Psychologists postulate a specific faculty of "mentalization" which, among other things, enables us to represent the mental states of others (their intentions, desires and beliefs) and to interpret their behavior in the light of these supposed mental states. Since Alan Leslie's work and that of simulation theorists, it has been common to analyze this specific faculty as resting on a more fundamental ability to construct "decoupled" representations. The idea is that, in addition to the representation of the world that plays the role of primary representation, the one that guides action and that we constantly update, we have the capacity to deploy secondary representations that function in the same way and use the same cognitive resources, but are disconnected from the primary representation that is directly linked to motivation and action. The research workshop aims to combine the efforts of philosophers of mind and developmental psychologists to clarify this notion of decoupling as it relates to mentalization.
Program
November 8
- François Recanati (Collège de France): Decoupling Decoupling from Mentalizing
- Pierre Jacob (Institut Jean Nicod): False-Belief Attribution with and without Cancellation
Lunch
- Agnes Kovacs (Central European University): Tracking and revising another's model of the world: do attributed belief files include information about their source?
- Gregory Currie (University of York): Irony, Decoupling and Deception
Dinner
November 9
- Jonathan Phillips (Dartmouth College): Knowledge before Belief
- Josef Perner (University of Salzburg): Representing Knowledge in Mental Files
Lunch
- Daniel Horschler (Yale University): Theory of Mind in Non-Human Primates
- Victoria Southgate (University of Copenhagen): Uniquely Infant Social Intelligence
