| Mitchell Herschbach |
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy & Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. My main research interests lie in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, including phenomenological approaches to cognitive science. My work thus far has mainly focused on the nature of human social understanding. From a philosophy of science perspective, I am interested in the nature of explanation in cognitive science, and have explored how to integrate phenomenological claims into multilevel, mechanistic explanations of cognitive phenomena. In my dissertation, Beyond Folk Psychology? Toward an Enriched Account of Social Understanding, I address the role of folk psychology (i.e., mental state attribution) in human social understanding, critiquing phenomenology-based arguments against the importance of folk psychology to everyday social understanding. While I accept and expand on the phenomenologists' call to emphasize unreflective social interaction, I argue that their phenomenological descriptions do not rule out mental state attribution, and that they have not offered convincing reason to reject the standard mechanistic accounts of our folk psychological abilities, namely, theory theory and simulation theory. This engagement with phenomenology identifies ways to enrich folk psychological accounts and highlights issues for further theoretical and empirical research. |
Teaching |
Selected Publications |
| - A response by Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher titled "The (in)visibility of others: a reply to Herschbach," appears in the same issue. |
Call for book reviewers |
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