ABSTRACT

In How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition, Shannon Spaulding develops a novel account of mindreading with pessimistic implications for mindreading accuracy: according to Spaulding, mistakes in mentalizing are much more common than traditional theories of mindreading commonly assume. In this commentary, I push against Spaulding’s pessimism from two directions. First, I argue that a number of the heuristic mindreading strategies that Spaulding views as especially prone to error might actually be quite reliable in practice. Second, I argue that current methods for measuring mindreading performance are not well-suited for the task of determining whether our mental-state attributions are generally accurate. I conclude that any claims about the accuracy or inaccuracy of mindreading are currently unjustified.

摘要

香农·斯波丁（Shannon Spaulding）在《我们如何理解他人：哲学和社会认知》中提出了一种新的记念方法，对记念方法的准确性产生了悲观的暗示：据斯帕丁说，在心理化方面的错误比通常认为的传统阅读理论要普遍得多。在这篇评论中，我从两个方向反对Spaulding的悲观主义。首先，我认为Spaulding认为特别容易出错的许多启发式思维阅读策略实际上在实践中可能是相当可靠的。其次，我认为目前衡量心智表现的方法并不适合确定我们的心理状态归因通常是否准确的任务。我得出的结论是，任何关于思维阅读的准确性或不准确性的主张目前都是不合理的。