Inventing pollution: coal, smoke, and culture in Britain since 1800

Abstract

for example, a psychology article or literary analysis. The claim that, for ToM, mental states are propositional is most obviously mistaken in those cases where our understanding of other people’s minds is spontaneous and simulative rather than effortful and inferential. This in turn brings us to perhaps the central problem with Walser’s treatment of ToM. She fails to distinguish its components and varieties. The most fundamental of these divisions is between ToM inference and ToM simulation. A number of Walser’s criticisms apply solely to the former, if they apply at all. Walser also repeatedly refers to heuristics that we employ in ToM. Though she is not entirely clear about her understanding of heuristics, it is undoubtedly the case that we do use heuristics. But they are important primarily in spontaneous ToM responses. Effortful inference can be a straightforward matter of logical entailment. Other distinctions concern whether the ToM addresses information processing or emotion; personality/disposition, affective state (e.g., mood), or situation (and so on) – all of which bear in some way on Walser’s claims. Of course, readers ofWalser’s book are likely to be particularly interested in her treatment of the literaryworks. Here, too, there are recurring problems, related to her concernwith debunking ToM. For one thing, she often fails to consider alternatives that are prima facie more plausible. For example, she discusses a recurring motif in Charles Brockden Brown, where characters expect to find crucial information inside of some container, but open the container and find nothing of value. I suppose this could be a criticism of the container metaphor of mind, but – based on Walser’s evidence – it could equally be a comment on materialism (one doesn’t find motives as such when one looks in a brain), or free will, or something else. But of course there is more to Walser’s book than I have suggested. I began by saying that most literary readers will react very differently than I have. Literary critics are particularly likely to find her literary analyses rewarding. Indeed, even partisans of ToM will – rightly – find many of her literary observations genuinely illuminating, particularly in her discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe.