Abstract
So far, we have introduced and discussed three prominent approaches to mindreading – theory-theory, modularity-theory, and simulation-theory – put forward as competing descriptions of the representational and computational processes on what Marr (1982) called the algorithmic level of description. As we saw in Chaps. 5 and 6, theories of empathy and enactive accounts of direct perceptual experience, though invariably put forward as competitors to these views, really describe a different phenomenon under the heading of social cognition, namely, empathy. ‑ In this chapter, we introduce the recently popular predictive processing framework of perception, cognition, and action and evaluate its explanatory strength in the context of social cognition. It has been praised by philosophers and cognitive scientists alike for its unificatory power as a theory of cognition in general, and recently some researchers have also claimed that it can provide a unifying view of social understanding. Since the literature on this topic is still very sparse, we will keep the discussion brief and relate the theory to the theories we have discussed so far.
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Schlicht, T. (2023). Predictive Processing Theories. In: Philosophy of Social Cognition. Palgrave Philosophy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14491-2_7
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