Perceiving mental states.

ON TWO ALLEGED CONFLICTS BETWEEN DIVINE ATTRIBUTES (forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy)

[ABSTRACT] Some argue that God’s omnipotence and moral perfection prevent God from being afraid and having evil desires and thus from understanding such states—which contradicts God’s omniscience. But, I argue, God could acquire such understanding indirectly, either by (i) perceiving the mental states of imperfect creatures, (ii) imaginatively combining the components of mental states with whic...

Higher-Order Thought Rendered Defenseless

I found this book to be a big disappointment. It attempts to elaborate and defend David Rosenthal's (1986, 1990, 1993) "higher-order thought" theory of consciousness, the idea that to be in a conscious mental state is to be thinking (correctly) that one is in a mental state. To have a conscious sensation of red is to be perceiving red and simultaneously to be perceiving the perception as a perc...

Theory of Mind (Neural Basis)

The externally observable components of human actions carry only a tiny fraction of the information that matters. Human observers are vastly more interested in perceiving or inferring the mental states the beliefs, desires and intentions that lie behind the observable shell. If a person checks her watch, is she uncertain about the time, late for an appointment, or bored with the conversation? I...

Perceiving expressions of emotion: What evidence could bear on questions about perceptual experience of mental states?

What evidence could bear on questions about whether humans ever perceptually experience any of another's mental states, and how might those questions be made precise enough to test experimentally? This paper focusses on emotions and their expression. It is proposed that research on perceptual experiences of physical properties provides one model for thinking about what evidence concerning expre...

Running Head: Perceiving and Remembering Events Cross-Linguistically Perceiving and remembering events cross-linguistically: Evidence from dual-task paradigms