How we know our own minds: The relationship between mindreading and metacognition
Abstract
Four different accounts of the relationship between third-person mindreading and first-person metacognition are compared and evaluated. While three of them endorse the existence of introspection for propositional attitudes, the fourth (defended here) claims that our knowledge of our own attitudes results from turning our mindreading capacities upon ourselves. Section 1 of this target article introduces the four accounts. Section 2 develops the "mindreading is prior" model in more detail, showing how it predicts introspection for perceptual and quasi-perceptual (e.g., imagistic) mental events while claiming that metacognitive access to our own attitudes always results from swift unconscious self-interpretation. This section also considers the model's relationship to the expression of attitudes in speech. Section 3 argues that the commonsense belief in the existence of introspection should be given no weight. Section 4 argues briefly that data from childhood development are of no help in resolving this debate. Section 5 considers the evolutionary claims to which the different accounts are committed, and argues that the three introspective views make predictions that are not borne out by the data. Section 6 examines the extensive evidence that people often confabulate when self-attributing attitudes. Section 7 considers "two systems" accounts of human thinking and reasoning, arguing that although there are introspectable events within System 2, there are no introspectable attitu…
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Model-based contributions to metacognition rely on extensions of the models that guide our predictions of the mental states and behaviors of other people (theory of mind or mentalizing).
“A long-standing proposal is that model-based contributions to metacognition rely on extensions of the models that guide our predictions of the mental states and behaviors of other people-a capacity known as theory of mind or mentalizing (Carruthers 2009).”
From Metacognition and Confidence: A Review and Synthesis (2024) · cites this paper as Carruthers 2009
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“cesses rather than second-order, genuinely metacognitive processes (Carruthers, 2011). That is, it has been said that instead of monitoring their own states of certainty or uncertainty, as most comparative psychologists assume (a second-order, metacognitive, process), the animals can succeed in these tasks through fir…”
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“(Carruthers 2009, p.5) What does this look like as an account of self-talk in particular?”
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“Theory of Mind (ToM) is regarded as a key marker of human consciousness and social cognition (Premack and Woodruff, 1978; Baron-Cohen, 1997; Saxe and Kanwisher, 2003; Frith and Frith, 2006; Carruthers, 2009).”
- Authors
- Carruthers, P.
- Affiliations
- University of Maryland, College Park (US)
- Corresponding author
- Carruthers, Peter
- ORCID
- Carruthers, Peter
- Venue
- Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2009-04
- Volume
- 32
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 121-138
- ISSN
- 0140-525X (ISSN-L)
- 1469-1825
- OpenAlex
- W2138336342
- Cited by
- 610
- References
- 39
- Citations by year
- 2026: 29 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 28 · 2023: 57 · 2022: 49 · 2021: 20 · 2020: 48 · 2019: 62 · 2018: 34 · 2017: 24 · 2016: 18 · 2015: 42 · 2014: 30 · 2013: 38 · 2012: 43
- FWCI
- 49.01
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Behavioral and Brain Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Philosophy and Theoretical Science
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
- Keywords
- theory of mind, metacognition, self-reflection, propositional attitudes, self-knowledge, confabulation, two-system model, schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder, child development
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Attitude, Autistic Disorder, Child Behavior, Child, Preschool, Cognition, Consciousness, Biological Evolution, Humans, Models, Psychological, Schizophrenic Psychology, Self-Assessment, Thinking, Intuition
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