About Robert Gordon, Seminar Director

Although I am a proponent and defender of a simulation approach, I strongly welcome and encourage disagreement with this view. As you will see, it was my own disagreement with a speaker at an NEH institute that spurred me to develop my own account of our commonsense understanding of the mind.

My initial interest in the topic developed out of my work on the nature of emotions and emotion concepts, presented in a number of articles and a book, The Structure of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1987). By the early 1980's I had come to think that emotion concepts could best be understood by addressing broader issues concerning mental concepts in general and our ability to apply them in understanding, explaining, and predicting human behavior. Like a number of other philosophers, however, I was not satisfied with the established "theory" account.

In 1984 I participated in Robert Audi's NEH summer institute on the Philosophy of Action. Responding to a challenge by one of the visiting speakers, I tried, not very successfully, to articulate an alternative to the theory theory. I continued work on the project in the last weeks of the institute and remained for an additional week to complete a paper containing my earliest formulation of the simulation theory. This was the ancestor of "Folk Psychology as Simulation," which was published in 1986 in the interdisciplinary journal Mind and Language. It was chiefly this paper that initially sparked the debate between ST and TT. In 1992, Mind and Language dedicated a special issue to the debate; and, such was the interest in the subject, the special issue grew into a double issue (Spring and Summer 1992) and, in 1995, the two Blackwell collections mentioned earlier. The debate was the main topic of a 1994 conference on "Theories of Theories of Mind," at the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies, University of Sheffield, UK. Papers from this conference were later published in Carruthers and Smith 1996.

I plan to have a couple of visiting speakers who have been prominently involved in the debate, but at this date I don't know who these will be. Major contributors to the debate include the philosophers Jane Heal, Alvin Goldman, Stephen Stich, Shaun Nichols, Martin Davies, and Gregory Currie; and the psychologists Paul Harris, Josef Perner, and Alison Gopnik.