Knowing and Understanding Other Minds

We all take it for granted that we are typically in a position to know about the thoughts and feelings of other people. But we might naturally wonder how we acquire this kind of knowledge. Knowing Other Minds brings together ten original chapters, written by internationally renowned researchers, on questions that arise from our everyday social interaction with others. Can we have direct perceptual knowledge of another person's thoughts? How do we acquire general conceptions of mental states? What lessons can be drawn from experimental work in developmental psychology? Are there fundamental differences between the ways in which we acquire knowledge of our own minds and the ways in which we acquire knowledge of someone else's mind? What sort of cognitive processing underlies our everyday social understanding? How should we best think of the relationship between our complex social life and moral value? The chapters in this volume convey a variety of different perspectives and make a number of novel contributions to the existing literature on these questions, thereby opening up new avenues of inquiry. Furthermore, they illustrate how questions in philosophy and questions from empirical cognitive science overlap and mutually inform one another.

Anita Avramides, University of Oxford, Matthew Parrott, University of Oxford

Anita Avramides is Southover Manor Trust Fellow in Philosophy at St Hilda's College and Reader in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Oxford. She has published books and articles in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Most recently she has concentrated her work on the questions relating to knowing and understanding others.

Matthew Parrott is an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Hilda's College. Prior to this, he was a Birmingham Fellow at the University of Birmingham and a Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College London. He also previously held an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on questions in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and philosophy of psychiatry but extends to issues in epistemology and philosophy of science.Â