I FEEL YOUR PAIN 75of others within our own self- awareness (Gallese and Goldman 1998, 497).
In this sense simulated mind reading is less abstract, more personal, and
more located in one’s own situation. Both theories, however, ultimately see
mind reading as a kind of theorizing about another’s mental state and favor
representational, rationalist mental knowledge over affective and corporeal
experience. Feminist psychologists Katherine Nelson and colleagues ob-
ject that in both scenarios the mind remains a “disembodied, autonomous,
individually owned information processing or representational device...
a cognitive mechanism, providing representations that mirror the real
world ‘out there’ ” (2000, 67). In their view, both mind reading theories are
informed by assumptions that are “antithetical to the principles of feminist
epistemologies” (68).^ These principles, as discussed in chapter 2, under-
score the embodied and situated character of knowledge.
Although not entirely answering such criticisms, the joining of simula-
tion theory to mirror neuron research rectifies its disembodied character.
In their embodied simulation theory, Gallese and Goldman argue that mir-
ror neurons “underlie the process of ‘mind reading,’ or serve as precursors
to such a process” through embodied simulation (1998, 495). For his part,
Goldman (2009) later makes a distinction between “low- level” automatic
processes accomplished by mirroring and the higher- level processes of
pretense and imagination. Mirroring, he argues, involves experiencing an-
other’s only relatively “primitive” mental states, such as disgust, pain, and
anger, which can be exogenously induced by a subject observing another’s
action. Higher- level simulation, he argues, is more multifaceted, utilizes in-
formation, appraises more complicated mental states, and is endogenously
produced by the subject’s imagination.^ But on the strong view of embodied
simulation embraced by Gallese and other members of the Parma research
group, mirroring offers an “immediate representation of the motor acts
being formed by others,” and there is “no need for a higher- order representa-
tion” (Rizzolatti et al. 2006, 589; see also Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2008).^ Em-
bodied simulation theory shifts the task of simulation from being the work
of an effortful mind to that of a brain effortlessly grasping knowledge of
the other, as automatic as contagious yawning or laughing (Gallese 2001).
Through mirroring, putting oneself in another’s shoes is a biologically
mandated mechanism occurring at the moment of perceiving the other’s
motor, sensory, and emotional actions and experiences. This is achievable