Robert Gordon Professor Emeritus
gordonr@umsl.edu
Robert Gordon (Ph.D., Columbia) retired from teaching in 2002 but continues to work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He is best known for the theory, first introduced in 1986, that we understand others, predict and explain their actions and emotions, by mentally simulating them. This "simulation theory" challenged a view that had been widely accepted in philosophy and psychology, that understanding others is a kind of impersonal theorizing, an application of "belief-desire psychology," an implicit theory of mental states. The “theory versus simulation debate” soon became a topic of interest among developmental psychologists as well as philosophers and later received attention in linguistics, social cognitive neuroscience, and social robotics. Hundreds of papers and numerous books have been written on the topic, as well as several encyclopedia articles. Gordon has lectured on the topic in Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, the UK, and the US. He has held several research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and in 1999 he directed a Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers, sponsored by the NEH. He chaired the program committee of the 2004 annual meeting of the Central division of the American Philosophical Association. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Helsinki and at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.
Gordon's influential work on the topic of emotion attributions was published in Philosophical Review, American Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, Journal of Philosophy, and in his book, The Structure of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
In an update of the simulation theory, Gordon argues that the human brain interprets the behavior of others by testing hypothetical ways of generating that behavior, a process of "analysis by synthesis," similar to processes known to be involved in vision and speech perception. In his chapter (download) in a book in cognitive neuroscience, The Neural Basis of Mentalizing (Springer Nature, 2021), he suggests that the existence of such a mechanism would have major consequences for the concept of knowledge, a point Gordon is developing in other papers.
