Stephen Andrew Butterfill

Knowledge is a mental state: Nagel may be right about this but wrong to suppose that knowledge is prior to belief in the sense that being able to recognize belief somehow depends on having a concept of knowledge. This commentary identifies objections to Nagel’s arguments for priority. Some of these objections arise from Nagel’s selective use of developmental evidence on mindreading: additional findings reveal a more complex (and more interesting) picture of how abilities to recognize and track knowledge and belief develop. If Nagel’s arguments for priority fail, why hold that knowledge is a mental state? An alternative approach might draw on arguments that intention is a mental state. Knowledge and intention play complementary and interlocking roles in planning and practical reasoning. Perhaps it is these roles, not claims about priority, which complicate attempts to reduce either knowledge or intention to belief or desire or some combination of these.

Given the premise that joint action plays some role in explaining how humans come to understand minds, what could joint action be? Not what a leading account, Michael Bratman's, says it is. For on that account engaging in joint action involves sharing intentions and sharing intentions requires much of the understanding of minds whose development is supposed to be explained by appeal to joint action. This paper therefore offers an account of a different kind of joint action, an account compatible with the premise about development. The new account is no replacement for the leading account; rather the accounts characterise two kinds of joint action. Where the kind of joint characterised by the leading account involves shared intentions, the new account characterises a kind of joint action involving shared goals.

The role played by motor representations in tracking others’ belief-based actions remains unclear. In experiment 1, the dynamics of adults’ anticipatory mediolateral motor activity (leftwards–rightwards leaning on a balance board) as well as hand trajectories were measured as they attempted to help an agent who had a true or false belief about an object’s location. Participants’ leaning was influenced by the agent’s belief about the target’s location when the agent was free to act but not when she was motorically constrained. However, the hand trajectories participants produced to provide a response were not modulated by the other person’s beliefs. Therefore, we designed a simplified second experiment in which participants were instructed to click as fast as possible on the location of a target object. In experiment 2, mouse-movements deviated from an ideal direct path to the object location, with trajectories that were influenced by the location in which the agent falsely believed the object to be located. These experiments highlight that information about an agent’s false-belief can be mapped onto the motor system of a passive observer, and that there are situations in which the motor system plays an important role in accurate belief-tracking.

When deciding on a strategy for explicating shared intention, we all face two fundamental questions. First, can an intention or any other mental state have more than one subject? A positive answer to this allows the plural subject strategy: shared intention is a matter of there being one mental state with two or more subjects. Mental states are shared in the same sense that siblings share a parent; no simpler view exists. A negative answer blocks the plural subject strategy. This motivates asking the second fundamental question. Are there aggregate subjects and, if so, can they have intentions? The aggregate strategy depends on a positive answer to this question: the idea is that shared intention is a matter of there being aggregate subjects of mental states, that is subjects of mental states with proper parts that include subjects of mental states. By contrast, a negative answer to this question limits us to the reductive strategy: shared intention is a structure of ordinary, individual subjects’ emotions, intentions and other mental states. I contribute a limited review of the three strategies. I also defend a novel thesis. Whereas these strategies are often presented as conflicting attempts to characterize a single set of phenomena, my thesis is that for each strategy there are phenomena which can be correctly characterized only by following that strategy. Instead of attempting to find one true strategy, we may need to seek ways to combine insights from different strategies.

The development of children's minds raises fundamental questions, from how we are able to know about basic aspects of the world such as objects and actions to how we come to grasp mental states. The Developing Mind is the first book to critically introduce and examine philosophical questions concerning children's cognitive development and considers the implications of scientific breakthroughs for the philosophy of developmental psychology. The book explores central topics in developmental psychology from a philosophical perspective : children's awareness of objects and the question of 'object permanence' the nature and explanatory role of 'core knowledge' evidence for innate drivers of language children's knowledge of the relation between actions and goals puzzles about when infants first have awareness of other minds how social interaction explains the emergence of knowledge Throughout the book, Stephen Butterfill draws on important case studies, including experiments with children on objects and their interactions, 'false belief tasks', and the process by which children come to see other people, not just themselves, as purposive agents. He shows how these questions can illuminate fundamental debates in philosophy of mind concerning the mind's architecture, the explanatory power of representation, the social character of knowledge, and the nature of metacognitive feelings. Additional features, such as a glossary and extensive bibliographic references, provide helpful tools for those coming to the subject for the first time.

When two or more people coordinate their actions in space and time to produce a joint outcome, they perform a joint action. The perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes that enable individuals to coordinate their actions with others have been receiving increasing attention during the last decade, complementing earlier work on shared intentionality and discourse. This chapter reviews current theoretical concepts and empirical findings in order to provide a structured overview of the state of the art in joint action research. We distinguish between planned and emergent coordination. In planned coordination, agents' behavior is driven by representations that specify the desired outcomes of joint action and the agent's own part in achieving these outcomes. In emergent coordination, coordinated behavior occurs due to perception action couplings that make multiple individuals act in similar ways, independently of joint plans. We review evidence for the two types of coordination and discuss potential synergies between them

Reading other minds is a pervasive feature of human social life. A decade of research indicates that people can automatically track an agent’s beliefs regardless of whether this is required. But little is known about the principles t guide automatic belief tracking. In six experiments adapting a false belief task introduced by Kovács et al. (2010), we tested whether belief tracking is interrupted by either an agent’s lack of perceptual access or else by an agent’s constrained action possibilities. We also tested whether such manipulations create interruptions when participants were instructed to track beliefs. Our main finding: the agent’s lack of perceptual access did not interrupt belief tracking when participants were not instructed to track beliefs. Overall, our findings raise a challenge: some of the phenomena that have been labelled mindreading are perhaps not mindreading at all, or—more likely—they are mindreading but not as we know it.