ABSTRACT
According to a widely held view, one of the primary ways in which people make sense of other people is by 'mindreading' them. Mindreading, in this context, refers to our perfectly ordinary capacity 'to identify the mental states of others, for example, their beliefs, desires, intentions, goals, experiences, sensations and also emotion states'. For the same reason, Ludwig Wittgenstein would not be prepared to accept a simulationist account either, as the following famous quote makes clear: Consciousness in the face of another. In line with Gallagher, what Maurice Merleau-Ponty recommends is that we do not conceive of mental phenomena such as anger as 'hidden', 'inner' phenomena, but rather view them as extending all the way to the perceivable bodily behaviour. Wittgenstein makes at least partly identical points. He, too, observes that people's ability to understand another's expressions of emotions depends on a number of things, such as belonging to the same culture, or knowing the person well.
