Robert M. Gordon

Ascent routines for propositional attitudes

An ascent routine (AR) allows a speaker to self-ascribe a given propositional attitude (PA) by redeploying the process that generates a corresponding lower level utterance. Thus, we may report on our beliefs about the weather by reporting (under certain constraints) on the weather. The chief criticism of my AR account of self-ascription, by Alvin Goldman and others, is that it covers few if any PA’s other than belief and offers no account of how we can attain reliability in identifying our attitude as belief, desire, hope, etc., without presupposing some sort of recognition process. The criticism can be answered, but only by giving up a tacit—and wholly unnecessary—assumption that has influenced discussions of ascent routines. Abandoning the assumption allows a different account of ARs that avoids the criticism and even provides an algorithm for finding a corresponding lower level utterance for any PA. The account I give is supported by research on children’s first uses of a propositional attitude vocabulary.

Simulation and systematic errors in prediction

What initially made the Simulation Theory of mindreading (ST) attractive to the cognitive science community was its ability to explain certain systematic errors reported by developmental psychologists [1]. ST predicted that until children had a capacity for sophisticated pretend play, they would fail in false-belief tasks. This prediction also explained findings that individuals with autism, who generally lack the requisite capacity for pretend play, would generally fail in such tasks.

The prior question: Do human primates have a theory of mind?

Given Heyess construal of “theory of mind,” there is still no convincing evidence of theory of mind in human primates, much less non human. Rather than making unfounded assumptions about what underlies human social competence, one should ask what mechanisms other primates have and then inquire whether more sophisticated elaborations of those might not account for much of human competence.