The case for mind perception

Somogy Varga

pp. 787-807

in: Nivedita Gangopadhyay (ed), The future of social cognition, Synthese 194 (3), 2017.

Abstract

The question of how we actually arrive at our knowledge of others’ mental lives is lively debated, and some philosophers defend the idea that mentality is sometimes accessible to perception. In this paper, a distinction is introduced between “mind awareness” and “mental state awareness,” and it is argued that the former at least sometimes belongs to perceptual, rather than cognitive, processing.