74 CHAPTER THREE
wants to go into that building because I know that people usually go up the
stairs and open the door when they want to enter a building. Perhaps I also
know that the building is an apartment building, it is around dinnertime,
and people are generally headed home at this hour. I apply such general
principles from folk psychology to make propositions about other people’s
mental states. These principles are drawn from concepts that are symbolic
representations of the world, whose validity depends on the extent of cor-
respondence to it. Thinking, then, can be understood as the computation
of abstract symbols to achieve an attribute of another’s mental state. As
Gallese and George Lakoff complain, this view inherited from analytic phi-
losophy “the propensity to analyze concepts on the basis of formal abstract
models, totally unrelated to the life of the body and the brain regions gov-
erning the body’s functioning in the world” (2005, 455). Mind reading is a
mentalist activity independent of embodiment and situatedness.
The primary alternative to the classical cognitivist view has been sim-
ulation theory, which has served as the main model for interpreting mir-
ror neuron research. Advanced by Alvin Goldman and others, simulation
theory argues that we understand another’s actions not through applying
generic principles but rather by simulating or pretending how we might act
in the same situation ourselves. I know Lucinda wants to eat the cupcake
she is picking up because I imagine myself picking up that cupcake and
wanting to eat it. My understanding of her desire is in some way dependent
on my ability to imagine my own desire, as well as my ability to see her as
me and as not me at the same time. In Goldman’s version of this, “the first
stage of the imaginative construction is creation of a set of initial states (in
the self ) antecedently thought to correspond to states of the target (but not
the specific state the mind reader wishes to ascertain). This is ‘putting one-
self in the other’s shoes.’ The second stage consists of feeding these inputs
into one of the mind’s operating systems and letting it output a further state.
Finally, the mind reader ‘reads’ or detects that output state and projects
it onto the target, i.e., attributes it to the target” (Goldman and Shanton
forthcoming, 12).
Goldman’s simulation theory rejects general, abstract reasoning in favor
of a capacity to imagine oneself, within a particular context, in the shoes
of the other. While theory theory “depicts mind- reading as a thoroughly
‘detached’ theoretical activity,” simulation theory locates our understanding