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February 27, 2007
New paper online: "From Folk Psychology to Folk Epistemology: The Status of Radical Simulation"
This is a copy of the extended version of a paper that was recently accepted for presentation at the Pitt/CMU Graduate Philosophy conference:
In this paper I consider one of the leading philosophic-psychological theories of "folk psychology," the simulation theory of Robert Gordon. According to Gordon, we attribute mental states to others not by representing those states or by applying the generalizations of theory, but by imagining ourselves in the position of a target to be interpreted and exploiting our own decision-making skills to make assertions which we then attribute to others as "beliefs." I describe two leading objections to Gordon's theory--the problem of pretense and the problem of adjustment--and show how a charitably interpreted Gordon could answer these objections. I conclude, however, that the best case for Gordon's position still runs into a new problem concerning the epistemological presuppositions of belief-attribution. These presuppositions are themselves explicit and theoretical, and seeing how they operate shows how simulation theory lacks the elegant simplicity it seemed at first to have.
Posted by Ben at February 27, 2007 10:10 PM