Mindreading

Abstract This volume defends an integrated account of the psychological mechanisms underlying “mindreading,” the commonplace capacity to understand the mind. The authors maintain that it is, as commonsense would suggest, vital to distinguish between reading others’ minds and reading one’s own. In reading other minds, the imagination plays a central role. As a result, the authors begin with an explicit and systematic account of pretense and imagination which proposes that pretense representations are contained in a separate mental workspace, the “Possible World Box,” which is part of the basic architecture of the human mind. The mechanisms subserving pretense get recruited in reading other minds, a capacity…