Maushumi Guha

The relationship between Experimental Philosophy and Philosophy of Mind has been recorded in research conducted by well-known experimental philosophers like Sytsma (2014), Buckwalter and Sytsma (2016) and others. Based on this, we attempted to put to test, two vignettes to see whether our ‘intuitions’ about theory-use and mental simulation in the understanding of other minds matched with our subjects’ intuitions. We designed the two vignettes on the basis of our study of the Theory Theory and the Simulation Theory in the philosophy of mind, which present hypotheses about how people understand others’ mental states and actions, i.e., how they explain, predict or ascribe mental states and behaviour to others. We selected subjects in such a manner that a majority of them had no exposure to the philosophy of mind module during any part of their course and as many of them were freshmen, they would not have heard about the issues from their immediate surroundings. The vignettes were randomly distributed among the subjects and we sought responses to pre-formulated questions based on the two vignettes. We received a good percentage of ‘expected’ responses for both the vignettes, but more for the vignette representing theory-use. Following this pilot study, we concluded that the two vignettes or more like them may be used for further experimental studies in the theory of mind domain, with appropriate modifications where necessary.