Call for Abstracts

In psychology and cognitive science, researchers aim to gain access to mental states and processes by scientific means. Psychiatrists put these methods to use to investigate symptoms and ultimately improve the patients’ mental well-being. However, scholars in social neuroscience and philosophy have raised the question of whether understanding psychiatric disorders or, more generally, mental states and events is even possible by methods employing a distanced third-person perspective or whether this requires a second-person perspective and, thus, active interaction.

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).

Keynote Speakers

Prof. Lucia Melloni (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics)

Prof. Dr. med. Leonhard Schilbach (LVR-Klinikum Düsseldorf)

Prof. Ivana S. Marková (Hull York Medical School)

Participation

The workshop will take place online from 10th to 12th of November 2021. The workshop is a combination of short presentations (approx. 20 min), panel discussions, poster presentations, and keynote lectures. Attendance is free.

The call for abstracts has been closed.

General inquiries can be directed to mb-mind-perspectives@hu-berlin.de.