Victor Fernandez Castro

El objetivo de este trabajo es exponer y analizar críticamente el libro de Tadeusz Zawidzki Mindshaping. Este libro presenta una visión alternativa a la visión estándar de la cognición social de acuerdo con la cual el eje central de nuestras capacidades socio-cognitivas es el mecanismo psicológico conocido como lectura de mentes. Por el contrario, el libro defiende que ciertos mecanismos de mindshaping dan forma a nuestra mente de manera que nuestra conducta es más cooperativa y fácilmente interpretable para los demás. De este modo, algunos de los rasgos sociales característicos del ser humano dependieron evolutivamente de los mecanismos de mindshaping

This paper assesses two different approaches to inner speech that can be found in the literature. One of them regards inner speech as a vehicle of conscious thought. The other holds that inner speech is better characterised as an activity derived from social uses of its outer counterpart. In this paper I focus on the explanatory power of each approach to account for the control of attention and behaviour in the context of executive tasks. I will argue that the vehicle view cannot capture some central cases of inner speech in executive tasks because they cannot be described as cases of bringing thought into consciousness. Then I will offer a revised version of the activity view and I will apply it to some examples so as to show that it is better posited to account for them. I end by considering two objections to the activity view and a possible way to address them.