Does the Experimental Scientist Have a “Theory of Mind”?

Abstract

The concept of a “theory of mind” was widely used in developmental and evolutionary psychology and neuroscience in the wake of Premack and Woodruff's 1978 article “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” and Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith's 1985 follow-up “Does the Autistic Child Have a ‘Theory of Mind?’” The subsequent confluence of cognitive science and narrative theory brought “theory of mind” to literary critics. Only a very small set of people, however, have read both the neuropsychological and the literary texts on “theory of mind”; as a result of this lack of interdisciplinary expertise, the term has acquired subtly differing senses in the literary and neuroscientific communities. Because of this terminological slippage, neuroscientists and literary critics who argue in terms of “theory of mind” may believe that they are speaking with each other when they actually are speaking past each other. If proponents of cognitive literary theory are to realize the interdisciplinary fusion to which we aspire, then we must ensure that we speak in the same idiom.