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Notes
In some sense the debate over theories of mind is a descendant of the problem of other minds. But it is important to stress that the theories of mind debate is not, unlike the other minds debate, concerned with a sceptical problem. It deals with our access to the contents of other minds and how this relates to the access we have to our own minds, not with the question whether and how we can be certain of the existence of other minds.
Here’s a version of the experiment: children see a scene in which a character, Maxi, puts chocolate in a drawer and goes away. While Maxi is away, his mother takes the chocolate from the drawer, puts it somewhere else and goes out. Then Maxi comes back, and the experimenter asks: ‘Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?’. For a long time, following the experiments by Wimmer and Perner in 1983 it was generally held that children before their fourth year tend to predict that Maxi will look where his mother put the chocolate, falsely assuming that Maxi believes what they themselves believe, while after the age of four they correctly attribute the false belief to Maxi that the chocolate is in the drawer. Lately non-verbal versions of the test have been devised that allegedly show children much younger than four to pass the test (e.g. Onishi and Baillargeon Citation2005; Southgate, Senju, and Csibra Citation2007).
Some writers prefer to classify interpretationism as a separate approach to social cognition, apart from TT and ST. See e.g. Goldman Citation2006, chap. 3.
Many philosophers in the debate think that simulation might involve implicit theorizing. Indeed, the majority of philosophers in the field feel that a final account of our theories of mind abilities must consist of some mix of TT and ST. We shall leave this aside here, as indeed we shall leave most of the debate itself aside. Our aim here is to introduce TT and ST as the two landmarks that up until recently determined the landscape of options.