Begin forwarded message:
From: Victoria Southgate <v.southgate@bbk.ac.uk>
Date: August 2, 2010 4:22:07 AM GMT-05:00
To: cogdevsoc@virginia.edu
Subject: [COGDEVSOC] Call For Papers: Special Issue on Mindreading,
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
Social Cognition: Mindreading and Alternatives
Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology
Guest Editors:
Daniel D Hutto, University of Hertfordshire
Mitchell Herschbach, University of California, San Diego
Victoria Southgate, University of London
CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline for submissions: 1 December 2010
Human beings, even very young infants, exhibit remarkable
capacities for
attending to, and engaging with, other minds. A prevalent account
of such
abilities is that they involve “theory of mind” or “mindreading”: the
ability to represent mental states as mental states of specific
kinds (i.e.,
to have concepts of “belief,” “desire,” etc.) and the contents of
such
mental states. A number of philosophers and psychologists question
the
standard mindreading and wider representationalist framework for
characterizing and explaining our everyday modes and methods of
understanding other people. One possibility is that infants may be
exhibiting sophisticated yet non-conceptual, and possibly
non-representational, mind tracking abilities that do not equate
to any sort
of mindreading.
Proponents on both sides of this debate must adequately accommodate
recent work in developmental psychology. Experiments involving a
variety of
nonverbal tasks — e.g., the “violation of expectation” paradigm and
anticipatory looking tasks, as well as nonverbal tasks involving
more active
responses —suggest that young infants can understand others’ goals,
intentions, desires, knowledge/ignorance, and beliefs. Perhaps most
prominent are studies suggesting infants as young as 13 months of
age are
selectively responsive to the false beliefs of others, well before
they are
able to reliably pass standard verbal false belief tasks around 4
years of
age.
This special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology
aims to
create a dialogue between the mindreading and non-mindreading
approaches to
basic social cognition. Contributors are asked to clarify their
theoretical
commitments; explain how their accounts compare with rivals; and
how they
propose to handle the emerging empirical data, particularly that
from human
developmental psychology. Themes and questions to be addressed
include but
are not limited to:
- Infants as young as 13 months old display a systematic
sensitivity to the beliefs of others. Does it follow that they
must be
operating with a concept of belief, or indeed, any concepts at all?
- Normally developing children become able to attribute false
beliefs to others between the ages of 3 and 5. Does it follow that
they must
be operating with a “theory of mind” or the equivalent?
- What does mental attribution minimally involve? What exactly
distinguishes mindreading from non-mindreading approaches to early
social
cognition? Are there theoretical reasons to prefer one over the
other?
- What exact roles are mental representations thought to
play in
mindreading approaches? What kind of mental representations might be
involved? Can a principled dividing line be drawn between
representational
and non-representational approaches?
- How precisely should we understand the explicit/implicit
distinction as invoked by certain theorists?
Invited contributors
- José Luis Bermúdez, Texas A&M University
- Pierre Jacob, Institut Jean Nicod
- Andrew Meltzoff, University of Washington
Important dates
- Submission deadline: 1 December 2010
- Target publication date: July 2011
How to submit
Prospective authors should register at:
https://www.editorialmanager.com/ropp to obtain a login and select
“Social
Cognition: Mindreading and Alternatives” as an article type to
submit a
manuscript. Manuscripts should be no longer than 8,000 words.
Submissions
should follow the author guidelines available on the journal's
website:
http://www.springer.com/13164 Any questions? Please email the guest
editors: d.d.hutto@herts.ac.uk, mherschb@ucsd.edu,
v.southgate@bbk.ac.uk
About the journal
The Review of Philosophy and Psychology (ISSN: 1878-5158; eISSN:
1878-5166) is a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by
Springer and
focusing on philosophical and foundational issues in cognitive
science. The
aim of the journal is to provide a forum for discussion on topics
of mutual
interest to philosophers and psychologists and to foster
interdisciplinary
research at the crossroads of philosophy and the sciences of the
mind,
including the neural, behavioural and social sciences.
The journal publishes theoretical works grounded in empirical
research
as well as empirical articles on issues of philosophical
relevance. It
includes thematic issues featuring invited contributions from leading
authors together with articles answering a call for paper.
Editorial board
Editor-in-Chief: Dario Taraborelli, Surrey. Executive Editors:
Roberto
Casati, CNRS; Paul Egré, CNRS, Christophe Heintz, CEU.
Scientific advisors: Clark Barrett, UCLA; Cristina Bicchieri,
Penn; Ned
Block, NYU; Paul Bloom, Yale; John Campbell, Berkeley; Richard
Breheny, UCL;
Susan Carey, Harvard; David Chalmers, ANU; Martin Davies, ANU;
Vittorio
Girotto, IUAV; Alvin Goldman, Rutgers; Daniel Hutto,
Hertfordshire; Ray
Jackendoff, Tufts; Marc Jeannerod, CNRS; Alan Leslie, Rutgers; Diego
Marconi, Turin; Kevin Mulligan, Geneva; Alva Noë, Berkeley;
Christopher
Peacocke, Columbia; John Perry, Stanford; Daniel Povinelli,
Louisiana-Lafayette; Jesse Prinz, CUNY; Zenon Pylyshyn, Rutgers;
Brian
Scholl, Yale; Natalie Sebanz, Nijmegen; Corrado Sinigaglia, Milan;
Barry C.
Smith, Birkbeck; Elizabeth Spelke, Harvard; Achille Varzi,
Columbia; Timothy
Williamson, Oxford; Deirdre Wilson, UCL
Dr. Victoria Southgate
Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellow
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development
Henry Wellcome Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London, WC1E 7HX.
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