Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading [Paperback]

People are minded creatures; we have thoughts, feelings and emotions. More intriguingly, we grasp our own mental states, and conduct the business of ascribing them to ourselves and others without instruction in formal psychology. How do we do this? And what are the dimensions of our grasp of the mental realm? In this book, Alvin I. Goldman explores these questions with the tools of philosophy, developmental psychology, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He refines an approach called simulation theory, which starts from the familiar idea that we understand others by putting ourselves in their mental shoes. Can this intuitive idea be rendered precise in a philosophically respectable manner, without allowing simulation to collapse into theorizing? Given a suitable definition, do empirical results support the notion that minds literally create (or attempt to create) surrogates of other peoples mental states in the process of mindreading? Goldman amasses a surprising array of evidence from psychology and neuroscience that supports this hypothesis.PART I:INTERNALISM, THE A PRIORI, AND EPISTEMIC VIRTUE1. Internalism Exposed2. A Priori Warrant and Naturalistic Epistemology3. The Unity of the Epistemic VirtuesPART II: INTUITION, INTROSPECTION, AND CONSCIOUSNESS4. Philosophical Theory and Intuitional Evidence (with Joel Pust)5. Science, Publicity, and Consciousness6. Can Science Know When You're Conscious?PART III: SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY7. Experts: Which Ones Should you Trust?8. Social Routes to Belief and Knowledge9. What is Social Epistemology? A Smorgasbord of ProjectsAlvin I. Goldman is Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Simulating Mindsis an impressive achievement. It combines rich scholarship with clear, lively, and original argument to give us by far the best and most comprehensive defense of the simulation theory perspective that has been produced to datl#*