# How Direct Is Social Perception **Opening (not a real abstract):** A very common way of approaching the topic of social cognition is to note that our ability to understand, anticipate and respond to others’ psychological states is a truly remarkable achievement. After all, according to this idea, perception only gives us access to lines, surfaces, colors, etc., and from this we must somehow infer a world of hidden causes, with other people’s psychological states being among the most hidden causes of all. Now, one may take this observation to be just obviously right, or one may regard it is as a harmless rhetorical device. In recent years, however, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have expressed the concern that this apparently innocent starting point in fact debilitates research on social cognition, because it smuggles in the false assumption that we cannot perceive the psychological states of other people. Although there are substantial differences among the positions espoused by these theorists, they are united in their **Authors:** [[John Michael]]