The content of this course changes every year; this year it will be taught by Pierre Jacob and will focus on:

Human mentalizing: its scope and limits

To mentalize is to attribute a mental state (e.g. a belief, an intention, a desire, an emotion etc.) to self and others, i.e. to form a belief about one's own or another's mental state. The cognitive capacity to mentalize has largely been taken for granted by philosophers who have addressed such logical puzzles as referential opacity, the intensionality of belief-ascription and the aspectuality of beliefs. The course will review these philosophical puzzles, but it will pay special attention to the developmental psychological investigation of how the capacity to mentalize arises in human ontogeny (and to some extent in phylogeny). It will examine the central role assigned to the capacity to attribute false beliefs to others. It will address the puzzle raised by discrepant developmental findings and it will compare the various resolutions of this puzzle offered in the past ten or so years. In particular, it will evaluate so-called dual-process (or two-systems) approaches to mentalizing. As the course will also address some of the limits of the human capacity to mentalize, it will highlight the extent to which the human capacity to attribute reasons is beyond the human capacity to mentalize.