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Consider Ralph. Ralph is strolling along the beach where he sees a man wearing a brown hat, black sunglasses and a trench coat. He has seen this man several times before in town and his strange and secretive behaviour has made Ralph suspicious. Since the man, let’s call him Ortcutt, always tries to cover his face and turns around all the time to see if he is being followed etc., Ralph has come to believe that Ortcutt might be a spy. Since Ralph finds this exciting, he follows him. Now, Ortcutt is in fact a spy and when he turns around and notices Ralph, he starts walking faster, takes his cell phone out of his pocket and makes all kinds of wild gestures while talking to someone. Ralph, in turn, comes to believe that the man in the brown hat believes that Ralph has recognized him as a spy and that his cover has been blown. Only now does it occur to Ralph that it might not have been such a good idea to show so much interest in the man and he runs away. How does Ralph acquire this belief about what Ortcutt might be thinking? This question is an instance of the more general question of how we understand others, how we come to know what they believe and desire or intend to do, what they feel and perceive. Typically, when we think about what others are (or might be) thinking, we represent them as having mental states (processes or events) like beliefs, desires, emotions and so on. This mental capacity of ours is sometimes called mentalizing or mindreading and it has been among the most-discussed topics in recent philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This research area has been transformed profoundly by recent developments in the cognitive neurosciences and developmental psychology. In the last decade, there has been an intensive investigation into the neural mechanisms underlying the capacities associated with mindreading and we have also learned a lot about some of the relevant capacities displayed by young children at various ages. Thus, research in this field has become essentially interdisciplinary. But despite the scientific progress in the empirical disciplines, there is still no consensus about how we should best understand and conceptualize these capacities subsumed under the name of mindreading. What exactly do we do when we try to make sense of other people by ascribing mental states like beliefs and desires to them?
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Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
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