Posted: Apr 08, 2022 9:33 pm
newolder wrote:zoon wrote:Spearthrower wrote:I’m not entirely sure how to answer, as the published researchers take for granted what all normal adult humans are aware of,...
Then that's not science, Zoon.
The statement I quoted at the beginning of a 2022 review article here appears to be good enough for the editors of Nature:
“Theory of mind is the human conceptual capacity to understand other people as agents who have subjective mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. It is the basis of distinctively human forms of social understanding and interaction that are essential for communication, cooperation, and culture.”
On what basis are you saying that is not science?
Science: Observe, hypothesise, test, repeat.
That snippet of an abstract to a paywalled paper makes an observation that "Theory of mind" is the basis of some essential human activities. What is the hypothesis we should test? How were the tests made? What were the results of the tests and how would they help point us to what we should look at next?
The snippet is not science because it is a snippet.
An article published in PNAS 30th Sept 2019, "Great apes use self-experience to anticipate an agent’s action in a false-belief test", (link here), offers and tests an alternative hypothesis to Theory of Mind, namely, the possibility that the animals are using direct behavioural cues to predict others (not Theory of Mind), rather than using their own experience and the similarity between their own brain processes and those of the other individuals (Theory of Mind). Humans understand and use others’ false beliefs easily and routinely, non-human animals certainly don’t use them to the same extent, and this is generally taken to be a distinction between fully human Theory of Mind and the social cognition of non-human animals. However, there is still discussion as to whether great apes can sometimes recognise false beliefs, and this article gives evidence in favour. The claim of the article is that evidence has been provided that chimpanzees can use Theory of Mind, not merely behavioural clues as in behaviourism, to predict others by understanding false beliefs.
The opening paragraph of the linked article is:
Many unique features of human communication, cooperation, and culture depend on theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. But is theory of mind uniquely human? Nonhuman animals, such as humans’ closest ape relatives, have succeeded in some theory-of-mind tasks; however, it remains disputed whether they do so by reading others’ minds or their behavior. Here, we challenged this behavior-rule account using a version of the goggles test, incorporated into an established anticipatory-looking false-belief task with apes. We provide evidence that, in the absence of behavioral cues, apes consulted their own past experience of seeing or not seeing through a novel barrier to determine whether an agent could see through the same barrier.