Other minds and other people: A tentative epistemology

In the last thirty years or so, two competing theories have emerged to explain our knowledge of the contents of other minds: the theory-theory and the simulation theory. As an alternative to the theory-theory and simulation theory, I offer a "shared-state theory." My account begins with the primary type of context in which we are aware of the mental states of others: face-to-face interaction (a feature missing in the standard experiments). It is only in such contexts that joint attention exists. In such contexts two or more individuals are aware that they are paying attention to the same object or event. Such awareness is the ground of the two basic sorts of knowledge of other minds: knowledge of another's attention to objects/events and her attitudes towards them. Thus mine is a "central case" account focused on joint attention in face-to-face interactions. In such cases our perceptions/beliefs/desires, track one another in real-time, back-and-forth dynamic exchanges of behavioral signals that indicate our attitudes about various things in the world. The two main accounts of knowledge of mental states, the theory-theory and the simulation theory, crucially leave out the interactive context, and have no special role for joint attention in mindreading.;The dynamics of interaction are highly context-dependent. Our abilities to share intentional states vary as a function of our perceptual and linguistic capabilities, for example. But the most important contextual variable is our interactive history with another. With those we know well the range of shared state possibilities is dramatically greater than it is with strangers and mere acquaintances. This fact suggests that knowing another's mental states in a given context is most often a part of a larger epistemological project we have as social beings, that of knowing other people, a kind of knowledge I take to be distinct from other types. In the ordinary course of things, for example, people are said to come to know one another -- a tandem experience over time. Such experiences play a different role in our mental economy than first and third person knowledge generating experiences, both non-reciprocal. Further, mindreading is done in the moment, while knowing someone is a longer-term project. But at the center of that project is a sequence of second-person interactions -- moments of mindreading -- over time.;Thus the two sorts of knowledge are interdependent. An adequate theory of mindreading, if it is to explain the most interesting instances, must be part of an analysis of the features of second-person encounters among familiar individuals. And so the final goal of the dissertation is to provide the groundwork for a general theory of second person epistemology -- knowing other people and their mental states.;Knowing a person is to knowing a specific mental state as watching a movie is to seeing a still photograph. An episode of shared intentionality with a stranger is analogous to viewing a single frame from a movie one is unfamiliar with. Having seen the movie on the other hand informs one's perception of the photograph in a variety of ways.;Our ordinary understanding of what it means to know another person includes both performative and cognitive elements. The former involves knowing how to successfully interact with a specific person. The latter involves knowledge of a set of generalizations over the person's actions, intentional objects, and attitudes over time. But the cognitive element also includes knowledge of the person's social relations over time. My account focuses on the cognitive element -- the generalizations over an individual's personal and social history. The former can be represented as propositional knowledge which is often expressed in the shorthand language of interests, action dispositions, and character/personality traits. But the latter, while expressible in propositions, is represented as a position in a matrix of social relations, what I term a "socio-epistemic scheme." As such, it has similarities to knowledge of a thing's spatial location. We represent "where a thing is" by its relation to the things around it. Similarly, our knowledge of "who a person is" is represented as a set of relations to those they know, love, work with, etc.;So I am arguing that it is beliefs about such personal features and social relations that make up the cognitive content of our knowledge of another person. I describe the formation of such beliefs in relation to a history of second person interactions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...