ABSTRACT
We rarely anticipate or understand one another purely out of curiosity. We are more often after some information that we need for some purpose. This book focusses on the purposes for which it is important to be understood as well as to understand. In this chapter the topic is the congruence between understanding and being understood. There are basic reasons why we need to understand by methods which are congruent with those with which we are being understood, as sections ‘Enter simulation’, ‘Kinds of simulation’ and ‘Learning to simulate’ below show. One result is a scope for learning. Each person has to acquire ways of anticipating and interpreting others that mesh with the ways the others have already acquired. And each person has to acquire the capacity to fine tune these ways, on particular occasions, to mesh with the fine tuned procedures that others are employing. Moreover, I shall argue, a very attractive form for such congruently tunable procedures puts them in the general area that recent philosophers have labeled ‘simulation’. In fact, in the kinds of situation that I discuss most in this chapter, in which it is in people’s interest not to know in advance exactly what one another will do, I
think that the only procedures that have much chance of working have the general appearance of simulation.
