Although our ultimate goal is an analysis and theory of perspective taking in literature, an important insight is that perspective taking in reading literature is subject to the same factors and constraints and may depend on the same types of processes as perspective taking in real life. In Chapter 3, we review research in social and personality psychology that is applicable to literary perspective taking and that can help us advance our understanding of how readers make sense of fictional minds. Under the general umbrella term of “mind reading,” theory of mind, theory theory, and simulation theories offer competing explanations of how individuals make sense of other minds. We argue that interpreting these ideas in terms of analogy provides the basis for a more coherent analysis. We also consider the problem of empathy and how it is related to mind reading. Our analysis is that empathy should be thought of as emotional perspective taking, and we apply our analogical inference approach here as well. Finally, we consider the neural bases of perspective taking and discuss how different brain networks may be related to the components of perspective taking by analogy.

A philosophical tradition going back to Descartes assumed that human beings have an indubitable consciousness of their own minds but that knowledge of other minds was at best inferred. What they failed to see was that the consciousness, the felt experience that could not be doubted, was not the same as introspection. William James, as mentioned in Chapter 4, was guilty of this conflation. Introspection is enabled by mental concepts used in ascribing mental states to others. Put simply, introspection is self-ascription; one cannot introspect without linguistic concepts of mind. As Montgomery (2005, p. 120) pointed out in regard to children’s acquisition of theory of mind, “introspective knowledge [plays a much smaller role] in mental concept formation than is sometimes claimed.” Montgomery’s concern has been ignored by those influenced by Simulation Theory.