THEORY OF MIND IN NONHUMAN-PRIMATES

Since the BBS article in which Premack and Woodruff (1978) asked ''doe s the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?'', it has been repeatedly clai med that there is observational and experimental evidence that apes ha ve mental state concepts, such as ''want'' and ''know.'' Unlike resear ch on the development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no subs tantial progress has been made through this work with nonhuman primate s. A survey of empirical studies of imitation, self-recognition, socia l relationships, deception, role-taking, and perspective-taking sugges ts that in every case where nonhuman primate behavior has been interpr eted as a sign of theory of mind, it could instead have occurred by ch ance or as a product of nonmentalistic processes such as associative l earning or inferences based on nonmental categories. Arguments to the effect that, in spite of this, the theory of mind hypothesis should be accepted because it is more parsimonious than alternatives or because it is supported by convergent evidence are not compelling. Such argum ents are based on unsupportable assumptions about the role of parsimon y in science and either ignore the requirement that convergent evidenc e proceed form independent assumptions, or fail to show that it suppor ts the theory of mind hypothesis over nonmentalist alternatives. progr ess in research on theory of mind requires experimental procedures tha t can distinguish the theory of mind hypothesis from nonmentalist alte rnatives. A procedure that may have this potential is proposed. it use s conditional discrimination training and transfer tests to determine whether chimpanzees have the concept ''see.'' Commentators are invited to identify flaws int he procedure and to suggest alternatives.