Interpreting Minds

Catalog description

A systematic introduction to the recent and dynamic interdisciplinary research area in naive psychology or theory of mind. The course begins with the philosophical debates about naive or folk psychology, then surveys the main empirical data, key experiments and hypotheses about ape and child interpretation of minds, and concludes with a comparative analysis of several much debated proposals about how the interpretation of minds is accomplished through innate mechanisms (modules), by simulation or in terms of a naive theory.