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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Synthese (2022) 200: 325
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03804-w
Abstract
In recent philosophy of science there has been much discussion of both pluralism,
which embraces scientic terms with multiple meanings, and eliminativism, which
rejects such terms. Some recent work focuses on the conditions that legitimize plu-
ralism over eliminativism – the conditions under which such terms are acceptable.
Often, this is understood as a matter of encouraging eective communication – the
danger of these terms is thought to be equivocation, while the advantage is thought
to be the fullment of ‘bridging roles’ that facilitate communication between dif-
ferent scientists and specialisms. These theories are geared towards regulating com-
munication between scientists qua scientists. However, this overlooks an important
class of harmful equivocation that involves miscommunication between scientists
and nonscientists, such as the public or policymakers. To make my case, I use the
example of theory of mind, also known as ‘mindreading’ and ‘mentalizing’, and
broadly dened as the capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others. I
begin by showing that ‘theory of mind’ has multiple meanings, before showing that
this has resulted in harmful equivocations of a sort and in a way not accounted for
by previous theories of pluralism and eliminativism.
Keywords Mindreading · Theory of mind · Autism · Polysemy · Pluralism ·
Eliminativism
1 Introduction
Many scientic terms, including technical terms and fairly recent neologisms, have
multiple dierent meanings. Taylor & Vickers (2017) oer a helpful list of such
Received: 10 August 2021 / Accepted: 4 July 2022 / Published online: 29 July 2022
© The Author(s) 2022
The many theories of mind: eliminativism and pluralism in
context
JoeGough1
Joe Gough
jg570@sussex.ac.uk
1 University of Sussex, Philosophy, BN1 9RH, Brighton, UK
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Synthese (2022) 200: 325
terms, each highly disputed. They oer a theory about how such terms come to have
multiple meanings, a process which they call ‘fragmentation’: as dierent areas of
science take up a term/concept for dierent theoretical purposes and using dierent
measures (see also Wilson 2006), precise context-specic denitions and extensions
of that term proliferate. The end result is that a single term ends up with multiple dis-
tinct but equally legitimate more precise meanings – although the fact that the term
has multiple meanings may not be widely noticed.
The phenomenon of scientic terms with multiple meanings was originally noticed
and highlighted by scientists and philosophers working in and on the life sciences,
especially biology. It was, therefore, seen as insignicant by some, because it might
reect the immaturity of these sciences, or the peculiarities of their subject-matters
(see Ruphy 2017, ch.3 for discussion). The physical sciences, physics and chemistry,
conversely, were seen as primarily using univocal terms, to refer to well-dened,
natural kinds, often thought to be denable in terms of microstructural essences (cf.
Bursten, 2018). The idea was that while terms like ‘species’ and ‘human’ might have
multiple meanings, terms like ‘electron’ and ‘Argon’ have only a single meaning
within the relevant sciences. More recently, however, there has been some pushback
on the idea that these sciences are generally free of this phenomenon (e.g., Bursten
2018; Chang, 2012; Ruphy, 2010, 2017; Ruthenberg & Mets, 2020; Slater, 2009;
Wilson, 2006) – indeed, so long as these sciences contain dierent theoretical and
explanatory contexts, much of the groundwork has been laid for terms to start accru-
ing meanings (Taylor & Vickers, 2017).1
I will use the term ‘theory of mind’ as a case study to explore this phenomenon,
arguing that the origin and tenability of its many meanings can only be satisfactorily
approached by considering how it is signicant in nonscientic ways. In doing so, I
will consider some previous theories of ‘pluralism’, which defends the use of terms
with multiple meanings, and ‘eliminativism’, which advocates rejecting such terms.
Often, this ‘eliminativism’ is driven by worries about miscommunication, equivo-
cation, and empty arguments about the ‘correct’ extension or denition (Taylor &
Vickers, 2017). Other forms of eliminativism are more directly ‘ontological’ (e.g.,
Churchland 1981, 1993), that is, more directly concerned with existence claims than
with the use of terms/concepts – although it is not clear from a pragmatist point of
view that this distinction stands up (e.g., Peirce 1878). Conversely, ‘pluralists’ defend
these terms as benecial – as better reecting the way the world is (as discussed in
Ereshefsky 1992), or as playing certain key ‘bridging roles’, facilitating communica-
tion and integration between dierent disciplines, subdisciplines, or researchers with
dierent, legitimate conceptions of the term (Neto, 2020).
Taylor & Vickers (2017); Haueis (2021b) oer heuristics or criteria for decid-
ing between pluralism and eliminativism, or for ensuring pluralism does not lead to
problems. Many papers discussing eliminativism and pluralism focus on scientic
1 There are other factors that support the idea that this phenomenon is extremely widespread. Haueis
(2021b) highlights that polysemy is an extremely widespread feature of natural language. Additionally,
according to at least Pritchard (2019), studies of analogical cognition suggest that word meanings are not
for categorization, but instead primarily for suggesting analogies in some way, and in particular in a way
that encourages rather than hinders contextual variation in reference and extension (see also, e.g., Lako
1987; Recanati, 2017).
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Synthese (2022) 200: 325
discourse over ordinary discourse. Many of these papers focus on terms with limited
or largely inconsequential contemporary use outside scientic discourse. Perhaps
because of these facts, the heuristics or criteria oered have focused on heuristics
and criteria heavily geared towards avoiding miscommunication between scientists.
Taylor and Vickers oer two heuristics, both with ceteris paribus clauses – rst, that
the more ‘theoretical roles’ a term takes on, the stronger the case for elimination;
secondly, the more pivotal the term is in arguments, the stronger the case for elimina-
tion. Haueis claims that pluralism is defensible wherever the term is associated with
reliable measurement techniques, a homogeneous domain, and pick out properties
signicant in description, explanation, or classication of behaviours of entities in
that domain.
If the question is when it is legitimate to make use of scientic terms with multiple
meanings, then it is my aim to highlight a largely unacknowledged aspect of answer-
ing this question. In particular, the meanings and signicance of a term outside sci-
entic contexts can both lead to miscommunications and equivocations between
scientists and nonscientists, and increase the likelihood of equivocations within sci-
ence. Indeed, one of the most potent roles that a scientic concept can have is in
‘[aecting] the conceptual self-understanding of a society as a whole’ (Haueis and
Slaby 2022, p.3). In some cases, making use of a scientic term with nonscientic
signicance unnecessarily invites misuse and misunderstanding of one’s conclusions.
In such a scenario, one presumably ought to avoid using the term. All one needs for
such a conclusion is a plausible general principle that if one can avoid using terms
that are likely to lead to the misinterpretation of one’s conclusions by the public,
politicians, and policymakers, one ought to avoid using such terms.2
In the following, I argue that nonscientic signicance sits at the heart of a dilemma
for accounts that aim to adjudicate between accepting and rejecting a term with mul-
tiple meanings. Either they ignore nonscientic factors, and are unable safely to rule
even on core examples in the debate, or they countenance such factors, and are unable
to oer prescriptive guidance that is both detailed and generalizable. I further suggest
that the second horn of this dilemma is preferable.
My argument proceeds by examining a case study, ‘theory of mind’, and the (by
denition) synonyms, ‘mindreading’ and ‘mentalizing’. My aim here is not to argue
that we should eliminate the term ‘theory of mind’. Instead, I argue that several fea-
tures relevant to determining whether we should eliminate the term are ignored by
any theory that focuses solely on the roles terms play within science and the ways
terms with multiple meanings may hamper science. Likewise, my aim is not to take a
stand on the debate between pluralism and eliminativism in general. Instead, my aim
is to bring out the importance of these ‘nonscientic’ factors, which have generally
not received much attention within this debate, and to argue that they are relevant
to this debate because they are relevant to many of the particular cases of scientic
terms where eliminativism and pluralism are live options.
The term ‘theory of mind’ has many dierent meanings (§ 2) – even though it is
generally dened as the capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others. Its
2 For broader discussion on the role of (non-epistemic) values in science, see Douglas (2000); Longino
(1990); Putnam (1982, 1984).
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Synthese (2022) 200: 325
scientic use results in harmful equivocations outside scientic contexts (§ 3). Its
signicance outside scientic contexts also appears to be part of what causes equivo-
cations in scientic contexts (§ 4). If the aim is to avoid harmful equivocations based
on scientic terms with multiple meanings, this cannot only be a matter of examining
the term’s use within science (§ 5). Unfortunately, this means that any theory that
tries to avoid scientic equivocations by looking solely at scientic factors is at risk
of ignoring some of the most important factors, the rst horn of the dilemma. The
second horn of the dilemma stems from a principled pessimism about the possibil-
ity of a detailed theory for adjudicating between pluralism and eliminativism that
accounts for scientic equivocations based on nonscientic factors, let alone one that
accounts for nonscientic equivocations (§ 6).
2 The many meanings of theory of ‘mind’
The term ‘theory of mind’, used interchangeably with ‘mindreading’ and ‘mentaliz-
ing’ which were introduced as synonyms to ‘theory of mind’, was originally dened
as the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, in the paper Does the
chimpanzee have a theory of mind? (Premack & Woodru, 1978). The rst ‘cognitive’
version of the social theory of autism (which largely supplanted previous sensory the-
ories of autism; Robertson & Baron-Cohen 2017) was put forward in Baron-Cohen et
al., (1985) paper, Does the autistic child have a theory of mind? which picked up the
term, proposing that a theory of mind decit was core to autism, and recalled the title
of Premack and Woodru’s paper (see also Happé & Frith 2020).
More recently, many researchers in animal psychology have come to use ‘theory
of mind’ as a ‘generic label … covering a wide range of processes of social cognition’
(Tomasello et al., 2003b, p.239; see also Tomasello, Call, & Hare, Tomasello et al.,
2003a). On this construal, dierent animals have dierent theory of mind abilities –
for example, Tomasello, Call, and Hare claim that chimpanzees can understand see-
ing, but not believing. Other animal psychology researchers, for example, Povinelli
& Vonk (2003) dene theory of mind as an ‘all-or-nothing’ capacity, either present or
absent in any given species, that involves ‘an attributed experience’ represented in a
‘non-behavioural code’ that cannot be reduced to representations of abstract classes
of observables, such as ‘abstracted spatio-temporal invariances’ (p.157) or abstract
classes of behaviour (Penn & Povinelli, 2007).
In autism research, the idea that a decit in theory of mind is the ‘core decit’
of autism has been abandoned by many researchers. Sometimes it is abandoned in
favour of theories that emphasise that autism is an umbrella term describing a kind
of syndrome not a specic aetiology or specic set of symptoms. Sometimes it is
abandoned in favour of domain-general theories. These domain-general theories
often have a more sensory avour. They often work on the idea that autism involves
an inability to sort signal from noise, thereby impairing gestalt perception, perhaps
including the perception of mental states. For example, there is a Bayesian theory
according to which autism is some kind of overweighting of sensory input over top-
down expectations (e.g., Karvelis et al., 2018).
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However, the idea that impaired theory of mind is the core characteristic symptom
of autism has not been widely abandoned. The claim that autism is a decit in theory
of mind is now oered by many as a characterization of rather than a hypothesis
about autism. For example, Gernsbacher & Yergeau, found that.
over 75% … of the top 500 articles indexed by Google Scholar (for “theory of
mind” and “autism”) simply assert that autistic people lack a theory of mind
rather than provide original data to buttress the claim. (2019, p.103)
An uncharitable interpretation of this practice of asserting that autistic people lack
a theory of mind without evidence is that people are asserting a highly contentious
hypothesis about autism entirely without justication. A more charitable interpre-
tation is that they are oering a characterization of autism, which they take to be
merely descriptive and largely uncontentious. This gives us perhaps the most signi-
cant meaning of ‘theory of mind’ in autism research – the general sort of social abil-
ity thought to be impaired or atypical in autism. It is worth noting that the cluster of
social abilities atypical in autism includes various abilities to do with the attribution
of features not generally considered ‘mental’, for example, social rank recognition
(Ogawa et al., 2019).
Some articles, however, talk not of an impaired or atypical theory of mind, but
of a lacking theory of mind – an idea also implied by terms like ‘mindblindness’
(for review see Gernsbacher & Yergeau 2019; Gernsbacher, 2018). When talking of
autistic people as lacking a ‘theory of mind’, the term can mean one of at least two
things. A common (but unjustied, and in my view clearly false – see § 3) claim is
that autistic people are entirely unable to understand the minds of others (and per-
haps themselves) – unable to ‘imagine what others are thinking, or even that they are
thinking’ (Soper & Murray, 2012, p.125); such claims are generally conned to popu-
lar books, textbooks, and encyclopaedias in psychology, and rarely made in research
papers. In this rst case, the ‘theory of mind’ supposed to be lacking is simply the
ability to understand minds.
Another common way to esh out the claim that autistic people lack a theory
of mind, which is less obviously false although in my view still unjustied (again
see Gernsbacher & Yergeau 2019), is that autistic people lack certain basic mecha-
nisms that embody some basic understanding of mental states, develop along clearly
dened tracks, and whose presence in neurotypical humans enables them to eort-
lessly develop a full suite of abilities for understanding minds (e.g., Bloom & German
2000). In this second case, ‘theory of mind’ refers to this set of basic mechanisms.
Many uses of ‘theory of mind’ in autism research refer to a construct developed
primarily in some other specialism. The term ‘theory of mind’ has also been adopted
by psychometrics, developmental psychology, and neuroscience. In developmental
psychology, the term can be used to name a body of conceptual knowledge (e.g.,
Wellman & Liu 2004; see Apperly 2012). This notion of ‘theory of mind’ cannot be
identied with any of the previous notions, but it has important relations to several –
for example, it is thought to underlie the ability to make explicit attributions of men-
tal states, and thought to develop as a result of the operation of the basic mechanisms
that enable social development. In developmental psychology, ‘theory of mind’ is
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also used to refer to a multi-component system dened in terms of multiple devel-
opmental milestones and responsible for a wide domain including the detection of
intentionality and goal-directed behaviour (Bermúdez, 2020).
Use of the term is perhaps messiest in psychometrics, where even excluding single-
task measures, there is no single kind of mental state attribution or ability assessed
in even close to a majority of ‘theory of mind’ measures (Beaudoin et al., 2020),
and where some even question whether ‘theory of mind tasks’ can legitimately be
described as measuring mental state attributions (Quesque & Rossetti, 2020). Worse
still, many of these measures and tasks fail to converge with one another, and to pre-
dict behaviours and abilities in the domain of pretheoretic interest such as prosocial
behaviour, empathy, and everyday social skills (Gernsbacher, 2018).
One could take one of at least three stances on this state of aairs. The rst option,
introducing no new meaning of ‘theory of mind’, is that ‘theory of mind’ measures
are an attempt to measure one of the other preexisting notions of theory of mind, and
that they do so with widely varying quality. The second option, likewise introducing
no new meaning of ‘theory of mind’, is that ‘theory of mind’ measures as a whole
fail to measure anything – that they represent a failed attempt to nd or dene a psy-
chometrically valid construct. The last option, introducing vastly more meanings of
‘theory of mind’, is that ‘theory of mind’ in each case refers to whatever each ‘theory
of mind’ measure actually measures, and that this varies measure to measure. There
are other options, but most represent a combination of these three strategies (e.g.,
holding that some ‘theory of mind’ measures fail to measure anything, while others
measure something specic to that measure, and some cluster of measures serve as
good measure of some preexisting notion of theory of mind). My aim here is not to
take a stand on the status of potential psychometric conceptions of ‘theory of mind’,
since there are enough other meanings of the term to show that it is a candidate for
pluralism and eliminativism.
In neuroscience, the ‘theory of mind mechanism’ is a group of neurones in the
right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) thought to be responsible for the explicit attri-
bution of certain complex intentional states like beliefs and thoughts (Saxe, 2009,
2010; Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003; Saxe & Powell, 2006; Scholz et al., 2009) – but not
the attribution of pain or emotion (Kosakowski & Saxe, 2018; Saxe & Powell, 2006).
It is worth noting that some think that the rTPJ, including this group of neurones, is
responsible for gestalt perception and attentional gating, tying in nicely to domain-
general theories of autism (Bloechle et al., 2018; Huberle & Karnath, 2012; Rennig et
al., 2013; Schuwerk et al., 2017). The ‘theory of mind network’ is a loose collection
of brain regions responsible for a variety of ‘theory of mind’ tasks, including most of
the so-called ‘social brain’ thought to underlie social cognition (Baron-Cohen, 2009;
Schaafsma et al., 2015). In each case, ‘theory of mind’ can be taken to refer either
to the underlying neural system (for the ‘theory of mind mechanism’, the group of
neurones in the rTPJ), or to refer to the function of that neural system (in this case,
explicit attribution of certain complex intentional states). For the ‘theory of mind net-
work’, specifying its function is dicult – the collection of brain regions is individu-
ated by the fact it is involved in several theory of mind tasks, but as discussed above,
the nature of these tasks and what they measure is extremely dicult to specify.
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There are, therefore, many meanings of ‘theory of mind’, making it an appropriate
case study for discussing theories of pluralism and eliminativism. Setting aside the
problem of ‘theory of mind’ measures, the term ‘theory of mind’ can be used to mean,
at least, two neural systems, their functions, a multicomponent system responsible
for (inter alia) the detection of intentionality and goal-directed behaviour, a body of
conceptual knowledge that enables the explicit attribution of mental states, the pos-
session of any understanding of minds whatsoever, the basic mechanisms involved in
the development of neurotypical adult mental state attributions, the cluster of social
abilities thought to be impaired or atypical in autism, the ability to explicitly attribute
of mental states where this is irreducible to the ability to recognize abstract classes of
observables, and a generic label for whatever abilities to understand whatever mental
states a given species has.3
3 Unscientic harms
These are far from the only scientic meanings that the term has taken on. Of course,
that is not a problem in itself – especially since the term is largely recognized as
an umbrella term, or shorthand, in at least animal psychology and autism research.
Bermúdez (2020, p.335) describes the term ‘mindreading’ as ‘a very general label
for the skills and abilities that allow us to make sense of other people and coordinate
our behaviour with theirs’. Although ‘theory of mind’, ‘mindreading’, and ‘mental-
izing’ have taken on many subtly distinct meanings, and although there is no reliable
measure associated with most uses of the terms, they are in this regard not obviously
problematic. There are very few examples of serious scientic errors based on equiv-
ocation between these meanings – which is not to say there are no plausible cases of
such errors (see § 4).
However, in terms of the reception and marketing of theories of ‘theory of mind’,
there are some very serious errors based on equivocation between these meanings.
The central error is the lumping together of autistic people, especially autistic chil-
dren, and nonhuman animals as lacking a ‘theory of mind’, where theory of mind is
seen as ‘one of the quintessential abilities that makes us human’ Baron-Cohen 2000b,
3 One might object to the preceding as follows: ‘theory of mind’ is essentially dened as the ability to
attribute mental states to oneself and others, and all other working denitions are somehow derived from
this ‘generic’ denition; it is therefore univocal, and not in the scope of the debate. I suspect that this is a
red herring. In my view, the implicit consensus is that a term in the scope of this debate – a ‘pluralistic’
term – is one whose use is governed by dierent working denitions in dierent contexts, where these
working denitions are importantly distinct and yet not in legitimate competition (i.e., do not reect
genuine disagreement about the nature of a phenomenon; see also Feyerabend 2001; Kidd, 2012). This is
an important category not because of the underlying linguistic mechanisms but instead because of the sci-
entic, metaphysical, and especially methodological issues raised by such terms (see also Bursten 2018).
If I am right, many pluralistic terms may even come out as univocal by some denitions because it may
be possible to give them a ‘generic’ denition so long as it is appropriately parametrized and imprecise
(Akagi, 2018, 2021). More pressingly, in the sense relevant to linguistics, the question of univocity may
be unanswerable – most tests of univocity/ambiguity rely on speaker-intuitions about whether utterances
are felicitous, and are therefore hard to bring to bear on technical terms used only in isolated specialist
areas. See also footnotes 8; 9.
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p.169), rendering autistic people as ‘biologically set apart from the rest of humanity
in lacking the basic machinery’ (Baron-Cohen, 2009, p.73).
In a clear sense, such claims are only rarely part of the scientic study of autis-
tic people or animals – they generally play no serious role in the conclusions or
argument. Instead, they form part of a ‘marketing strategy’, a ‘hook’ for drawing
in readers and presumably funding. It is also based on a clear equivocation. While
animals’ purported lack of theory of mind turns on their purported over-reliance on
low-level cues, and inability to explicitly attribute such states (e.g., Heyes 2014; Penn
& Povinelli, 2007), the precise opposite is true for autistic people. Autistic people
are claimed to be too reliant on explicit, perhaps linguistically-mediated attribution
of mental states and impaired in their ability to tune into and easily make use of low-
level cues (e.g., Gernsbacher & Yergeau 2019). Even supposing that both theories are
correct, the ‘theory of mind’ lacked by animals and the ‘theory of mind’ lacked by
autistic people are simply not the same thing.
Part of the trouble is that the terms ‘theory of mind’ and ‘mindreading’ have taken
on a great deal of ethical signicance, given the role they have taken on in contempo-
rary theories of personhood. Dennett (1976), whose 1978 commentary on Premack
and Woodru’s paper had a major inuence on the direction of research, helping
cement the false-belief paradigm, directly links the ability to attribute mental states to
reason, reectiveness, decision-making, and personhood. More recently, Lurz (2011,
p.4–5) claims ‘that of the attributes that dene personhood, mindreading is the most
central.’
Baron-Cohen (2000a, p.266) treats autistic people as some sort of morality tale
about the signicance of theory of mind. He claims that ‘autism is a clear illustra-
tion of what human life would be like if one lacked a theory of mind’. He envisages
this as a world in which humans see each other as grotesque, terrifying ‘bags of skin
… stued into pieces of cloth’, ‘noisy skin-bags’ with ‘no way of explaining … or
predicting’ each other (Alison Gopnik, who is not autistic, as quoted in Baron-Cohen
1995, p.4–5).
This dehumanization is stigmatizing in itself, and is in my view the primary harm
that results from this way of construing autism. However, it is not the only way in
which conveying autism as a ‘theory of mind’ decit has proven stigmatizing (e.g.,
Gernsbacher & Yergeau 2019; Yergeau & Huebner, 2017). For example, conveying
autism this way is frequently linked to dismissals of the opinions of autistic people
on autism – if an autistic individual demonstrates a signicant level of introspection,
it is claimed that they must not really be autistic (Yergeau & Huebner, 2017), and so
their personal account of autism can be dismissed.
For example, Oliver Sacks, upon rst reading Temple Grandin’s autobiographical
account of her life and experience with autism, Emergence: Labeled Autistic (1996),
could not help being suspicious of it: the autistic mind, it was supposed at the
time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and there-
fore of authentic introspection and retrospection (Sacks, 2012, p.241).
This common belief at the time, that autistic people lack the ability to introspect, was
rendered plausible by the messiness of the term ‘theory of mind’. There are at least
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two senses of ‘theory of mind’ at play here, worth reintroducing. The rst is ‘theory
of mind’ as the ability to attribute mental states to oneself or others. The second is
‘theory of mind’ as the basic mechanisms that normally support the development
of this ability in neurotypical humans. Arguably, the research literature when Sacks
was writing oered some support for the claim that autistic people were impaired
in the rst, and some support that they lacked the second. Even so, because autistic
children apparently struggled on false-belief tasks in a way not accounted for by gen-
eral cognitive impairment, many came to believe that autistic people were entirely
unable to introspect. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to see how people en masse could
have acquired this harmful, false belief without the construct theory of mind to facili-
tate the inference from extremely specic developmental evidence, to an ostensibly
absurd conclusion about autistic people.4
In my view, the above situation represents a nonscientic harm, resulting from
a nonscientic equivocation, in turn resulting from nonscientic factors, including
prior normative views, the social context of research, and the nonscientic signi-
cance of ‘theory of mind’. The term ‘theory of mind’ builds bridges between the
study of the dierences between autistic people and neurotypical humans, the dier-
ences between humans and nonhuman animals, and theorizing about the conditions
of personhood. This interfaces very poorly with the fact that autistic people are a
highly stigmatized group, and that dehumanization is an important mechanism for
stigma. The equivocation seemingly results in part from a prior willingness to take a
dehumanizing view of autistic people. It is worth stressing here that this equivocation
does more than merely reect preexisting harms. Certainly, the equivocation may
be caused in part by prior social attitudes towards autistic people. Nevertheless, the
equivocation may further cement these attitudes by lending them spurious scientic
legitimacy. This equivocation is nonscientic in that, rather than primarily being a
matter of miscommunication between scientists in their roles as scientists, the issue
is that the term misleads important groups of nonscientists, such as policymakers and
the public.
4 Scientic harms, unscientic causes
It is not only nonscientic equivocations and harms that result from nonscientic
factors – such factors can also increase the risk of scientic equivocations. One of the
few plausible signicant cases of a scientic equivocation based on ‘theory of mind’
results from the nonscientic signicance of ‘theory of mind’. In the debate over
theory of mind in nonhuman animals, two senses of ‘theory of mind’ appear to be
conated regularly. This appears to be a result of a particular sort of theorizing about
human specialness, which goes beyond a scientic concern.
4 To his credit, Sacks’ response to this situation was to meet with Temple Grandin, to write about her in
a careful and empathetic manner, and to encourage others to read her autobiography. When his view of
autism was challenged by a rst-person account of autism, he changed his view of autism. However, as
Yergeau & Huebner (2017) show, this has been far from a universal response to such accounts of autism.
Many researchers have doubled down, dismissing such accounts of autism as showing that their authors
are not really autistic.
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Those who hold that there are nonhuman animals that have a ‘theory of mind’
tend to take a relatively ‘deationary’ view of theory of mind. According to this more
deationary view, the attribution of mental states is manifest in sensitivity to equiva-
lence classes best dened in relation to mental state terms, and not denable in rela-
tion to any particular observable – this meaning of ‘theory of mind’ is not mentioned
in § 2, but is associated with the view of theory of mind as a generic label for certain
social abilities of whatever given species.5 Conversely, those who hold that nonhu-
man animals lack, or have not been shown to have, a ‘theory of mind’ tend to use a
more ‘inationary’ denition. According to this denition, the attribution of mental
states requires the explicit internal representation of mental states qua mental states
(Burge, 2018; Heyes, 2014; Lurz, 2011).
The more deationary denition of ‘theory of mind’ is arguably the default – some
of its opponents seem to acknowledge it as such (e.g., Heyes 2015). Its opponents’
denition, however, is not obviously illegitimate (although it is linked to some pos-
sibly intractable methodological problems; see Halina 2015; cf. Burge, 2018). What
is illegitimate, however, is using one legitimate sense of ‘theory of mind’ to object to
claims made using another legitimate sense of ‘theory of mind’.
It is plausible that this goes on in many discussions of the ‘logical problem’ (e.g.,
Penn & Povinelli 2007; Povinelli, 2004; Povinelli & Vonk, 2003, 2004). The logical
problem is used as an objection to all previous evidence of theory of mind in non-
human animals. It is claimed that no previous experimental paradigms are exacting
enough to distinguish theory of mind from ‘behaviour reading’. For example, if it is
found that chimpanzees track and respond appropriately to other chimpanzees’ gaze
direction, it is claimed that this cannot prove that they attribute vision. According
to this objection, they could just be inferring directly from gaze to behaviour, with-
out explicitly representing vision as mediating between their conspecic’s gaze and
behaviour.
This objection relies on the more inationary sense of ‘theory of mind’ (see also
Halina 2015). The reason for this is that the deationary denition of ‘theory of mind’
entails that theory of mind grades into behaviour-reading, and that to be capable of
suciently smart behaviour reading just is to have a theory of mind (Whiten, 1996).
To demonstrate the presence of ‘theory of mind’ in this more deationary sense, it is
neither possible nor necessary to rule out behaviour reading.
However, the logical problem is used as an objection to conclusions pitched in
terms of the more deationary sense of ‘theory of mind’. If both are legitimate, as
I think that they are, then these kinds of objections cannot work. Moreover, with
notable exceptions (e.g., Heyes 2015), those who make use of the inationary sense,
and object to claims made using deationary sense, do not pitch their arguments as to
do with the meaning of ‘theory of mind’. They appear to end up talking across previ-
ous researchers, on the basis of an equivocation between dierent senses of ‘theory
of mind’.
Why does this occur? It appears to be partly a matter of the nonscientic signi-
cance of ‘theory of mind’. A key factor is the ethical signicance of ‘theory of mind’
5 This denition was developed by Whiten (1996; 2001), foreshadowed by Gómez (1991), and endorsed
by, e.g., Hare et al., (2000) and Halina (2015).
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in theories of personhood, discussed above. Another factor is the widespread use
of psychological theorizing to support theorizing about what makes human beings
special, ethically, culturally, and psychologically (Sorabji, 1993). The role of ‘theory
of mind’ in such ethically-loaded theorizing lends it normative connotations that dif-
ferent researchers may want ‘on their side’ (Gallie, 1955). Part of the motivation for
putting forward the logical problem and objecting to previous research is that it casts
nonhuman animals as inappropriately similar to humans, in the eyes of those who
oer the objection (e.g., Caporeal & Heyes 1997; Heyes, 2014, 2015; Penn et al.,
2008; Povinelli, 2004; Povinelli & Vonk, 2003). Compare the example of ‘vision’.
‘Vision’ has been applied to systems as dierent to humans as individual bacteria
(e.g., Nilsson & Colley 2016; Schuergers et al., 2016). Such claims generate com-
paratively little controversy: vision is not widely seen as a particularly ethically sig-
nicant capacity; it has not been widely held to be unique to humans.
The ethical signicance of ‘theory of mind’, and the increased motivation to
defend theories of human specialness, are not entirely a matter of a term’s use within
science. However, it appears that the use of the logical problem as an objection is, in
many cases, an instance of obstructive equivocation, and researchers talking across
one another. As such, the term’s nonscientic roles appear also to be relevant to the
risk of miscommunication within science.
5 The pervasiveness of nonscientic signicance
‘Theory of mind’ therefore suers from exactly the sort of problem that motivates
many eliminativists – it has many meanings, and this results in harmful equivo-
cations, both nonscientic (§ 3) and scientic (§ 4). However, several key factors
behind these equivocations are nonscientic – social context, normative assump-
tions, discriminatory biases, and the ethical signicance of the term. My primary aim
across the rest of this paper is to argue that nonscientic factors present an interesting
challenge to theorists of pluralism and eliminativism.
In particular, I aim to press a dilemma. Any theory of eliminativism and pluralism,
even one focussed solely on scientic equivocations, faces this dilemma. The rst
horn is to ignore nonscientic factors and thereby lose a signicant amount of scope.
The other is to countenance such factors and, as I will argue in § 6, thereby become
intractable. In this section, in order to push the rst horn of the dilemma, I will argue
that nonscientic signicance is pervasive among the key terms in the scope of the
debate, and that nonscientic factors can play several key roles relevant to the debate.
Previous theories of eliminativism and pluralism generally do not account for non-
scientic factors. This is not necessarily a problem on their own terms, and certainly
need not reect a view that such factors should be set aside. There may also be terms
on which it is possible to come to a ruling without any great consideration of nonsci-
entic signicance. Many of the key terms, and especially key candidates for plural-
ism over eliminativism, lack any great nonscientic signicance (e.g., Haueis’ 2021a
‘cortical column’), or have a form of nonscientic signicance that is innocuous and
perhaps even helpful for communication and identication of a coarsely-demarcated
domain or phenomenon of pretheoretic interest (e.g., Wilson’s 2006 ‘hardness’).
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Even so theories that do not account for nonscientic factors seem ill-placed
to account well for many of the central candidates for eliminativism or pluralism.
Included on Taylor and Vicker’s (2017) list are, among others, ‘consciousness’,
‘race’, ‘intelligence’, ‘health’, ‘life’, ‘scientic explanation’, ‘scientic method’, and
‘scientic theory’. All of these terms, in my view, have a great deal of nonscientic
signicance – the latter three least obviously so, but given the public importance of
the demarcation problem (distinguishing science from nonscience, especially pseu-
doscience), I think it is hard to deny that they do. There are many other possible
examples, not included on this list, for example, ‘wellbeing’ (Alexandrova, 2017)
and ‘democracy’ (Krauss, 2016; Nagel, 1961) – both of which have many meanings,
and both of whose scientic and nonscientic use is heavily shaped by nonscientic
factors.
Even if a theory remains squarely focussed on (avoiding) scientic equivocations,
it is hard to see how it could reliably come to the right ruling in such cases if one
focusses solely on scientic factors. There are two main reasons for this. The rst
is that the normative content of a term may increase the likelihood of equivoca-
tions – independently of the scientic factors discussed by Haueis (2021) and Taylor
& Vickers (2017). For ‘theory of mind’ to result in the kind of equivocation that I
think is going on in the use of the logical problem as an objection to previous ani-
mal psychology research on the topic, it need only have two scientic meanings (cf.
Taylor & Vickers, 2017), both of which could be associated with a reliable measure
and signicant in explaining the relevant animals’ behaviour (cf. Haueis 2021) – in
particular, it need only have the meaning assigned to it by Povinelli & Vonk (2003),
and the meaning discussed by Halina (2015).
Even if these were the only scientic meanings, and even if both were associated
with a reliable measure, it might still lead to harmful equivocations within science on
the basis of its nonscientic, ethical signicance. The point here is not that Haueis’
theory or Taylor and Vickers’ theory would come to the wrong ruling, which they
may or may not; the point here is that their theories appear not to track the relevant
factors in raising the likelihood of scientic equivocations based on ‘theory of mind’.
Where there are normative connotations to compete over, these have long been rec-
ognized as increasing the risk of equivocation (Gallie, 1955). As such, a theory that
tracks the risk of harmful scientic equivocations based on scientic factors may well
fail to track the actual risk of harmful scientic equivocations, making it less infor-
mative even on cases central in anchoring the contemporary debate.
There is an even more troublesome role that nonscientic signicance may play.
In certain cases, the nonscientic signicance of a scientic term may make it indis-
pensable, ruling out eliminativism even though there is an extremely high risk of
equivocation. Such a defence does not, in my personal opinion, work in the case of
‘theory of mind’. It seems fairly plausible to me that ‘theory of mind’ links animal
psychology and autism research to a particularly bad or pointless kind of ethical dis-
course. For example, Sorabji (1993) identies a pattern of reasoning common across
the history of Western philosophy, looking for a single feature that distinguishes
humans from all other animals. However, there need be no one feature that so dis-
tinguishes us; additionally, it need not be the same feature that distinguishes us from
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Synthese (2022) 200: 325
each other kind of animal (Carpenter, 2018; Sorabji, 1993) also highlights that the
search for a single distinguishing feature is a peculiarly Western concern.
Compare, however, discussions of wellbeing. If the normative signicance of
‘wellbeing’ – the normative component shared across dierent denitions and mean-
ings of the term – is something like an inherently desirable state which it would be
good for (such-and-such) individuals to be in, then it is hard to see how one could
eliminate the term ‘wellbeing’ from scientic discourse, even if it is inevitable that
people will adopt dierent denitions of the term, and will talk across one another
after having done so. The reason for this is that one might think that the benets
of scientically-informed theories of wellbeing for humans (and subclasses thereof;
Alexandrova 2017), as well as the benets of scientic theories of how to attain such
a state, outweigh the inevitable equivocations that come from making use of such a
normatively-loaded term in science.
In other words, while ‘theory of mind’ may link together certain areas of science
inappropriately linked to one another and a particularly unhelpful kind of norma-
tive theorizing, ‘wellbeing’ may link together certain areas of science appropriately
linked to one another and an extremely helpful kind of normative theorizing. While
the former casts the resultant equivocations as needless and egregious harms, the lat-
ter casts the resultant equivocations as necessary but fairly minor evils in pursuit of
a much greater good. Overall, what this means is that the nonscientic signicance
of scientic terms may also make equivocations more or less tolerable, and may
therefore mean that eliminativism is inappropriate even in the face of widespread sci-
entic equivocations. More pressingly for a theory concerned solely with scientic
equivocations, it may render such equivocations inevitable – eliminating a term like
‘wellbeing’ may be an entirely pointless endeavour, if it means that another term will
simply come to replace it (see also Wilson 2006).
There are also other ways that nonscientic signicance and nontechnical mean-
ings can support pluralism in a particular case. I mentioned earlier that in Wilson’s
(2006, ch.6) example of ‘hardness’, it is extremely plausible that the ordinary mean-
ing of the term helps the term to play its roles within science – that ‘hardness’ is
a useful scientic term in part because it has a nontechnical meaning that is both
widely understood, and helpful for generating legitimate and rarely-confused tech-
nical meanings (corresponding to dierent ways of probing materials).6 More gen-
erally, one might think that it is often a good idea to use terms with nonscientic
signicance in science, since such terms tend to be easily comprehensible and tied to
coarsely-demarcated domains of public and pretheoretic interest.
Any theory of eliminativism and pluralism, even one focussed solely on scientic
equivocations, therefore loses a signicant amount of scope if it does not counte-
nance non-scientic factors. If such a theory deals solely with scientic factors, then
it cannot come to an overarching ruling on terms with nonscientic signicance, and
this includes many key terms in the debate. This is because nonscientic factors may
play many important roles relevant to choosing between eliminativism and pluralism.
They may increase the likelihood of equivocations because they may lend terms nor-
mative connotations that researchers want associated exclusively with their preferred
6 This point was stressed to me by an anonymous reviewer.
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technical denitions. They may also mean that eliminativism even with respect to
a term that leads to many equivocations is undesirable from a broader perspective,
and pointless even if one’s sole interest is avoiding scientic equivocations because
another term with the same normative signicance will come to replace it.
6 The prospects of a general theory
The other horn of this dilemma is that one accepts that theories of pluralism and elim-
inativism (even those focussed solely on scientic equivocations) need to account for
the nonscientic signicance of scientic terms, and the range of factors to which
they must be sensitive becomes much larger, perhaps indenitely large. This makes
generalizable normative guidance extremely dicult to specify, a point that I will
press in this section.
I do not believe that it is likely that we will be able to build a normative theory of
pluralism and eliminativism that manages to be both sensitive to enough factors and
suciently specic in its prescriptions and criteria, that it can oer clear and correct
guidance in dierent cases. It is plausible, in my view, that there are no general rules
that govern when scientic terms with multiple meanings lead to equivocations that
are harmful, avoidable, and not outweighed by the benets that such terms can bring.
If this were so, any assessment or decision would have to be open-ended and case-by-
case – which in my view is neither particularly surprising, nor particularly bad news!7
Of course, at a very general level, many dierent cases have certain abstract fea-
tures in common.8 As highlighted by an anonymous reviewer, one important feature
which comes out clearly from discussion of ‘theory of mind’ is that scientic terms
gain traction in nonscientic contexts because they (appear to) have some ‘ordi-
nary’ meaning which one can grasp withosut grasping their more technical mean-
ings (again, see Wilson 2006). Many scientic terms with many meanings, including
neologisms and technical terms, are introduced precisely because they have some
ordinary meaning approximately appropriate for the relevant technical notion. It is
the precise nature of the gap between ordinary and technical meanings, in addition to
7 Indeed, this open-endedness may be an inevitable feature of the nature of concepts and conceptual
practices if for example, conceptual practice is normative by nature (e.g., Haueis & Slaby, 2022), and if
normative evaluation is necessarily open-ended (e.g., Rouse 2007), grounded in a relationship of mutual
accountability between (candidate-)performers of a practice (including those criticising a performance).
8 One reason that it is dicult to get beyond this very general level is that the phenomenon of concern is
not, in my view, a linguistically-unied phenomenon (or in other words, pluralistic terms do not consti-
tute a linguistic kind). One issue is that multiple kinds of polysemy, vagueness, and context-sensitivity all
plausibly play a role in generating new ‘meanings’. A more signicant issue is that various mechanisms
special to scientic contexts also do so, including operational denitions (e.g., Haueis 2021b; Wilson,
2006), scale-dependency (e.g., Bursten 2018; Haueis, 2021b), resolution-dependency (e.g., Ruphy 2017),
and the use of concepts that ‘bridge’ observable/phenomenological and microstructural/explanatory lev-
els of description (see again Bursten 2018). One particularly important phenomenon highlighted by an
anonymous reviewer is that of ‘normal cotravellers’, where one term ends up referring (or is discovered
to refer) to several dierent properties because they normally (appear to us to) co-occur (see also Field
1973).
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the dierences between technical meanings, that leads to many of the problems with
‘theory of mind’.
Such terms can help to build bridges between a domain of pretheoretic interest,
areas of scientic research, and areas of theoretical or normative discussion. In an age
of increasing specialization, this can be a hugely important service. It can also help to
facilitate discussion and integration between dierent disciplines – for example, Neto
(2020) discusses the services done to by biology in this way by ‘molecular gene’,
‘evolutionary novelty’, and ‘biological lineage’, all of which he counts as examples
of imprecise concepts. The way these terms build bridges is plausibly by encourag-
ing the perception of similarity, and discouraging the perception of dierence, by a
trick as simple as giving things the same name (or at least, letting them have the same
name). This in turn provides a sort of exible glue.9 Flexibility is aorded by dier-
ences in meaning. Glue is provided by encouraging people to see dierent areas as
discussing the ‘same thing’10 (also, in the modern day, by the way scientic work is
indexed and searchable).
In any given case, we can ask whether it is a good idea to build such bridges
in the rst place, and whether those bridges have been built well. We ought not to
encourage the perception of relevance and similarity between some kinds of areas,
especially not in a way that encourages the underplaying of dierences. It can facili-
tate stigmatizing equivocations and enable illicit cultural obsessions to inuence and
obstruct scientic research. Thoroughly assessing the choice between pluralism and
eliminativism means considering social attitudes – because these attitudes can raise
the prior likelihood of the harmful equivocations potentially facilitated by a term
with multiple meanings. It also means considering the legitimacy and necessity of the
cultural pursuits that have laid claim to a term.
My aim in this section is to explain why I do not hold much hope for a gen-
eral theory signicantly more detailed than this brief sketch. The primary reason for
this is that nonscientic factors of the sort considered in previous sections provide
a seemingly open-ended way for terms to acquire new meanings, and for their vari-
ous meanings and forms of signicance to interact with each other and to behave in
atypical ways.
Nonscientic signicance interfaces with scientic use of terms reciprocally, and
not in a particularly well-behaved manner. For example, ‘theory of mind’ took on
some of its nonscientic signicance partly because it was applied to autism, an
already stigmatized condition that people were presumably all too ready to believe
reected a reduced level of humanity and an inability to understand others or intro-
spect. Autism thereby came to serve as a sort of ‘proof’ of the signicance of ‘theory
9 Ostensibly, some psychological evidence also supports this point (for discussion, see Haueis 2021b).
However, such evidence primarily bears on how a term might have multiple related meanings in an
individual’s idiolect, and how an individual might store and represent these dierent meanings. But no
one individual need store or represent all the dierent meanings associated with a pluralistic technical
term – indeed, often the problem is precisely that dierent speakers are unaware that there are dierent
meanings in use.
10 This is not necessarily wrong – ‘discussing the same thing’ is often taken to be as coarse-grained as
concepts, and therefore not as ne-grained as conceptions of, descriptions of, or beliefs about that ‘thing’
(e.g., Sawyer 2018).
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of mind’ to humans in general, as discussed in § 3; this also seemingly increased the
prole of animal psychology research on the topic. It is, in turn, the success of these
areas of study that led to the proliferation of meanings of ‘theory of mind’, as objec-
tions to and defences of this broad scheme proliferated. Scientic uses can seemingly
therefore aect nonscientic signicance, which can in turn aect scientic uses.
The specic nature of these eects, once more, appears to depend on the content
and context of the discussion. For example, there appear to be cases in the history
of science where the nonscientic signicance of terms has led them to fall out of
favour, because scientists at the time were suspicious of the particular normative con-
notations involved – this is arguably true of the behaviourists’ scepticism of ‘mind’
and ‘consciousness’, and true on a larger timescale of ‘self’ and ‘soul’ (Martin & Bar-
resi, 2006). This opens the door to various kinds of disorderly case – for example, the
possibility that a scientic use of a term might increase its nonscientic signicance,
in turn leading to scepticism of the term among scientists, and thereby resulting in
certain kind of harm, the needless abandonment of a useful scientic term.
One key issue here is that no good account of pluralism and eliminativism can be
‘formal’ if it is to account for nonscientic signicance. The specic content and the
specic context matter – it matters who or what is being discussed, in what context,
for what reason, and so on. In particular, one’s view of the legitimacy of the cultural
pursuits that have laid claim to a term, and the prior normative views of research-
ers regarding what they are researching, aect the decision between eliminativism
and pluralism. More generally, where ‘theory of mind’ results in harmful equivoca-
tions, scientic and nonscientic, it is because of what (and who) is discussed in the
contexts that it links together, the stigma associated with these groups, and broader
cultural concerns. Much of the problem with ‘theory of mind’ is what kinds of areas
it links together. It is a bad idea to build a bridge between the study of autistic people,
who are a highly stigmatized group, and an area of animal psychology where many
researchers are looking for a psychological explanation of human specialness. Autis-
tic people are a stigmatized and marginalized group, and dehumanization is a core
mechanism of stigmatization and marginalization.
As such, it cannot solely be a matter of counting the range of purposes and gaug-
ing the signicance of the term in arguments (cf. Taylor & Vickers, 2017), nor can
it solely be a matter of ensuring that the term stands in appropriate relations to sci-
entically signicant properties and reliable measures (cf. Haueis 2021) – which is
not to deny that any of these features is nevertheless highly signicant. In fact, my
suspicion is that these more formal features are highly signicant, thereby adding to
the already large range of potentially highly signicant factors.
There is a still greater range of factors if one wishes also to avoid harmful nonsci-
entic equivocations – as I believe one ought. It is worth briey defending my view
on this point. The core issue, as I see it, is that if a theorist of pluralism and elimina-
tivism deliberately sets aside nonscientic equivocations and harms, then they risk
nding themselves in a deeply morally dubious position.11 Suppose that there is a
11 It is very important here that I be clear that I am not accusing previous theorists of pluralism and elimi-
nativism of any moral failing. This would be a doubly absurd accusation. First, because many authors who
advocate for the retention of scientic terms with multiple meanings focus on morally innocuous terms
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term that is scientically in credit overall, but which leads to extremely harmful non-
scientic equivocations. The theorist might oer their theory as claiming that the
term is scientically in credit, but not as advocating for its retention on this basis,
but practically this seems a dicult and unstable position to hold in a debate. More
likely, they will end up (or at least end up being understood as) advocating for plural-
ism and the retention of the term – not because they believe that the scientic benets
outweigh the nonscientic harms, but because they have set aside the nonscientic
harms as being outside their purview.
Putting pluralism and eliminativism in context may be indispensable for making a
well-informed decision, but it may also mean that no complete, overarching norma-
tive theory of eliminativism and pluralism is possible. It is important, however, not to
overestimate how grim this would be. It opens the door to the possibility that dierent
cases will look very dierent to one another. It may also make it hard to be sure that
all relevant factors have been considered. Neither of these things, however, means
that the decision would be impossible, or even necessarily dicult, in any particular
case (see also Haueis & Slaby, 2022).
7 Conclusion
The term ‘theory of mind’ has many meanings and results in harmful equivocations.
Previous theories of eliminativism and pluralism often identify this as the key dan-
ger of using scientic terms with multiple meanings. However, some of the most
signicant harmful equivocations that it leads to are not covered by current theo-
ries of pluralism and eliminativism. Additionally, the features of the term that lead
to these equivocations are not those identied in current theories of pluralism and
eliminativism.
The term ‘theory of mind’ and the research areas in which it is used are highly
socially signicant. This is not apparent when looking solely at scientic discussions
of ‘theory of mind’. ‘Theory of mind’ does not lead to problems because it has an
especially wide range of uses, fails to be associated with reliable measures, or fails to
pick out scientically signicant properties. Instead, it leads to problems because it
builds bridges between theorizing about a stigmatized group, research on nonhuman
animals, and a particular kind of theorizing about human specialness.
It may be that in an ideal world, such problems would not arise, because the public
and policymakers would not ‘misappropriate’ the ndings of science even when sci-
entists use ostensibly ordinary, nontechnical terms to describe their ndings. Perhaps
science, conceived as a process of collective inquiry, would be better-o in such a
world, able to proceed without fear of misleading the public and policymakers. We
(e.g., Haueis 2021a, b; Wilson, 2006), and although many authors who advocate for the elimination of
terms that are not morally innocuous do largely ignore their moral dangers, they are working in an entirely
morally defensible way – once they have gathered what they see as sucient, maximally persuasive (which
here likely means ‘scientic’) evidence in favour of elimination, it seems deeply unreasonable to insist that
they gather more, more morally-salient evidence. Secondly, because explicit discussions of eliminativism
and pluralism remain a fairly young, burgeoning area of discussion, and it is deeply unreasonable to accuse
other authors of being immoral because they did not make the points I made by building on their insights.
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Synthese (2022) 200: 325
do not live in that world. When it is suciently feasible to use alternative scientic
terms that are less likely to encourage such misuses of science, scientists ought to do
so. It surely would not undermine scientic progress to use dierent terms for the
capacity to explicitly represent mental states, as nonhuman animals have often been
claimed to lack, and the shortcuts neurotypical humans use to work out others’ mental
states, as autistic people have often been claimed to lack.
Scientic publishing does not rigorously stick to a distinction between work that
is intended for public consumption, and work that is intended for other scientists.
Even if it did, it seems unlikely that the way science is reported in newspapers, and
the way scientic conclusions are used in public discourse, politics, and policy would
respect that distinction. So long as scientic writings are discussed in nonscientic
contexts, there should be some norms that discourage their misuse. It might be that
whenever these clash with the norms that best support collective inquiry, collective
inquiry must win out. However, this does not preclude norms that do not undermine
collective inquiry – for example, carefully considering one’s use of scientic terms
with multiple meanings and signicant nonscientic uses.
Discussions of pluralism and eliminativism therefore apparently need to account
for the nonscientic uses of scientic terms with multiple meanings. This cannot be a
matter solely of purely formal properties of such terms. Some such terms exploit the
exibility that they aord in order to facilitate benecial interaction and integration.
Others lead to harmful equivocations and miscommunication. In order even to spot,
let alone to mitigate, these problems, one has to consider the broader social systems
in which scientic research is embedded.
Acknowledgements With thanks to Andy Clark, Riana Betzler, Alex Raubo, Nathan Davies, Helen
Gough, and two anonymous reviewers for their indispensable feedback.
Funding N/A
Availability of data and material N/A
Code Availability N/A
Declarations
Conflicts of interest/Competing interests N/A
Ethical approval N/A
Consent to participate N/A
Consent for publication N/A
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
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