The question “How do we understand other human beings?” has to be divided into several subquestions, the first of which is: What epistemic strategy do we adopt to register or assess the other’s cognitive states? To reach any kind of assessment of the other we need to obtain information within a concrete situation. The second question is: Once obtained, how is this prior information stored and organized? This second aspect is important, because we always rely on prior background knowledge in our assessments of others. One main defect of the debate thus far has turns on the failure to distinguish these two questions. The debate between the two classic positions, ST and TT, can roughly be described as a misunderstanding stemming from their dealing with different questions: while ST insists that the use of simulation is the standard epistemic strategy, TT insists that the prior information we have about others is organized as a folk-psychological theory. Concerning their main claims, these accounts are not in opposition. The opposition only becomes visible if for each account we consider their favoured answer to both questions. The classic opposition between ST and TT can then be described as follows: TT claims that the epistemic strategy relies upon theory-based inferences, and that the prior information is organized as a folk-psychological theory; while ST claims that the strategy for information-processing involves simulation (to put oneself into the other person’s shoes) which draws only on my own experience as the source of data for simulation, leaving it open as to whether these data form a theory.
Before turning to the question of which information-processing strategy we use to understand others, I first provide a brief survey of the field. Thus, in addition to TT and ST, we have Gallagher’s IT, which focuses only on the strategy question; it claims that we understand others through social interaction and/or by direct perception, i.e., we can directly perceive mental phenomena; we also have Hutto’s account, which is given in terms of story-telling. Their more elaborate joint account combines these claims (Gallagher & Hutto 2008), maintaining that we can distinguish three epistemic strategies for understanding others, depending on the stage of cognitive development in ontogeny: direct perception in very early childhood, followed by interactional understanding, and finally narrative understanding (Hutto 2008). In contrast, my aim will be to show that we actually use a multiplicity of information-processing strategies to understand others, depending on the context; the proposed account, then, is even richer than the three strategies proposed by the joint account of Hutto and Gallagher.