Dr Carrie Figdor: Dehumanization, Anthropomorphism, and Other Mindreading Speech Acts.
Speech-act theory provides a framework for mindreading of ourselves, other humans, nonhuman living creatures, and inanimate objects. This framework emphasizes our uses of psychological terms in context to categorize and characterize others for social and epistemic purposes. Dehumanizing and anthropomorphizing mindreading practices and responses to them reveal a tension between these purposes. I show how this tension may be alleviated through explicit recognition of the distinct goals of mindreading in science and society and through conceptual revision of human and animal concepts to distinguish biological and social senses.
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