Sharif Digital Repository

How do we enter into empathic relations with inanimate objects (IO)? Do we indirectly infer that they possess mental states, or directly perceive them as mental things? In recent years these questions have been addressed by a number of authors. Some argue in favor of an indirect approach that involves mediatory procedures; others defend a direct approach that postulates no intermediate. In this paper I argue on the side of the latter. I show that Simulation Theory (ST), one of the most elaborated versions of the indirect approach, does not have the capacity to account for our empathy with IO.Investigating ST paves the way for criticizing a special kind of indirect theory, namely Imaginative...