Deanne Bogdan; Toward a Rationale for Literary Literacy, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 199–212, https://doi.org/10.

An argument that in response to sociocultural pressures, human minds develop self-consciousness by activating a complex machinery of self-regulation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 80-98 [Access article in PDF] Musical Spirituality:Reflections on Identity and the Ethics of Embodied Aesthetic Experience in/and the Academy Deanne Bogdan Music in/and My Life Several years ago, I attended a Pontifical High Mass at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. It was the feast of the Epiphany, a public holiday in the predominantly Roman Catholic country of Austria. 1 A "lapsed" (...) Catholic myself, my intention as part of the congregation that day was not primarily one of worship as it was to listen to a performance of the Pauckenmesse of Joseph Haydn, complete with soloists, full choir, and orchestra (in overcoats), including, of course, timpani.As I stepped from the brilliant winter morning into the narthex of that gothic splendor, the pungency of the incense propelled me into Proustian recollections of growing up female, Catholic, and Italian-Canadian in the cathedral parish in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada's steel town. My mother and father, first generation Italian-Canadians, whose own parents had emigrated as teen-agers, had been partners in a corner grocery located in another part of the city that was largely professional and white-Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Eager to assimilate (they never spoke Italian to my sister or me, and we never learned the language), my parents realized early on that their most valuable legacy to their two daughters would be the advantages of a solid education, religious and secular. For them that meant enrolling us in the local co-educational Catholic elementary school. Later we attended a convent secondary school as day students, and were the only members of our extended family, male or female, to attend university.It was memories of those elementary school years that were conjured up for me that crisp January morning at St. Stephen's. (In hindsight, I am struck by the synchronicity 2 of the fact that my original surname is Di Stefano, or rather "Distefan," as it had become in its anglicized form). 3 For a [End Page 80] whole complex of reasons, I identified strongly with my parochial school and the church that sheltered/shadowed it — a soaring pseudo-gothic structure reputed to have been replicated, stone by stone, wood carving by hand wood carving, from some European cathedral. The romance of that basilica — The Cathedral of Christ the King — its "daughter" school, and the priests and nuns who were our guides and teachers became my second family for the whole of my grade school education. For me, being at school was like a recognition scene. As Italian-American literary theorist Marianna de Marco Torgovnick writes: When I was a child, school was...a light-filled, wide awake world in which fear did not erupt except on rare occasions. I saw school as a place where I was valued for my intelligence, even though I was female — and this probably had something to do with my absence of fear there. I quite naturally chose to stay in school through college and into graduate school. It's in these relatively late years that I first became fully conscious of how even within the world of school I was and always would be female. 4My identification with my church/school centered around my musical development, which began at age four when the piano I grew up on arrived like a beacon in our home. Coterminous with my eager entry into first grade, piano lessons were begun with Sister Cecile, a somewhat nervous, gentle nun predisposed to mystical experience, who shepherded me through exams and recitals until high school. Because I could sight-read fairly well, I was regularly pulled out of class to accompany soloists and dancing groups rehearsing for annual Christmas and St. Patrick's Day concerts. Something about this made me feel special; I both reveled in and felt isolated by my difference from my classmates. I had found a sense of community through my music, and enjoyed a feeling of security in the knowledge that my schoolwork was strong enough... (shrink)

The theme of this essay is rather simple, though its demonstration is not. It is that humans think reflexively or metamentally because -- and often in the forms in which -- they interpret each other. In this essay ‘metamental’ means ‘about mental’ and ‘reflexive mind’ means ‘a mind thinking about its own thoughts.’ To think reflexively or metamentally is to think about thoughts deliberately and explicitly, as in thinking that my current thoughts about metamentation are right. Thinking about thoughts requires (...) understanding thoughts as thoughts, as mental structures that represent; it also requires an ability to relate thoughts to other thoughts and to recognize such inter-thought relations. Since metamentation is essential to and uniquely distinctive of human minds, the idea that it originates in interpreting other minds can be encapsulated in the slogan that minds are minded because minds mind minds. This word play translates as: minds evolve into reflexive minds because they mind other minds -- where ‘minding other minds’ means interacting and bonding with other minds, being concerned or curious about them, representing their relations to the world, manipulating and using these relations for some purpose, and the like. All of this amounts (in my terminology) to interpreting other minds in social contexts of cooperation, communication, education, politics, and so on. It follows that intermental relations among individuals, handled by a distinct competence for interpretation, are essential to the evolution of abilities to represent intramental relations among thoughts, typical of a reflexive mind. I take ‘interpretation’ to be a convenient, short, and grammatically flexible label for what is known in philosophy as commonsense or folk psychology and in psychology as theory of mind, mindreading, or naive psychology. Interpretation is a cognitive rapport between an interpreter (she, in this book) and a subject (he), whereby she represents his mind-world relations, from the simplest, such as seeing.... (shrink)

Research targeting emotion’s impact on relational episodic memory has largely focused on spatial aspects, but less is known about emotion’s impact on memory for an event’s temporal associations. The present research investigated this topic. Participants viewed a series of interspersed negative and neutral images with instructions to create stories linking successive images. Later, participants performed a surprise memory test, which measured temporal associations between pairs of consecutive pictures where one picture was negative and one was neutral. Analyses focused on how (...) the order of negative and neutral images during encoding influenced retrieval accuracy. Converging results from a discovery study (N = 72) and pre-registered replication study (N = 150) revealed a “forward-favouring” effect of emotion in temporal memory encoding: Participants encoded associations between negative stimuli and subsequent neutral stimuli more strongly than associations between negative stimuli and preceding neutral stimuli. This finding may reflect a novel trade-off regarding emotion’s effects on memory and is relevant for understanding affective disorders, as key clinical symptoms can be conceptualised as maladaptive memory retrieval of temporal details. (shrink)

This is how guidance of behavior to goal grounds and explains cognition and the main forms in which it manages information.

Arguments, the story goes, have one or more premises and only one conclusion. A contentious generalisation allows arguments with several disjunctively connected conclusions. Contentious as this generalisation may be, I will argue nevertheless that it is justified. My main claim is that multiple conclusions are epiphenomena of the logical connectives: some connectives determine, in a certain sense, multiple-conclusion derivations. Therefore, such derivations are completely natural and can safely be used in proof-theoretic semantics.

The contributors to this volume examine recent controversies about the importance of common sense psychology for our understanding of the human mind. Common sense provides a familiar and friendly psychological scheme by which to talk about the mind. Its categories tend to portray the mind as quite different from the rest of nature, and thus irreducible to physical matters and its laws. In this volume a variety of positions on common sense psychology from critical to supportive, from exegetical to speculative, (...) are represented. Among the questions posed are: Is common sense psychology an empirical theory, a body of analytic knowledge, a practice or a strategy? If it is a legitimate enterprise can it be naturalized or not? If it is not legitimate can it be eliminated? Is its fate tied to our understanding of consciousness? Should we approach its concepts and generalizations from the standpoint of conceptual analysis or from the philosophy of science? (shrink)

In this paper I analyse the claim according to which law is objective. After clarifying the philosophically relevant meaning of this claim , I distinguish several aspects of the thesis, concerning, respectively legal truth , legal error , legal determinacy and the metaphysical status of legal entities . Then, I take into consideration the phenomenology of our legal practice and the apparent support it gives to claims of legal objectivity. Finally, I stress the connection between legal objectivity and normativity and (...) suggest that legal objectivity reduces to the conclusiveness of legal reasoning. (shrink)

Logical nihilism is the view that the relation of logical consequence is empty: there are counterexamples to any putative logical law. In this paper, I argue that the nihilist threat is illusory. The nihilistic arguments do not work. Moreover, the entire project is based on a misguided interpretation of the generality of logic.

Intra-theoretical logical pluralism is a form of meaning-invariant pluralism about logic, articulated recently by Hjortland :355–373, 2013). This version of pluralism relies on it being possible to define several distinct notions of provability relative to the same logical calculus. The present paper picks up and explores this theme: How can a single logical calculus express several different consequence relations? The main hypothesis articulated here is that the divide between the internal and external consequence relations in Gentzen systems generates a form (...) of intra-theoretical logical pluralism. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest dyskusja pewnych ogólnych, epistemologicznych i semantycznych podstaw badań logicznych. Osią rozważań są pytania o 1) istotę i źródła rozwoju tzw. logiki czystej i 2) związek logiki czystej z logiką stosowaną. Autor stara się przy tym uzasadnić dlaczego taki właśnie dobór kwestii posiada zasadniczą teoretyczną i metodologiczną wartość, by po tym udzielić odpowiedzi na postawione pytania.

The present study aims to provide a critical analysis of the account of modernity and modern thinkers done by the Austrian philosopher Eric Voegelin, arguably one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century. Eric Voegelin is a leading figure among those who considered it pertinent to speak about a crisis of modernity, primarily seen as a crisis of the spirit. The present study stresses Voegelin’s original analysis of “the ideological soul” of modern thinkers, his effort to go (...) beyond a merely descriptive approach, and to define ideological thinking as a spiritually diseased pattern of thought rooted in an existential attitude. At the same time, I critically discuss some problematic consequences of Voegelin’s position, the possible flaws in his treatment of modern philosophers, perhaps too harshly seen as “intellectual swindlers” whose main concern was the distortion of fundamental experiences. (shrink)

Research has shown that cheating is perceived as immoral when it serves the cheater’s interests, though it can be seen as moral when it serves the interests of the perceiver. However, are such biased moral judgments real, or are they merely lip service? To answer the question of whether biased moral judgments actually inform behavior, the authors asked participants to observe a confederate who either cheated for money or did not cheat, which benefited either the confederate alone or both the (...) confederate and the participating observer. Then, participants evaluated the confederate and, finally, played a one shot trust game with her. Cheating influenced moral judgments and decreased behavioral trust, but this only occurred when self-interest was not involved. When self-interest was involved, participants showed no significant differences in trust levels, independent of whether the confederate had cheated or not. Implications for the dual process theory in moral psychology are discussed. (shrink)

In this original and provocative book, Bogdan proposes that the ability to interpret others' mental states should be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation.

The aim of this historically oriented article is to give an account of the methodological similarity of Whitehead and Russell with regard to the logico-mathematical mode of philosophical analysis, and of Whitehead and Moore with regard to common sense. According to the authors, these similarities, especially when taken together, justify the classification of Whitehead as an analytic philosopher. Because of the doctrinal uniqueness of Whitehead, however, they also hold that he will always remain an atypical analytic philosopher.

The strict-tolerant approach to paradox promises to erect theories of naïve truth and tolerant vagueness on the firm bedrock of classical logic. We assess the extent to which this claim is founded. Building on some results by Girard we show that the usual proof-theoretic formulation of propositional ST in terms of the classical sequent calculus without primitive Cut is incomplete with respect to ST-valid metainferences, and exhibit a complete calculus for the same class of metainferences. We also argue that the (...) latter calculus, far from coinciding with classical logic, is a close kin of Priest’s LP. (shrink)

: The dual perspective model of agency and communion predicts that observers tend to interpret a target’s behavior more in terms of communion than agency, whereas actors interpret their behavior more in terms of agency. The present research for the first time tests this model in real interactions. Previously unacquainted participants had a short conversation and afterwards rated their own behavior and their interaction partner’s behavior in terms of agency and communion. Supporting the dual perspective model, observers rated the actor’s (...) behavior higher on communion than on agency, and higher on communion than actors themselves did. Findings for actors were more complex: Actors rated their own behavior as more agentic than observers did. However, they also rated their behavior high on communion. We discuss implications for the dual perspective model as well as for understandings in social interactions. (shrink)

An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be.

The aim of this paper is to present Peirce’s semiotics as an important factor in the genesis of Alfred North Whitehead’s doctrine of symbolism. I argue that Peirce had a direct impact on Whitehead’s earliest reflections on symbolism generally and mathematical symbolism particularly. From his first encounter with Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic doctrine, contrasted to that of George F. Stout, Whitehead derived a general doctrine of signs which he never abandoned and which formed the basis of his mature doctrine of (...) symbolism. While in the first years of his Harvard professorship, Whitehead suffered a second, indirect, influence from Peirce, through the American philosophers he interacted with. His mature philosophy of perception is both the development and application of the doctrine derived from Peirce and Stout thirty years before, and a reply to the realist doctrines which stressed the symbolic nature of perceptual knowledge, most importantly Santayana’s. Whitehead’s own brand of realism rests on the assumption of a pansemiotic principle, obscurely and mediately derived from Peirce. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a proof-theoretic defence of meaning-invariant logical pluralism. I argue that there is a relation of co-determination between the operational and structural aspects of a logic. As a result, some features of the consequence relation are induced by the connectives. I propose that a connective is defined by those rules which are conservative and unique, while at the same time expressing only connective-induced structural information. This is the key to stabilizing the meaning of the connectives across (...) multiple determinations of the consequence relation. (shrink)

This paper discusses three research perspectives on political culture, civic culture and citizenship: the classic approach of Almond and Verba; contemporary analyses of citizenship referring to the book Civic Culture by Almond and Verba and oriented to the empirical description of social reality; and theoretical analyses of new relational sociology, oriented to the ontology and epistemology of social reality. The authors’ analysis leads to two conclusions. Firstly, it is necessary to combine these three approaches – relational social theory with empirical (...) analyses departing from methodological individualism. This requires conducting an empirical analysis, where the basic ‘analytical units’ – of collection, interpretation and generalization of data – are not separate but combined by relations and networks within which people act. Secondly, Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński’s statements are the best starting point for conducting such a new research programme. What is decisive is his systematic, theoretical interest in contemporary agency theories and relationality of citizenship, combined with innovative application of quantitative methods. (shrink)

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted all aspects of social and economic life, including the evolution of stock markets. Thus, we advance a methodological framework suitable for assessing 2020 year-long shifts in markets’ statistical complexity, and we apply such framework to ten major international developed or emerging stock markets. Our research reveals that this crisis had considerably altered markets’ evolutionary patterns. The network description of markets’ multivocal transmission of complex responses changed in 2020, European and Asian markets (...) playing a pivotal role. Nevertheless, an important regional and time heterogeneity emerges. In addition, we find that the total number of worldwide confirmed COVID-19 cases plays a leading role in the changes in markets’ complexity. (shrink)

Eliminativism assumes that commonsense psychology describes and explains the mind in terms of the internal design and operation of the mind. If this assumption is invalidated, so is eliminativism. The same conditional is true of intentional realism. Elsewhere (Bogdan 1991) I have argued against this 'folk- theory-theory' assumption by showing that commonsense psychology is not an empirical prototheory of the mind but a biosocially motivated practice of coding, utilizing, and sharing information from and about conspecifics. Here, without presupposing a (...) specific analysis of commonsense psychology, I want to challenge a key implication of the 'folk-theory-theory' assumption to the effect that commonsense psychology is committed to a definite architecture of the mind. (shrink)

A logical constant is weakly disharmonious if its elimination rules are weaker than its introduction rules. Substructural weak disharmony is the weak disharmony generated by structural restrictions on the eliminations. I argue that substructural weak disharmony is not a defect of the constants which exhibit it. To the extent that it is problematic, it calls into question the structural properties of the derivability relation. This prompts us to rethink the issue of controlling the structural properties of a logic by means (...) of harmony. I argue that such a control is possible and desirable. Moreover, it is best achieved by global tests of harmony. (shrink)

In the recent literature on proof-theoretic semantics, there is mention of a generality condition on defining rules. According to this condition, the schematic formulation of the defining rules must be maximally general, in the sense that no restrictions should be placed on the contexts of these rules. In particular, context variables must always be present in the schematic rules and they should range over arbitrary collections of formulae. I argue against imposing such a condition, by showing that it has undesirable (...) results and that it is ill-supported by the arguments brought in its favour. (shrink)

Some of the topics presented in this volume of original essays on contemporary approaches to belief include the problem of misrepresentation and false belief, conscious versus unconscious belief, explicit versus tacit belief, and the durable versus ephemeral question of the nature of belief. The contributors, Fred Dretske, Keith Lehrer, William Lycan, Stephen Schiffer, Stephen P. Stich, and the editor, Radu Bogdan, focus on the mental realization of belief, its cognitive and behavioral aspects, and the semantic aspects of its content. (...) This interdisciplinary study takes advantage of many new theories in what has become an important area of research. (shrink)

This collection of essays evolved from a colloquium held at the University of British Columbia in 1995 to honour the eminent political scientist and aphorist W.J. Stankiewicz. A theorist and consultant on political decisions, Stankiewicz has been noted for his ability to bring the classical concepts of political science into the decision-making rooms of everyday political action. Among the distinguished Canadian and American contributors are Alan Cairns, Jean Bethke Elshtain, George Feaver, Barry Cooper, Anthony Parel, Arpad Kadarkay and Ian Ross. (...) The contributors have not only explored and extended the central ideas of Stankiew146;s political situations. The volume concludes with two of Professor Stankiewicz's hitherto unpublished essays (on natural law and ecology, and truth in politics). (shrink)

In this article I analyze the issue of many levels of reality that are studied by natural sciences. Particularly interesting is the level of mathematics and the question of the relationship between mathematics and the structure of the real world. The mathematical nature of the world has been considered since ancient times and is the subject of ongoing research for philosophers of science to this day. One of the viewpoints in this field is mathematical Platonism. In contemporary philosophy it is (...) widely accepted that according to Plato mathematics is the domain of ideal beings that are eternal and unalterable and exist independently from the subject’s beliefs and decisions. Two issues seem to be important here. The first issue concerns the question: was Plato really a proponent of present-day mathematical Platonism? The second one is of greater importance: how mathematics influences our understanding of the nature of the world on its many ontological levels? In the article I consider three issues: the Platonic theory of “two worlds”, the method of building a mathematical structure, and the ontology of mathematics. (shrink)

Contestable motives of filing reports comprise a set of factors which were not present in the origin of the reported criminal act, as stated by the reporting individual. The objective of such reports is to create circumstances which would lead to the either an imaginary or implicated perpetrator being brought to criminal justice. These types of reports generate a number of doubts and investigative problems. Recently, in the light of newly introduced legislative changes into the methods of investigative procedures in (...) relation to sexual assault, this issue has become much more significant. The following publication includes a detailed description of the legal and psychological situation of an individual who has been classified as a victim in a case of sexual assault. The article includes an analysis of statistical data encompassing the period after the introduction of the aforementioned legislative changes in the type of investigative procedures as well as a qualitative analysis of the major factors influencing the process of filing contestable reports of such crimes. The research has been conducted on the basis of analysing a total of 50 cases. It is the opinion of the author that an expert court psychologist, whose presence is mandatory in these types of cases and whose opinion formulated in the course of preparatory proceedings ought to play a key role in the disclosure of false pretences accompanying such reports. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the issue of alchemy in the scientific activity of Adam A. Kochanski. Polish Jesuit, Adam Kochanski S J was an unusual scholar in the Polish science of the 17th century. Kochanski was an excellent mathematician, one of his greatest achievement in mathematics is the solution of the famous squaring of the circle. He published his mathematical works in "Acta Eruditorium", one of the first scientific journals in 17th century Europe. Kochanski was a professor of (...) mathematics in Germany, Italy, Prague, Olomouc, Wroclaw and Warszawa. An interesting part Kochanski's activity is his correspondence with many scholars, mathematicans and philosophers, for example the exchange of letters with German philosopher and mathematican Gottfried W. Leibniz. (shrink)

This study demonstrates how and with what aim philosophy is received into the missionary activities of the apostles Paul and Luke as regards the Areopagitica in Acts 17. By an ingenious utilization of Greco-Roman learning and paideia, generally, and philosophy, particularly, Lukan Paul offers a context oriented cross-cultural model of preaching the kerygmatic word as of evangelization. A model for the inculturation of the power and meanings of the Gospel message is offered. In this a significant function is allocated to (...) disciplined mindful reasoning, viz. philosophy. The author demonstrates the special ways in which contact-points are made, and common ground established, between the apostle Paul and Athenian philosophers. This allows him to observe that philosophy is endorsed by the primordial Church: both (a) as a dialectical (critical analytical) and rhetorical (per­suasive oratorical) science-skill of addressing significant intellectual others and (b) as a faith-friendly mode of the Christian’s practice of philosophy. The author infers a number of conclusions regarding the substantial role that philosophy acquires within the early Church. Moreover, the Christian endorsement of philosophy as a missionary tool has its grounding in the apostolic Church and, consequentially, it has its grounding in the New Testament. In this way philosophy, utilized and re-functionalized by the apostles Paul and Luke themselves, in its special way, participates in the “authoritative establishment of tradition by means of apostolic origin”. The missionary model laid-out in Acts 17:16-34 has lasting value and needs to be continuously re-actualized: the same follows suit for a faith-conducive practice of philosophy. (shrink)

The novel COVID-19 infection has spread all over the world and is still generating a lot of issues at different levels. There is a lack of control in disease early diagnosis and rapid evolution, which impacts both the medical and the economic system. Young gastroenterologists should adapt to overcome current difficulties and continue their life and general training. This is a multi-center national study, which aims to assess the general perspective of young gastroenterologists from six university centers in Romania regarding (...) their current training and the psychological effect the pandemic has on their life and job. An online survey with 58 items was distributed using Google Forms, and quality of life and anxiety were assessed. The validated instruments 15D and endler multidimensional anxiety scales were used. All analyses were performed using SPSS 25. Of the 174 gastroenterologists approached, 96 responded. A majority of the respondents were residents in gastroenterology, and 40.6% were male. The pandemic influenced the number of examined patients as well as young gastroenterologists’ endoscopy training. Health-related quality of life was negatively associated with the level of anxiety generated by the cognitive component of anxiety as a state, the new and ambiguity of the state, and how threatened the respondent felt. The level of anxiety was moderate, and no difference was found between the physicians working in a designated hospital or not. General caution should be considered for young gastroenterologists’ training, and continuous observation should be done to ensure better mental health on the current evolution. These findings would need to be verified in larger-sample studies and in different types of specialties. (shrink)

This book explores the evolution of the mental competence for self-reflection: why it evolved, under what selection pressures, in what environments, out of what precursors, and with what mental resources. Integrating evolutionary, psychological, and philosophical perspectives, Radu J. Bogdan argues that the competence for self-reflection, uniquely human and initially autobiographical, evolved under strong and persistent sociocultural and political pressures on the developing minds of older children and later adults. Self-reflection originated in a basic propensity of the human brain to (...) rehearse anticipatively mental states, speech acts, actions, and states of the world in order to service one's elaborate goal policies. These goal policies integrate offline representations of one's own mental states and actions and those of others in order to handle the challenges of a complex and dynamic sociopolitical and sociocultural life, calling for an adaptive intramental self-regulation: that intramental adaptation is self-reflection. (shrink)

This article is first in a series dedicated to issues in the intellectual history of Mīmāṃsā in early modern India and part of a larger effort to broaden the basis for understanding the new formulations of central topics of the Mīmāṃsā textual-ritual complex in this period. It examines how the Varanasi scholar Khaṇḍadevamiśra makes use of Navyanyāya tools of analysis by putting under the microscope the example of his investigation and new formulation of the signification of agent and agency by (...) the verbal affix in his ample analysis of the cognition of the meaning elements of a sentence. Authors of Mīmāṃsā works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gradually and selectively adopt the tools and techniques of cognitive analysis and the characteristic new idiom elaborated by Navyanaiyāyikas a few centuries earlier. This process of adoption arises on the sidelines of the Advaita–Dvaita Vedānta controversy in South India, then subsequently flourishes in Varanasi, as I have followed elsewhere. In his analysis of the topic studied here, Khaṇḍadeva uses the new tools to revisit the Mīmāṃsā tradition in order to advance his new formulation while refuting certain Navyanyāya rival positions. (shrink)

On a bilateralist reading, sequents are interpreted as statements to the effect that, given the assertion of the antecedent it is incoherent to deny the succedent. This interpretation goes against its own ecumenical ambitions, endowing Cut with a meaning very close to that of tertium non datur and thus rendering it intuitionistically unpalatable. This paper explores a top-down route for arguing that, even intuitionistically, a prohibition to deny is as strong as a licence to assert.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S72-S78, March‐April 2022.

Almost everybody believes, but nobody has conclusively shown, that common sense psychology is a descriptive body of knowledge about the mind, the way physics is about elementary particles or medicine about bodily conditions. Of course, common sense psychology helps itself to many notions about the mind. This does not show that common sense psychology is about the mind. Physics also helps itself to plenty of mathematical notions, without being about mathematical entities and relations. Employment of notions about the mind does (...) not by itself establish the nature and business of common sense psychology. To find out what the latter's notions are about requires finding out what they are for. To find out what they are for, we should start by asking who employs them in what contexts and for what reasons. If we consider seriously these questions, we should not be too surprised to find out that: (1) A subject is an agent busily pursuing his worldly interests. In the process, he encodes, operates on, can be read for, and often deliberately conveys information about his current as well as past or future cognitive and behavioral states, and about the world around him, as it was, is, and could be. (2) A sense maker is also a busy agent. To pursue her worldly.. (shrink)