Understanding Minds: Essays on Social Cognition

We know a lot about one another. Our suite of capacities and strategies for understanding one another— ‘social cognition’—is remarkable. This dissertation is a detailed investigation of social cognition. I argue that we perceive agency, but not mental states, and that attention to perception-based mental state attribution surprisingly constrains the epistemology of perception. Then I argue that theorists of social cognition have been too focused on behavior, and that social cognition has essential cognitive functions beyond behavior prediction and explanation. Finally, I argue that the personal–subpersonal distinction is constructed by social cognition. The boundaries of a person are determined by our social intelligence.