ABSTRACT
I introduce the mainstream view of mindreading and highlight the broad scope of mindreading claim as particularly contentious. I describe two sorts of challenges to this claim, one from embodied and enactive cognition and one from pluralistic accounts of folk psychology. I argue the challenge from embodied and enactive cognition comes down to whether phenomenology can play a substantial methodological role in debates about mindreading. I argue that phenomenology does not provide novel, reliable, or relevant evidence, and thus it ought not play such a substantial role. I argue that the dispute between mindreading theorists and embodied and enactive cognition proponents turns out to be a terminological debate about whether explanation and prediction are exclusively conscious phenomena. As such, the challenge from embodied and enactive cognition is not successful. The challenge from pluralistic views of folk psychology, in contrast, is much more successful. I argue that these challenges do not show that mindreading is unnecessary or just a minor part of our folk psychological toolkit, but they do hint at the idea that there is much more to our social interactions than mindreading theorists indicate. This conclusion sets up the next two chapters which lay out a broader conception of mindreading.
