What is mindreading?

Spaulding, Shannon

doi:10.1002/wcs.1523

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…In addition, while some (mostly critics) have conceived of ToM as presupposing a mastery of a theory-like body of knowledge (e.g., Gallagher, 2001), one need not be committed to this view. Some, for example, take 'ToM' to be whatever mechanism it is that enables us to track and reason in light of others' mental states, whether this is theory-like or not (e.g., Spaulding, 2020). As a result, when thinking about rival accounts of the origins of ToM, we should be aware that different authors may not always be giving an account of quite the same thing.…”

Section: The Cultural Evolution Of Mindreadingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social inheritance and the social mind: Introduction to the Synthese topical collection The Cultural Evolution of Human Social Cognition

Moore

Brown

2022

Synthese

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In this introduction to the Synthese SI: The Cultural Evolution of Human Social Cognition, we introduce some basic theoretical terms that will help readers to navigate the volume. Subsequently we describe the papers that make up the volume and draw attention to points of agreement and disagreement between the authors. We also identify a number of outstanding issues for the field of cultural evolution research. The papers in the volume can be divided into three sections: (1) The Cultural Evolution of Mindreading, (2) The Cultural Evolution of Ethics and Aesthetics, and (3) Methodological Challenges. Keywords Cultural evolution • Social cognition • Theory of mind • Human evolution • Methodological challenges • Aesthetics • EthicsQuestions about the origins of the human mind have a long philosophical history. Debates about whether human cognitive powers are innate or learned can be traced back to Plato's Meno, are present in disagreements between Locke and Leibniz, and were a central bone of contention in analytic philosophers' discussions of the representational mind in the second half of the 20th century. In more recent years, questions about whether features of the mind are innate have been supplemented with a further set of questions about the processes through which learned aspects of mental life develop during ontogeny, and about how culturally acquired traits arose in human history. Building on work by Dawkins (1976), Boyd (1985, 2005), and

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Section: The Cultural Evolution Of Mindreadingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social inheritance and the social mind: Introduction to the Synthese topical collection The Cultural Evolution of Human Social Cognition

Moore

Brown

2022

Synthese

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“…These two features combined illustrate that irony comprehension crucially involves a form of reasoning about mental states that allows a comprehender to interpret a speaker's behavior. Such reasoning generally falls under the umbrella term of mindreading (Nichols & Stich, 2003;Spaulding, 2020) or Theory of Mind (Baron- Cohen et al, 1985).…”

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When irony is faster than its literal control: The role of mindreading during irony comprehension.

Ronderos¹,

Tomlinson²,

Noveck³

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Irony is a heavily context-dependent pragmatic phenomenon. But what is it about context that facilitates or blocks irony comprehension? Based on the echoic account, we suggest that a context facilitates irony comprehension when it makes manifest a speaker's intentions and attitude, i.e., when a context makes it easy for participants to engage their mindreading abilities. In two pre-registered self-paced reading experiments, we investigated the comprehension of sentences in English that could be understood as ironic or literal, according to the story frame that participants read leading to the target sentence. In Experiment 1, we found that when the story frames prevent participants from anticipating the speaker's intention, literal readings of critical sentences are-not surprisingly-faster than ironic ones. Importantly, when the story frames gave access to the speaker's intentions, we find cases in which ironic readings are actually faster than literal ones, resulting in a novel finding for the irony comprehension literature. Further, when the speaker was described as having a sincere attitude towards their utterance, participants tended to understand the utterances literally. They tended to understand them ironically when it was not clear what the speaker's attitude was. In Experiment 2 we investigated whether the findings of Experiment 1 could be linked to individual differences in participants' mindreading abilities. We found that participants who scored higher on a standard Theory of Mind task (the "Reading the mind in the Eyes" task) were significantly more likely to derive ironic-but not literal-interpretations. We see these results as supporting the echoic account of irony comprehension. This work discusses the relevance of our findings to the long-standing debate on the processing effort of ironic versus literal sentences.

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“…For an argument that empathy in general can compromise the empathizer's authenticity, despite its moral and epistemic benefits, see Paul (2021). 14 For helpful recent discussion of some of these myriad strategies in mindreading, see Spaulding (2018Spaulding ( , 2020.…”

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Hot-cold empathy gaps and the grounds of authenticity

Helton,

2023

Synthese

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Hot-cold empathy gaps are a pervasive phenomena wherein one's predictions about others skew 'in the direction' of one's own current visceral states. For instance, when one predicts how hungry someone else is, one's prediction will tend to reflect one's own current hunger state. These gaps also obtain intrapersonally, when one attempts to predict what one oneself would do at a different time. In this paper, we do three things: First, we draw on empirical evidence to argue that so-called hotcold empathy gaps arise when one projects one's own current state into a simulation about another. Second, we argue that this process does not typically confer knowledge, even when the predictions it produces happen to be accurate. Third, we suggest that these results can be used to develop a challenge for L.A. Paul's view that authentic action sometimes requires a certain kind of experience-based knowledge of one's own values and of how these values relate to relevant outcomes. We then sketch an alternative view of the epistemic grounds of authenticity, one on which authenticity requires a kind of understanding. The relevant form of understanding can be achieved by knowledge from first-personal experience but can also be achieved elsewise, such as through testimony from a close friend about what one values.

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What is mindreading?

Cited by 8 publications

References 79 publications

Social inheritance and the social mind: Introduction to the Synthese topical collection The Cultural Evolution of Human Social Cognition

Social inheritance and the social mind: Introduction to the Synthese topical collection The Cultural Evolution of Human Social Cognition

When irony is faster than its literal control: The role of mindreading during irony comprehension.

Hot-cold empathy gaps and the grounds of authenticity

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