The mental simulation debate: a progress report

Abstract

Introduction For philosophers, the current phase of the debate with which Part I of this volume is concerned can be taken to have begun in 1986, when Jane Heal and Robert Gordon published their seminal papers (Heal, 1986; Gordon, 1986; though see also, for example, Stich, 1981; Dennett, 1981). They raised a dissenting voice against what was becoming a philosophical orthodoxy: that our everyday, or folk, understanding of the mind should be thought of as theoretical. In opposition to this picture, Gordon and Heal argued that we are not theorists but simulators. For psychologists, the debate had begun somewhat earlier when Heider (1958) produced his work on lay psychology; and in more recent times the psychological debate had continued in developmental psychology and in work on animal cognition. But the debate has a much longer provenance than those datings suggest; for it goes back, at least, to disputes in the eighteenth century about whether the methods that had been so successful in the natural sciences were also appropriate for the human or moral sciences. Today's friends of mental simulation stand in a tradition that includes Vico, Herder, Croce, and particularly Collingwood (1946). Nine questions Given the inter-disciplinary ancestry of the debate, it is no surprise that current discussion ranges over a number of distinguishable – indeed, often fairly independent – questions. We suggest that it is useful to separate out some of these questions, and here we identify nine.