According to the BD-model of mindreading, we primarily understand others in terms of beliefs and desires. In this article we review a number of objections against explicit versions of the BD-model, and discuss the prospects of using its implicit counterpart as an explanatory model of early emerging socio-cognitive abilities. Focusing on recent findings on so-called ‘implicit’ false belief understanding, we put forward a number of considerations against the adoption of an implicit BD-model. Finally, we explore a different way to make sense of implicit false belief understanding in terms of keeping track of affordances.
Spinal cord-injured (SCI) individuals, having a sympathetic nervous system lesion, experience hypotension during sitting and standing. Surprisingly, they experience few syncopal events. This suggests adaptations in cerebrovascular regulation. Therefore, changes in systemic circulation, cerebral blood flow, and oxygenation in eight SCI individuals were compared with eight able-bodied (AB) individuals. Systemic circulation was manipulated by lower body negative pressure at several levels down to -60 mmHg. At each level, we measured steady-state blood pressure, changes in cerebral blood velocity with transcranial Doppler, and cerebral oxygenation using near-infrared spectroscopy. We found that mean arterial pressure decreased significantly in SCI but not in AB individuals, in accordance with the sympathetic impairment in the SCI group. Cerebral blood flow velocity decreased during orthostatic stress in both groups, but this decrease was significantly greater in SCI individuals. Cerebral oxygenation decreased in both groups, with a tendency to a greater decrease in SCI individuals. Thus present data do not support an advantageous mechanism during orthostatic stress in the cerebrovascular regulation of SCI individuals.
It is generally acknowledged that confabulation undermines the authority of selfattribution of mental states. But why? The mainstream answer is that confabulation misrepresents the actual state of one's mind at some relevant time prior to the confabulatory response. This construal, we argue, rests on an understanding of self-attribution as first-person mindreading. Recent developments in the literature on folk psychology, however, suggest that mental state attribution also plays an important role in regulating or shaping future behaviour in conformity with normative expectations. We explore an analogue understanding of selfattribution of mental states in terms of first-person mindshaping. The main aim of this paper is to explore how this insight alters the implications of empirical confabulation studies on firstperson authority. We also indicate how this sheds new light on the phenomenon of confabulation itself.
Empirical evidence suggests that people often confabulate when they are asked about their choices or reasons for action. The implications of these studies are the topic of intense debate in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. An important question in this debate is whether the confabulation studies pose a serious threat to the possibility of self-knowledge. In this paper we are not primarily interested in the consequences of confabulation for self-knowledge. Instead, we focus on a different issue: what confabulation implies for the special status of self-attributions, i.e. first-person authority (FPA). In the first part of the paper, we propose that FPA is based on a capacity for self-regulation. Accordingly, FPA depends on the extent to which we are able to bridge the gap between our sayings and doings by aligning our actions with our avowed self-ascriptions and vice versa. FPA is withheld when we (systematically) fail at such realignment. In the second part of the paper, we contrast our view with the accounts of Scaife (Acta Anal 29:469-485, 2014) and Bortolotti (Rev Philos Psychol 9(2):227-249, 2018). We claim (contra Scaife) that the apparent fact that we cannot reliably distinguish, from a first-person perspective, when we are confabulating and when we are not, does not necessarily undermine FPA. We argue (contra Bortolotti) that a systematic failure to align our actions with our self-ascriptions and vice-versa is a genuine threat to FPA. In the last part of the paper, we introduce the concept of self-know-how-the know-how embodied in the way one is disposed to relate to oneself in making sense of oneself with or in the face of others-and briefly explored the importance of diminished or absent self-know-how in clinical cases.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.