Article Can you ever really think what someone else is thinking?

[C C]

RELATED (scivillage): When does a thought quit being just my thought?
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(Oct 23, 2026) We should set aside the notion that different people can share the same thoughts
https://psyche.co/ideas/can-you-ever-rea...s-thinking

EXCERPTS (Víctor Verdejo): This intuitive picture is old and powerful. Yet the notion that people think the very same thought in successful communication has come under increasing scrutiny. Contemporary philosophers argue that what seems like straightforward thought-sharing is more complex, and more interesting, than the familiar metaphors suggest. They both challenge this natural idea and show that understanding each other plausibly involves thinking differently from each other. Realising this can help us see how communication really works.

[...] In recent philosophical work, there are some who defend a sophisticated version of thought-sharing. They make room for the variability of what people are actually thinking when they understand each other, but retain the idea that you can, in some sense, share a thought. This approach, which I myself favour, reflects that the basic concept of thought-sharing is not only natural, but explanatorily useful. For example, the notion that you can share a thought makes it easy to distinguish between misunderstanding what someone means (‘getting the wrong idea’) from grasping what someone means (‘getting the idea’) and yet disagreeing with it.

In this way of viewing thought-sharing, each person’s version of the shared thought is layered: thought similarity at one level is compatible with a level of disparity that reflects each person’s distinctive points of view. To constitute a ‘shared thought’, some core content or state must be identical, even as some other components of the thought differ. On this view, sharing thoughts is complex because thoughts themselves are complex.

But other philosophers explain communication differently: via coordination or informational relations among different thoughts. On these accounts, if I know or somehow track what you are thinking, I don’t actually need to ‘share’ your thought in order to understand what you are saying.

One particularly influential example of this is relationism, the kind of approach originally championed by Kit Fine. According to this perspective, communication is not really a matter of thought identity, but thought coordination. What matters is not the intrinsic properties of two people’s thoughts or the extent to which those are the same. What matters is how those thoughts are related. For instance, treating our thoughts as if they are about the same things often suffices for understanding and joint behaviour.

So, if you tell me about your ‘awful day at work’, and elaborate about impending deadlines, an unkind boss and feeling overwhelmed, and I respond sympathetically, we both presuppose or act as if our thoughts are about these same things – even if the thoughts themselves are different – and doing so allows the conversation to serve its function. I may not need to share your experience in order to understand you. It might be enough that our thoughts coordinate – that they stand in an appropriate relation to one another.

The debate continues between proponents of these perspectives. But the richer picture drawn by these trends helps us think about communication and shared understanding without positing (as some would be tempted to) perfect matching in the way people think. [...] It may still seem plausible and useful to suppose that we can think ‘the same thing’. But, often, the connection you have to someone else’s thought is looser than it might appear, and interestingly complex.

Whatever perspective you take, the question of whether or how we ever truly ‘share’ thoughts gives us reason to pause and consider what it actually means to connect with someone else – to understand and to be understood... (MORE - missing details)

[Magical Realist]

It becomes simpler I think if we understand sharing itself as only possible between two or more subjective states. Not as though there is this objective thing called a thought that is indifferently possessed or perceived by multiple minds. More like empathy, where we believe we are sharing or participating in the same experience or subjective state.

Thought considered this way, as the private ideational state of another mind, not passed around in space like an unthinkable only perceivable object, but as a mirroring of that state of thinking that way, thus retains its essential subjective and performative nature while also being shareable and communicable to other subjects. Like how the same movie can be playing on different TVs, viewers not sharing the movie like in a movie theater, but as reproductions each viewed in their own private living rooms.

Thoughts shared thru their approximate reproducibility, not thru being a shared acquisition of the same possession. While its not likely that every reproduction of a thought in another mind is a perfectly matched replica, again it becomes true and accepted because it works this way best in our social world. It's true pragmatically, in Wittgenstein's sense, not representationally. As they say, close enough for govt work!