•  125
    Imagining Others
    Analysis. forthcoming.
    How good are we at imagining what it is like to be someone else? Clearly, we sometimes get it right. Proponents of empathy suggest that it is an important and useful tool in our interactions with other people. But, also clearly, there are many inauspicious instances where we badly misimagine what it is like to be someone else. In this paper, I consider the epistemic utility of empathic imagination. I argue that most views fail to explain the distinctive patterns of success and failure of empathi…Read more
  • Psychologists have long noted the correlation between empathy and pro-social outcomes. Empathetic people are happier, healthier, more cooperative, and more altruistic than people who are less empathetic. However, empathy is not a panacea for all social ills. Critics argue that empathy is idiosyncratic, easily manipulated, biased in favour of one’s in-group, and exacerbates rather than relieving underlying inequalities. The praise and critique of empathy raise an interesting question: can we impr…Read more
  • Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition (edited book)
    Routledge. forthcoming.
    This chapter wades into the growing discussion surrounding embodied cognition and predictive processing. After surveying a recent debate between Jakob Hohwy and Andy Clark, it articulates two outstanding issues facing discussions of compatibility. It argues that headway on these issues can be made by drawing on the resources of philosophy of science.
  •  29
    Motivating Empathy
    Mind and Language. forthcoming.
    Critics of empathy argue that empathy is exhausting, easily manipulated, exacerbates rather than relieves conflict, and is too focused on individual experiences. Apparently, empathy not only fails to stop negative acts like sadism, bullying, and terrorism, it motivates and promotes such acts. These scholars argue that empathy will not save us from partisanship and division. In fact, it might make us worse off. I will argue that empathy exhibits bias in the ways critics describe because empathy i…Read more
  •  119
    Psychologists have long noted the correlation between empathy and prosocial outcomes. Empathetic people are happier, healthier, more cooperative, and more altruistic than people who are less empathetic. However, empathy is not a panacea for all social ills. Critics argue that empathy is idiosyncratic, easily manipulated, biased in favor of one's in-group, and exacerbates rather than relieves underlying inequalities. The praise and critique of empathy raise an interesting question: Can we improve…Read more
  •  211
    Cognitive Empathy
    In Heidi L. Maibom (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, Routledge Press. pp. 13-21. 2017.
    We have various strategies available to us for understanding another person’s state of mind. Cognitive empathy may be achieved by mental simulation, i.e. by imagining yourself in another’s situation and figuring out what you would think and feel in that situation. Alternatively, you could consider all the relevant information about the person’s situation and folk psychology and draw a sophisticated inference to the best explanation of that person’s perspective. In this chapter, I examine the con…Read more
  •  214
    Phenomenology of social explanation
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (3): 637-653. 2022.
    The orthodox view of social cognition maintains that mentalizing is an important and pervasive element of our ordinary social interactions. The orthodoxy has come under scrutiny from various sources recently. Critics from the phenomenological tradition argue that phenomenological reflection on our social interactions tells against the orthodox view. Proponents of pluralistic folk psychology argue that our ordinary social interactions extend far beyond mentalizing. Both sorts of critics argue tha…Read more
  •  226
    Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Bertram Gawronski articulate a careful defense of research on implicit bias. They argue that though there is room for improvement in various areas, when we set the bar appropriately and when we are comparing relevant events, the test–retest stability and predictive ability of implicit bias measures are respectable. Edouard Machery disagrees. He argues that theories of implicit bias have failed to answer four fundamental questions about measures of implicit bia…Read more
  •  221
    Implicit Social Cognition
    In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Implicit Cognition, Routledge. forthcoming.
    Positing implicit social cognitive processes is common in the social cognition literature. We see it in discussions of theories of mentalizing, empathy, and infants' social-cognitive capacities. However, there is little effort to articulate what counts as implicit social cognition in general, so theorizing about implicit social cognition is extremely disparate across each of these sub-domains. In this paper, I argue that Michael Brownstein’s account of implicit cognition promises to be a fruitfu…Read more
  •  355
    Conceptual Centrality and Implicit Bias
    Mind and Language 33 (1): 95-111. 2018.
    How are biases encoded in our representations of social categories? Philosophical and empirical discussions of implicit bias overwhelmingly focus on salient or statistical associations between target features and representations of social categories. These are the sorts of associations probed by the Implicit Association Test and various priming tasks. In this paper, we argue that these discussions systematically overlook an alternative way in which biases are encoded, that is, in the dependency …Read more
  •  322
    How I Know What You Know
    In Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2024.
    Mentalizing is our ability to infer agents’ mental states. Attributing beliefs, knowledge, desires, and intentions are frequently discussed forms of mentalizing. Attributing mentalistically loaded stereotypes, personality traits, and evaluating others’ rationality are forms of mentalizing, as well. This broad conception of mentalizing has interesting and important implications for social epistemology. Several topics in social epistemology involve judgments about others’ knowledge, rationality, a…Read more
  •  411
    Beliefs and biases
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 7575-7594. 2021.
    Philosophers are divided over whether implicit biases are beliefs. Critics of the belief model of implicit bias argue that empirical data show that implicit biases are habitual but unstable and not sensitive to evidence. They are not rational or consistently action-guiding like beliefs are supposed to be. In contrast, proponents of the belief model of implicit bias argue that they are stable enough, sensitive to some evidence, and do guide our actions, albeit haphazardly sometimes. With the help…Read more
  •  617
    This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not present…Read more
  •  13
    Response to Westra
    Philosophical Psychology 33 (6): 883-887. 2020.
    Volume 33, Issue 6, August 2020, Page 883-887.
  •  513
    What is Mindreading?
    WIREs Cognitive Science 11 (3). 2019.
    Theory of mind, also known as mindreading, refers to our ability to attribute mental states to agents in order to make sense of and interact with other agents. Recently, theorists in this literature have advanced a broad conception of mindreading. In particular, psychologists and philosophers have examined how we attribute knowledge, intention, mentalistically-loaded stereotypes, and personality traits to others. Moreover, the diversity of our goals in a social interaction – precision, efficienc…Read more
  •  569
    The Nature of Empathy
    with Hannah Read and Rita Svetlova
    In Felipe De Brigard & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (eds.), Philosophy of Neuroscience, Mit Press. pp. 49-77. 2022.
    Empathy is many things to many people. Depending on who you ask, it is feeling what another person feels, feeling bad for another person’s suffering, understanding what another person feels, imagining yourself in another person’s situation and figuring out what you would feel, or your brain activating as if you were experiencing the emotion another person is experiencing. These are just some of the various notions of empathy that are at play in philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, develo…Read more
  •  228
    Response to Evan Westra’s review of “How We Understand Others”
    Philosophical Psychology 33 (6): 883-887. 2020.
    In this reply to Evan Westra's review of my book How We Understand Others, I discuss the methodological limitations of determining how accurate our mindreading abilities really are.
  •  92
    In our everyday social interactions, we try to make sense of what people are thinking, why they act as they do, and what they are likely to do next. This process is called mindreading. Mindreading, Shannon Spaulding argues in this book, is central to our ability to understand and interact with others. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have converged on the idea that mindreading involves theorizing about and simulating others’ mental states. She argues that this view of mindreading is limitin…Read more
  •  89
    Traditional theories of mindreading tend to focus exclusively on attributing beliefs and desires to other agents. The literature emphasizes belief attribution in particular, with numerous debates over when children develop the concept of belief, how neurotypical adult humans attribute beliefs to others, whether non-human animals have the concept of belief, etc. I describe a growing school of thought that the heavy focus on belief leaves traditional theories of mindreading unable to account for t…Read more
  •  167
    Introduction to Debates on Embodied Social Cognition
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (4): 431-448. 2012.
    Embodied social cognition (ESC) aims to explicate how our embodiment shapes our knowledge of others, and in what this knowledge of others consists. Although there is much diversity amongst ESC accounts, common to all these accounts is the idea that our normal everyday interactions consist in non-mentalistic embodied engagements. In recent years, several theorists have developed and defended innovative and controversial accounts of ESC. These accounts challenge, and offer deflationary alternative…Read more
  •  661
    Simulation Theory
    In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge. pp. 262-273. 2016.
    This is a penultimate draft of a paper that will appear in Handbook of Imagination, Amy Kind (ed.). Routledge Press. Please cite only the final printed version.
  •  2103
    Embodied cognition and theory of mind
    In Lawrence Shapiro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, Routledge. pp. 197-206. 2014.
    According to embodied cognition, the philosophical and empirical literature on theory of mind is misguided. Embodied cognition rejects the idea that social cognition requires theory of mind. It regards the intramural debate between the Theory Theory and the Simulation Theory as irrelevant, and it dismisses the empirical studies on theory of mind as ill conceived and misleading. Embodied cognition provides a novel deflationary account of social cognition that does not depend on theory of mind. In…Read more
  •  921
    On Whether we Can See Intentions
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (2): 150-170. 2017.
    Direct Perception is the view that we can see others' mental states, i.e. that we perceive others' mental states with the same immediacy and directness that we perceive ordinary objects in the world. I evaluate Direct Perception by considering whether we can see intentions, a particularly promising candidate for Direct Perception. I argue that the view equivocates on the notion of intention. Disambiguating the Direct Perception claim reveals a troubling dilemma for the view: either it is banal o…Read more
  •  150
    Andy Clark's Supersizing the Mind begins as a manifesto in which the components of an embodied theory of mind are carefully moved into place, proceeds to a defense of these components from recent critical attacks, and ends with words of caution to those who would seek to extract too much from the embodied perspective. Readers unfamiliar with Clark's earlier works are likely to find the result dazzling -- an exciting, novel, and coherent conception of the mind that dares one to abandon nearly eve…Read more
  •  1987
    Imagination Through Knowledge
    In Amy Kind & Peter Kung (eds.), Knowledge Through Imagination, Oxford University Press. pp. 207-226. 2016.
    Imagination seems to play an epistemic role in philosophical and scientific thought experiments, mindreading, and ordinary practical deliberations insofar as it generates new knowledge of contingent facts about the world. However, it also seems that imagination is limited to creative generation of ideas. Sometimes we imagine fanciful ideas that depart freely from reality. The conjunction of these claims is what I call the puzzle of knowledge through imagination. This chapter aims to resolve this…Read more
  •  2308
    Mirror Neurons and Social Cognition
    Mind and Language 28 (2): 233-257. 2013.
    Mirror neurons are widely regarded as an important key to social cognition. Despite such wide agreement, there is very little consensus on how or why they are important. The goal of this paper is to clearly explicate the exact role mirror neurons play in social cognition. I aim to answer two questions about the relationship between mirroring and social cognition: What kind of social understanding is involved with mirroring? How is mirroring related to that understanding? I argue that philosophic…Read more
  •  818
    Embodied Cognition and Sport
    In Massimiliano Cappuccio (ed.), Handbook of Embodied Cognition and Sport Psychology, Mit Press. pp. 3-22. 2018.
    Successful athletic performance requires precision in many respects. A batter stands behind home plate awaiting the arrival of a ball that is less than three inches in diameter and moving close to 100 mph. His goal is to hit it with a ba­­t that is also less than three inches in diameter. This impressive feat requires extraordinary temporal and spatial coordination. The sweet spot of the bat must be at the same place, at the same time, as the ball. A basketball player must keep a ball bouncing a…Read more
  •  1734
    Phenomenology of Social Cognition
    Erkenntnis 80 (5): 1069-1089. 2015.
    Can phenomenological evidence play a decisive role in accepting or rejecting social cognition theories? Is it the case that a theory of social cognition ought to explain and be empirically supported by our phenomenological experience? There is serious disagreement about the answers to these questions. This paper aims to determine the methodological role of phenomenology in social cognition debates. The following three features are characteristic of evidence capable of playing a substantial metho…Read more