Hi, I’m James and I’m a PhD student in philosophy, working at University of Manchester, UK.
In the course of doing my PhD, there will be stuff that I want to share that isn’t necessarily going in my thesis. I intend this space to be a place to put casual conversational pieces about stuff I’m thinking about or working on, as well as thoughts about life as a PhD student.
For those wondering, my research (at the moment) is about the role of character trait attributions in our folk psychology. Folk psychology is our capacity to understand others. Generally, it is thought that our ability to ‘mindread’, to attribute propositional attitudes to others, is the main way by which humans do this. (E.g. she will drink the water because she is thirsty, she desires to quench her thirst and believes that drinking water will achieve this.) However, a lot of the research into mindreading doesn’t consider a lot of the other complex social interactions we engage in, like attributing character traits to people. Where does this ability fit in our folk psychology, and how does it relate to mindreading?
Caffeinated Man 