Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we examine the suggestion that inferences about another person's state of mind can proceed by simulation. According to that suggestion, one performs such reasoning by imagining oneself in that person's state of mind, and observing the evolution of that imagined cognitive state. However, this simulation-based theory of psychological inference suffers from a number of limitations. In particular, whilst one can perhaps observe the probable effects of an given cognitive state by putting oneself in that state, one cannot thus observe its probable causes. The purpose of this paper is to propose a solution to this problem, within the spirit of the simulation-based theory of psychological inference. According to the indexing thesis, certain cognitive mechanisms required for non-psychological inference can be re-used for hypothesising psychological causes. The paper concludes by discussing some of the possible implications of the indexing thesis.