Understanding Minds is a course about one of the most exciting empirical areas of contemporary psychology: an area of study overlapping with Philosophy of mind. How do we adjust our behavior and expectations towards other people by "reading" their mental states: of knowledge, belief, emotion, desire, intention? How do children learn to do this? What distinguishes humans from animals? The empirical literature is fraught with difficult questions that reflect the rocky history of psychology trying to wrestle with the "black box" of the mind: what should count as evidence for thinking a certain way? Are the "theories" of the mind that children develop actually universal across cultures? Can neuroscience, or cases of atypical development, shed light on the mechanisms?
All these questions come up in the explosion of empirical and theoretical work on the topic in the last forty years, and in the colloquium we will try to get a map of the terrain while also learning the jargon and understanding the methods of the broad field.
There is no textbook: you will be reading original papers.
- Instructor: Jill de Villiers