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Supported by the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

How to Understand Others (Without Mindreading)

What are the obstacles to understanding one another and how can we best overcome them? In this talk, I consider and reject the most popular accounts of understanding others, including those that award prominent roles to empathy and theory. Such approaches, I maintain, are overly informationalist, in so far as they conceive of understanding as a kind of 'mindreading' which involves accessing information that is purportedly stored in the mind or brain. This conception, which can be traced back to Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, contrasts with Wittgenstein's idea that we only begin to understand one another through the sharing of interests and behaviour. Wittgenstein's approach holds up across cultural, political, and even biological divides. It faces serious challenges, however, in cases of historical understanding and self-understanding. To think through these more difficult cases, I solicit some additional assistance from Nietzsche and Collingwood.

Constantine Sandis is Director of Lex Academic and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire. His authored books include The Things We Do and Why We Do Them, Character and Causation, From Action to Ethics, and Wittgenstein on Other Minds. He is currently working on a book on understanding others for Yale University Press.