Professor Emma Borg

Event details

Does understanding what someone is doing involve knowing what they’re thinking?

A standard view in philosophy – known as ‘Folk’ or ‘Common-sense’ Psychology – holds that we understand and predict the actions of others by first attributing suitable mental states to them (including propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires) and then reasoning about what actions those mental states should lead to in the target’s environment. I can make sense of Maya’s reaching behaviour because I take her to want a cookie and to believe that there is a cookie in the jar. Recently, however, this model has come under significant pressure from alternative views which adopt more deflationary perspectives (taking action understanding to involve attributing simpler mental states, or perhaps just sensitivity to non-mental states). This talk explores the arguments against the Common-sense model and the viability of the deflationary approaches. I argue that, although some kind of pluralism about the methods involved in action understanding is probably right, this should be seen (contra some theorists) as supplementing rather than supplanting Common-sense Psychology.