If I assume that others have minds like mine I surely would also assume they “project” the same properties, so calling them “mental projection” is not likely to make this error go away. Conversely if I establish that a certain property is a real, non-projected property of an object, that doesn’t entitle me to assume that it will be perceived by an alien with a different evolutionary history. After all, humans only perceive a tiny percentage of the actual properties of objects. So I think that the “mind projection error” and the “all minds are alike” error are quite different.
John_O
Karma: 8
I like these posts, but let me add a couple of comments. In philosophical circles the “type distinction”, as you call it, is known as the use/mention distinction, i.e. the distinction between using a phrase like “evening star” (to talk about the thing itself) and merely talking about the phrase (usually signaled by quotation marks).
But that’s not the first problem you mentioned, which is known in philosophical circles as the failure of substitution in intensional (i.e., roughly, mental) contexts. I’m not so sure the use/mention distinction is useful in explaining this failure. For example, the sentence “Lois is looking for Superman” cannot be substituted for “Lois is looking for Clark Kent”, because she may not know that that Superman and Clark Kent are identical. Obviously we never make that mistake, but if someone were to make it, the reason is surely to do with failing to realise that Lois may have false beliefs. But that’s not a category mistake.