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To what extent should we trust our natural instincts about knowledge? The question has special urgency for epistemologists who want to draw evidential support for their theories from certain intuitive epistemic assessments while discounting others as misleading. The focus is on the viability of endorsing the legitimacy of Gettier intuitions while resisting the intuitive pull of skepticism — a combination of moves that most mainstream epistemologists find appealing. Awkwardly enough, the ‘good’ Gettier intuitions and the ‘bad’ skeptical intuitions seem to be equally strong. The chapter argues that it is not a coincidence that these two types of intuition register with equal force: they are generated by a common mechanism. However, the input to this mechanism is interestingly different in the two types of case, and different in a way that can support the mainstream view that Gettier cases tell us something about knowledge where skeptical intuitions involve systematic error.

This chapter examines the role of speaker intentions in issues of reference determination for context-sensitive expressions, focusing on demonstratives. Intuitively, the referent of a token utterance of ‘that’ is fixed (at least in part) by the speaker's intentions. However, if this is right it causes a potential problem for semantic minimalism. The chapter begins by setting out the nature of this problem and proceeds to explore three putative solutions. First, the assumption that speaker intentions fix reference in these cases may be rejected; second, it may be held that current speaker intentions are relevant but that they can be accommodated within a formal semantic theory; third, reference determination and semantic content may be held strictly apart. The first two of these moves, termed respectively ‘conventionalism’ and ‘non-inferentialism’, are rejected. However it is shown that the third move provides an appealing way for the minimalist to accommodate the content of context-sensitive expressions.

This chapter explains how mindmelding — the direct experience by one person of another's conscious representations — is in fact possible. The temporal lobes causally interact with the prefrontal lobes by way of fiber bundles that run underneath the cortical surface. This provides the perfect first experiment in mindmelding: to ‘branch’ those fiber bundles and run the other end into the brain of another person. Evidence is provided that these bundles have close connections to consciousness, in that whatever affects them has immediate effects on consciousness. Then, before responding to several objections, the chapter considers another issue brought up by these experiments — the question of the relation between mindmelding and mindreading. Is mindmelding similar to mindreading? Does the existence of a mindreading system help us achieve mindmelding?

On the basis of the arguments presented in this book, it cannot be determined with certainty whether animals are capable of mindreading or complementary behavior reading. It is also not clear whether animals predict other agents’ behaviors by attributing cognitive states to them, such as seeing, hearing, knowing, and believing. However, there is a way forward to elucidating these issues. Researchers now have the experimental protocols that could help them determine whether animals can attribute such mental states or just the observable grounds associated with them. These protocols put the field of animal social cognition research in a position to answer its strongest methodological challenge—the logical problem.

A large tradition of work in moral psychology explores the capacity for moral judgment by focusing on the basic capacity to distinguish moral violations (e.g., hitting another person) from conventional violations (e.g., playing with your food). This method plausibly reveals a capacity for a kind of coremoral judgment. Recent evidence indicates that affect plays a crucial role in mediating the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinguish. However, the prevailing account of the role of affect in moral judgment is problematic. This chapter argues that the capacity to draw the moral/conventional distinction depends on both a body of information about which actions are prohibited (“a normative theory”) and an affective mechanism that confers a special status on the norms.

This chapter explores in detail the nature of the affective response to suffering in others. Humans exhibit importantly different kinds of response, each of which apparently emerges fairly early in development. The psychological underpinnings of altruistic motivation are especially complex, and the chapter argues that altruistic motivation depends on a basic affective system, a “Concern Mechanism,” which requires only a minimal capacity for understanding other minds.

Most animals have mental states of one sort or another, but few species share our capacity for self-awareness. We are aware of our own mental states via introspection, and we are aware of the mental states of our fellow human beings on the basis of what they do and say. This chapter is concerned with the prospects of a rather different and significantly more recent ‘mindreading’ capacity: the capacity to ascribe mental states to a creature based on information derived from neuroimaging. It analyzes the foundational issues that are likely to confront the use of any neuroimaging technology to read minds, no matter how sophisticated it may be.

This chapter focuses on the possible impact of neuroscientific technological development on one area of privacy in particular: the privacy that we enjoy in relation to the contents of our minds or, as it has come to be called, ‘mental privacy’. Many people are horrified by the thought that we might develop mindreading capability. An informal survey generated adjectives such as ‘appalling’, ‘invasive’, ‘intrusive’, and ‘terrifying’; it has been suggested that having one's thoughts exposed was akin to ‘mental rape’; allusions have been made to Big Brother and thought police. The chapter considers whether this immediate ‘gut’ reaction is justified. It shows that when the possibility of mental transparency is examined more carefully, and without prejudicial assumptions, it turns out to be less completely alarming than we think. It examines the potential impact of transparency in various situations, and finds that there might even be some ‘pros’, alongside the obvious ‘cons’.

This chapter examines one of the main predictions made by all forms of inner sense theory. This is that there should exist dissociations between capacities for self-knowledge and for other-knowledge, in one or both directions. The interpretive sensory-access (ISA) theory, in contrast, predicts an absence of dissociations, since it holds that there is just one metarepresentational faculty with a single mode of access to the domain of mental states. Evidence from schizophrenia, autism, and alexithymia (blindness to one's own emotions) is examined. In addition, the chapter inquires whether brain imaging data show any difference between the regions of the brain that process one's own mental states and the regions involved when one attributes mental states to other people.

The chapter discusses neural mechanisms of mirroring in the primate brain and their potential role in empathy. In monkeys, motor neurons that fire while the animal perform an action, also fire when the animal observes another individual performing the same action, or an action that achieves the same goal or is logically related to the performed action. In humans, neural systems active during action execution and action observation, seem to provide a bio‐marker of sociality. Indeed, their activity correlates with the tendency to empathize of the subject and with her/his social competence. Furthermore, recent single cell recordings in humans demonstrate that mirroring neurons are present in many human brain areas, suggesting that this neural system provides a rich mirroring of the actions of other people, and of the emotions and intentions associated with them. It is possible that these neuronal responses have been selected because they provide an effortless, automatic form of intersubjectivity.

This chapter further develops and supports the interpretive sensory-access (ISA) account of the nature and sources of self-knowledge. One goal is expository—it is to develop and explain the ISA theory in more detail than has been done up to this point in the book. But another goal is to show that the ISA account draws significant support from three well-established theories in cognitive science. These are global broadcasting theory, theories of sensory-based working memory, and theories that see the evolution of metarepresentational capacities as driven by the demands of living in complex social groups.

The goal of this chapter is to explain and provide a preliminary evaluation of so-called “inner sense” accounts of self-knowledge, contrasting them with the interpretive sensory-access (ISA) theory. There are a trio of such accounts to be considered. These are distinguished from one another by the varied relationships that they postulate between inner sense and other-directed mindreading. The predictions made by each are extracted and compared with those of the ISA theory. Evidence relating to the developmental emergence of self-knowledge and other-knowledge is evaluated, as is evidence that recognition of the emotions of others depends upon awareness of the corresponding emotion in ourselves. In addition, introspection-sampling evidence of amodal “unsymbolozed” thinking is considered.

The topic of mindreading is central to the interpretive sensory-access (ISA) theory of self-knowledge. This chapter lays out the issues and options, and examines some of the pertinent evidence. The goal of the chapter is to lay bare the assumptions about mindreading that either support the ISA theory, or to which that theory is independently committed, and to show that those assumptions are at least defensible, if not highly plausible. Theorizing-theory and simulationist accounts of mindreading are discussed and found to be problematic, and recent evidence of very early mindreading in infants is reviewed and evaluated. It is argued that this supports a broadly modular conception of our mindreading competence. Evidence of simple forms of mindreading in non-human primates is also considered.

This chapter situates the dispute over the metacognitive capacities of non-human animals in the context of wider debates about the phylogeny of metarepresentational abilities. This chapter clarifies the nature of the dispute, before contrasting two different accounts of the evolution of metarepresentation. One is first-person-based, claiming that it emerged initially for purposes of metacognitive monitoring and control. The other is social in nature, claiming that metarepresentation evolved initially to monitor the mental states of others. These accounts make differing predictions about what we should expect to find in non-human animals: the former predicts that metacognitive capacities in creatures incapable of equivalent forms of mindreading should be found, whereas the latter predicts that they should not. The chapter elaborates and defend the latter form of account, drawing especially on what is known about decision-making and metacognition in humans. In doing so the chapter shows that so-called ‘uncertainty-monitoring’ data from monkeys can just as well be explained in non-metarepresentational affective terms, as might be predicted by the social-evolutionary account.

Given disagreements about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self-knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and scope of metacognition — the control of one’s cognition — is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self-ascriptive view (or one-function view), has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one’s own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one’s own mind. The self-evaluative view (or two-function view), in contrast, takes metacognition to involve a procedural form of knowledge that is generated by actually engaging in a first-order cognitive task, and monitoring its success. The comparative and developmental arguments supporting, respectively, each of these views are discussed in the light of Hampton’s operational definition of metacognition. New arguments are presented in favour of the two-function view. Recent behavioural and neuroscientific evidence suggests that metacognitive assessment relies on dedicated implicit mechanisms, which are wholly independent, and indeed dissociable, from theory-based self-attribution. The two-function view is claimed to be the best interpretation of these findings.