1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
Summary
Much philosophy of mind in the analytic tradition, as practised in the last few decades, has been in the grip of a mistaken conception of the nature of psychological judgements and concepts. In its haste to repudiate metaphysical dualism about the mind it has been tempted to assume too much similarity between psychological concepts and those of natural science. It has overlooked the centrality of the fact that other people are not just objects we may try to predict and control but fellow creatures with whom we enter into dialogue and with whom we make joint decisions. Important ramifications of these facts, for example what they show about how we arrive at our views about others' thoughts, about the logical shape of psychological concepts and about the nature of persons, have thus gone missing in much recent philosophy of mind. These, in brief, are the themes of this collection of essays. The book is aimed primarily at philosophers, but I hope that philosophically minded colleagues in psychology and other human sciences may find something of interest here too.
We have thoughts about others' thoughts. We have views about what others perceive, think, feel, care about or intend. And where we are ignorant about such things we often try to find out more, since knowing these kinds of things about each other is important to us for many reasons.
These facts suggest many questions, among them these three:
How do we arrive at such psychological judgements about others?
How should we explain psychological concepts and what it is to possess them?
[…]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mind, Reason and ImaginationSelected Essays in Philosophy of Mind and Language, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
- 1
- Cited by