Accessing Mental States: The Mind from Different Perspectives

This interdisciplinary workshop provides a space for reflecting on the more fundamental issues underlying the different approaches to others’ mental states and to present recent empirical studies related to the following questions: 

How are we able to obtain access to the mental from second- and third-person perspectives? 

Which mental states and processes are accessible without relying on a subject’s introspection? 

What procedures are adequate to access the mental? What do they imply for the perspectives involved? 

What are the major theoretical and methodological challenges we have to overcome? 

Focusing on social cognition, psychiatry, and their corresponding methodologies, we explore clinical and non-clinical cases of external access to mental states and processes. The aim of the workshop is to further evaluate procedures used in clinical and non-clinical settings and to investigate their relation to the foundations of external access among human beings (such as empathy and perspective-taking).