ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a rough characterization of the role of simulation in our epistemic competence for understanding others. The place for simulation within our epistemic competences will then turn on how it works in yoke with other capacities that we have or might have. The theory may, presumably, have been important in framing the simulation, but simulation is needed to really deal with tracing out the particulars of the processing to be understood. The insistence on unsullied simulation or unsupplemented theory seems far-fetched from a general epistemological point of view. In some cases, the off-line processes required to sustain the application of theory may themselves be plausibly viewed alternatively as small simulations. Even maximal reliance on simulation with minimal use of discursive information—even untutored simulation in which relatively little adjustment is made in processes to be taken off-line and in beliefs and desires supposed in the simulation—would seem acceptably reliable.
