La mente sociale. Le basi cognitive della comunicazione (The Social Mind. The Cognitive Bases of Communication)

“Theory of Mind” is the branch of cognitive science that investigates the so-called “mindreading” abilities, i.e., the skills shared by almost all human beings beyond early childhood to treat the agents as the bearers of unobservable psychological states and processes, and to anticipate and explain their behavior in terms of such states and processes. These mentalistic abilities are also called “folk psychology” by philosophers, and “naïve (or intuitive) psychology” by cognitive scientists. According to the “theory theory”, mindreading depends on the deployment of a “theory” of the mental realm; and according to the modularist version of theory theory, that folk-psychological theory is a body of information specific to the domain of naïve psychology which is manipulated by a domain-specific algorithm. The psychologist Alan Leslie has postulated such a module (the Theory of Mind Mechanism), which receives as input information about the past and present behavior of other people and utilizes this information to compute their probable psychological states. This mechanism has been considered, contra Fodor, as one of the strongest candidates for central modularity; a claim that is the main subject of the book.

Ponendosi all’intersezione di scienza cognitiva e pragmatica, gli autori esplorano e compongono in un quadro unitario il rapporto tra mente, socializzazione e comunicazione.