Embodied Cognition and Mindreading

Mind & Language, Vol. 25, No. 1, Pg. 119-140, 2010.

 Shannon Spaulding

Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of mindreading and those that challenge the alleged ubiquity of mindreading. Together, these two kinds of arguments, if successful, would present a serious challenge to the standard account of human social understanding. In this paper, I examine the strongest of these embodied cognition arguments and argue that mindreading approaches can withstand the best of these arguments from embodied cognition.

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