Theories of theories of mind: Chimpanzee theory of mind?: the long road to strong inference

Povinelli’s paper sets out by differentiating two possible models for cognitive development a domain-generic model, implying underlying representational abilities, and a domain-specific one, where no such abilities connect the different domains’ development. He uses this distinction to explain why the empirical findings that chimpanzees perform impressive gaze-following and self-recognition tasks, which in humans is taken to be signs of mentalism, do not imply a mentalist mechanism in chimpanzees (if we accept the domain-specific approach). The paper also points out other weak spots in the mentalist theory, namely the inexistance of proto-declarative pointing, teaching, pretend play and possibly imitation in apes.