The impact of culture on mindreading

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

The role of culture in shaping folk psychology and mindreading has been neglected in the philosophical literature. This paper shows that there are significant cultural differences in how psychological states are understood and used by (1) drawing on Spaulding’s recent distinction between the ‘goals’ and ‘methods’of mindreading (2018) to argue that the relations between these methods vary across cultures; and (2) arguing that differences in folk psychology cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the cognitive architecture that facilitates our understanding of psychological states. The paper concludes that any good account of social cognition must have the conceptual resources to explain how culture affects our understanding of psychological states, and that this explanandum should not be an after-thought but instead a guiding feature for those accounts.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-24
JournalSynthese
VolumeN/A
Early online date14 Nov 2019
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 14 Nov 2019

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • social cognition
  • mindreading
  • cross-cultural psychology
  • folk psychology

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