timelets

“Cultural representations such as Little Red Riding Hood, the Golden Rule, or multiplication tables are, most of the time, considered in the abstract, even though they must be instantiated in mental and public representations in order to play a role in human affairs.. Since representations are recognized in our commonsense ontology, the question arises: What cognitive mechanisms do we have, if any, for drawing inferences about them? ”

“There must be a mindreading module—actually a minds-reading module, with “minds” in the plural—that has the job of managing, in our mental files about other people, what these people have in their men “mental files. No such module, however, could do the job on its own. In order to perform mindreading inferences about the inferences that are performed in other people’s mind, the mindreading module must be linked to a great variety of other inferential modules and use them for updating the information represented in individual files.”

Dan Sperber. “The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.”