Mindreading and Joint Action: Philosophical Tools

This course will introduce a variety of new and established philosophical ideas that might usefully inform experimental research on mindreading or on joint action (or both) but have so far been neglected or misunderstood by cognitive scientists. Starting from foundational questions like What is a mental state? and Which events are actions? we shall search for tools that might help us with two tasks. First, we need theoretically coherent and empirically motivated ways of distinguishing kinds of mindreading, and kinds of joint action. Second, we need ways of decomposing mindreading in something like the way that actual reading can be decomposed into orthographic, lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic components.