Knowing One’s Own Mind
About: This article is published in The American Philosophical Association Centennial Series.The article was published on 2013-01-01. It has received 682 citations till now.
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TL;DR: A broad survey of the key abilities, processes, and ways in which to relate these to data from cognitive neuroscience is provided.
Abstract: Social cognition in humans is distinguished by psychological processes that allow us to make inferences about what is going on inside other people—their intentions, feelings, and thoughts. Some of these processes likely account for aspects of human social behavior that are unique, such as our culture and civilization. Most schemes divide social information processing into those processes that are relatively automatic and driven by the stimuli, versus those that are more deliberative and controlled, and sensitive to context and strategy. These distinctions are reflected in the neural structures that underlie social cognition, where there is a recent wealth of data primarily from functional neuroimaging. Here I provide a broad survey of the key abilities, processes, and ways in which to relate these to data from cognitive neuroscience.
1,426 citations
Cites background from "Knowing One’s Own Mind"
...…been taken up by some philosophers who emphasize social communication and learning as an essential ingredient to giving content to mental states (Davidson 1987), by neuroscience theories of consciousness that argue sensory consciousness requires relay of information to the prefrontal cortex for…...
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Book•
22 Sep 2009TL;DR: The first edition of Place and Experience as mentioned in this paper established Jeff Malpas as one of the leading philosophers and thinkers of place and space and provided a creative and refreshing alternative to prevailing post-structuralist and post-modern theories of place.
Abstract: The first edition of Place and Experience established Jeff Malpas as one of the leading philosophers and thinkers of place and space and provided a creative and refreshing alternative to prevailing post-structuralist and postmodern theories of place. It is a foundational and ground-breaking book in its attempt to lay out a sustained and rigorous account of place and its significance. The main argument of Place and Experience has three strands: first, that human being is inextricably bound to place; second, that place encompasses subjectivity and objectivity, being reducible to neither but foundational to both; and third that place, which is distinct from, but also related to space and time, is methodologically and ontologically fundamental. The development of this argument involves considerations concerning the nature of place and its relation to space and time; the character of that mode of philosophical investigation that is oriented to place and that is referred to as ‘philosophical topography’; the nature of subjectivity and objectivity as inter-related concepts that also connect with intersubjectivity; and the way place is tied to memory, identity, and the self. Malpas draws on a rich array of writers and philosophers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Proust, Heidegger and Donald Davidson. This second edition is revised throughout, including a new chapter on place and technological modernity, especially the seeming loss of place in the contemporary world, and a new Foreword by Edward Casey. It also includes a new set of additional features, such as illustrations, annotated further reading, and a glossary, which make this second edition more useful to teachers and students alike.
715 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that a number of possible mechanisms, including complementary activation of attachment and mentalisation, the disruptive effect of maltreatment on parent-child communication, the biobehavioural overlap of cues for learning and cues for attachment, may have a role in ensuring that the quality of relationship with the caregiver influences the development of the child's experience of thoughts and feelings.
Abstract: Developmental psychology and psychopathology has in the past been more concerned with the quality of self-representation than with the development of the subjective agency which underpins our experience of feeling, thought and action, a key function of mentalisation. This review begins by contrasting a Cartesian view of pre-wired introspective subjectivity with a constructionist model based on the assumption of an innate contingency detector which orients the infant towards aspects of the social world that react congruently and in a specifically cued informative manner that expresses and facilitates the assimilation of cultural knowledge. Research on the neural mechanisms associated with mentalisation and social influences on its development are reviewed. It is suggested that the infant focuses on the attachment figure as a source of reliable information about the world. The construction of the sense of a subjective self is then an aspect of acquiring knowledge about the world through the caregiver's pedagogical communicative displays which in this context focuses on the child's thoughts and feelings. We argue that a number of possible mechanisms, including complementary activation of attachment and mentalisation, the disruptive effect of maltreatment on parent-child communication, the biobehavioural overlap of cues for learning and cues for attachment, may have a role in ensuring that the quality of relationship with the caregiver influences the development of the child's experience of thoughts and feelings.
514 citations
Cites background from "Knowing One’s Own Mind"
...The sharing of minds established at this early stage is also (implicitly or explicitly) considered critical by many philosophers of mind (Cavell, 1994; Davidson, 1987; Wittgenstein, 1969)....
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...…humans to infer, attribute and represent the intentional mental states of others – a capacity that can clearly extend to generate representations of one’s own mind; 3) a capacity to predict, explain, and justify the actions of others by inferring the intentional mental states that cause them....
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TL;DR: In this paper, a modified functionalist model for mental states is proposed, which can appeal to qualitative (phenomenological) properties, providing a model that need not refer to functional (causal-relational) properties at all.
Abstract: Folk psychology, the naive understanding of mental state concepts, requires a model of how people ascribe mental states to themselves. Competent speakers associate a distinctive memory representation (a category representation, CR) with each mentalistic word in their lexicon. A decision to ascribe such a word to oneself depends on matching to the CR an instance representation (IR) of one's current state. As in visual object recognition, evidence about a CR's content includes the IRs that are or are not available to trigger a match. This poses serious problems for functionalism, the theory-of-mind approach to the meaning of mental terms. A simple functionalist model is inadequate because (1) the relational and subjunctive (what would have happened) information it requires concerning target states is not generally available and (2) it could lead to combinatorial explosion. A modified functionalist model can appeal to qualitative (phenomenological) properties, but the earlier problems still reappear. Qualitative properties are important for sensations, propositional attitudes, and their contents, providing a model that need not refer to functional (causal-relational) properties at all. The introspectionist character of the proposed model does not imply that ascribing mental states to oneself is infallible or complete; nor is the model refuted by empirical research on introspective reports. Empirical research on “theory of mind” does not support any strict version of functionalism but only an understanding of mentalistic words that may depend on phenomenological or experiential qualities.
339 citations
Cites background from "Knowing One’s Own Mind"
...Solutions to this apparent puzzle are proposed by Davidson (1987) and Burge (1988); but the former is less than transparent and the latter is convincingly shown by Boghossian (1989) to be inadequate....
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TL;DR: The authors criticizes Bourdieu's and Giddens's overintellectualizing accounts of human activity on the basis of Wittgenstein's insights into practical under standing, and criticizes their over-intellectualization of human activities.
Abstract: This article criticizes Bourdieu's and Giddens's overintellectualizing accounts of human activity on the basis of Wittgenstein's insights into practical under standing. Part 1 describes these two t...
319 citations
Cites background from "Knowing One’s Own Mind"
...As these &dquo;that&dquo; clauses suggest, conditions of life are states of affairs that hold a person, not discrete entities (for other construals of &dquo;mental states&dquo; as nondiscrete, see Davidson 1987 and Dennett 1987)....
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