We have a capacity to run our own inferential and decision-making systems offlin...

Similar

A human being can mentally simulate what follows from having another h...86%Humans understand the mental states of others by drawing on a tacit th...86%Strong mental states make us most aware of our own mental activity81%We possess a (perhaps tacit) theory of others' mental states and their...81%

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AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid

SEP: aesthetics-cogsci

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Wollheim (1980) said that what is distinctive about pictorial representation is its capacity to generate a certain kind of experience: the experience of “seeing the subject in the picture”. For many this has seemed to capture something deeply important about the nature of depictive representation, though Wollheim’s specific claims about it are disputed. What exactly is seeing-in? One subsequent suggestion has been that we see something, X, in a picture when we experience a resemblance between th

Extraction notes

Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 3 (1 for, 2 against)
Edits: 1 edit