RTG 2386 Extrospection
Interdisciplinary Virtual Workshop
Accessing Mental States:
The Mind from Different Perspectives
10th-12th November 2021
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
Prof. Lucia Melloni, PhD
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany
Prof. Dr. med. Leonhard Schilbach
LVR-Klinikum Düsseldorf, Germany
Prof. Ivana S. Marková
Hull York Medical School, Hull, UK
Call for Abstracts
The call for abstracts and registration have been closed.
Schedule
The workshop will take place online from 10th to 12th of November 2021.
We will offer a combination of short presentations (approx. 20 min), panel discussions, poster presentations, and keynote lectures.
The following documents are available for download as PDFs: Full Schedule, Talk Abstracts and Poster Session, All Poster-PDFs.
About Us
The RTG 2386 “Extrospection” is an independent research project attached to the Berlin School of Mind and Brain.
Our aim is to conduct a comprehensive epistemological, historical and empirical assessment of extrospection, which is defined as the third-person access to another person’s conscious experience, e.g. with scientific methods or by way of mind reading. As a working hypothesis, we assume that there is an epistemic symmetry between extrospection and introspection: What can be known by way of first-person methods can be known by way of third-person methods as well, at least in principle. While we do not deny the obvious insufficiencies of current extrospective methods, we hypothesize that they can be overcome by future scientific, methodological, and technological developments.