Analogical Uses of the First Person Pronoun: A Difficulty in Philosophical Semantics

Abstract

A common human enterprise is to try to understand what another human will do, how he will act, in terms of oneself. Many philosophers and psychologists agree that humans often predict what another will do by, in imagination, placing themselves in the others situation and simulating the others mental economy. On the basis of his own psychological responses during this exercise of imagination, the simulator then may predict what the other will do. Simulation theorists argue that human competence in predicting behaviour, and more generally in mindreading, depends mainly on a capacity for mental simulation1. Most simulation theorists suppose that two steps are needed in an exercise of prediction: a replication in oneself in some significant respects of the others situation and mental states and an implicit analogical inference to the effect that the individual simulated is in the same or in similar mental states.