In Open Minds, Wolfgang Prinz offers the novel claim that agencyand intentionality are first perceived and understood in others, and that it is only throughpractices and discourses of social mirroring that individuals come to apply these features tothemselves and to shape their architectures for volition and cognition accordingly. Developing a(social science) constructive approach within a (cognitive science) representational framework,Prinz argues that the architectures for agency (volition) and intentionality (cognition) arise fromparticular kinds of social interaction and communication. Rather than working as closed, individualsystems, our minds operate in ways that are fundamentally open to other minds. Prinz describesmirror systems and mirror games, particular kinds of representational mechanisms and social gamesthat provide tools for aligning closed individual minds with other minds. He maps the formation ofan architecture for volition, addressing issues of agency and intention-based top-down control, thenoutlines the ways the same basic ideas can be applied to an architecture for cognition, helping tosolve basic issues of subjectivity and intentionality. Addressing the reality and efficacy of suchsocial artifacts as autonomy and free will, Prinz contends that our beliefs about minds are not justbeliefs about their workings but powerful tools for making them work as we believe. It is throughour beliefs that our minds work in a particular way that we actually make them work in thatway.
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