November 10th-12th, 2021: The RTG 2386 Extrospection

invites you to its Interdisciplinary Workshop

Accessing Mental States: The Mind from Different Perspectives

This interdisciplinary workshop provides a space for reflecting on the more fundamental issues underlying the different approaches to others’ mental states and to present recent empirical studies related to the following questions:

• How are we able to obtain access to the mental from second- and third-person perspectives?

• Which mental states and processes are accessible without relying on a subject’s introspection?

• What procedures are adequate to access the mental? What do they imply for the perspectives involved?

• What are the major theoretical and methodological challenges we have to overcome?

Focusing on social cognition, psychiatry, and their corresponding methodologies, we explore clinical and non-clinical cases of external access to mental states and processes. The aim of the workshop is to further evaluate procedures used in clinical and non-clinical settings and to investigate their relation to the foundations of external access among human beings (such as empathy and perspective-taking).

Speakers