Phil Koop

Comment of the Day: "It is not only crows and chimpanzees that have a 'theory of mind'-people do too!": Phil Koop: "Well thank goodness I am not the only one who feels this way! Far too much is made, in my opinion, of the [Scott Sumner's] banal observation that we can never know what someone else is thinking. This is speciously true - we can never be certain of the entirety of another's thoughts. But it is substantively false, once you allow as you ought for probable inference; we can often make a pretty good guess on salient points of interest. It is not only crows and chimpanzees that have a 'theory of mind'-people do too! And some of us are pretty good at it; we can be quite sure of this because they tend to do things like consistently win a lot of money at poker. Certainly we do not need to be telepaths to judge Moore's or Cain's motives...

#commentoftheday