
The Social Brain: Neural Basis of Social Knowledge (2009) - prossercj
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2588649/
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prossercj
I stumbled onto this while looking for something completely different (the
book by Michael Gazzaniga), and found it interesting enough to share.

I was intrigued by the idea in these paragraphs about three different kinds of
knowledge: of the world, of one's mind, and of other minds.

> There are three broad domains of knowledge that, taken together, seem to
> exhaust what it is that we can know or conceive of knowing. The first is the
> simplest to describe—it is knowledge of the nonsocial environment, the world
> we share with others. The common-sense view is that this domain of knowledge
> is shared, public, and hence objective in that sense. How we come to acquire
> this knowledge is also no mystery—through our senses and perception of the
> world (although the acquisition of such knowledge already depends on
> learning, selection, and categorization mechanisms that are in part innate).
> Although the kinds of inferences that we make about the world are certainly
> complex, it seems that much of this domain of knowledge is shared with other
> animals. Like us, mice, cats, dogs, and monkeys know about objects in the
> world, the properties they possess, and the events they transact; they know
> something about which objects are good and which are bad, and they direct
> their behavior accordingly.

> The second and third domains of knowledge are more mysterious, and it is
> unclear to what extent, if at all, other animals have access to them. These
> are knowledge of other minds, and knowledge of our own mind. Although many
> biologists who study social behavior in animals treat their processing of
> social information as an issue in perception that is just a special instance
> of the first category discussed above, some, especially those working with
> primates, focus on knowledge of one's own and others' minds. Workhorse tasks
> have been devised to assess the abilities in question: deception as a test
> for knowledge of other minds, and mirror self-recognition as a test for
> self-knowledge.

