CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@KatyElphinstone i'm putting that book on my (very long) reading list, thank you.

@joshsusser @SecondUniverse @KatyElphinstone @adelinej

theory of mind is an example of what i call "bucket concepts" (still working on a better term). one research team coins it to mean one thing--particularly, in chimpanzees, the ability to recognize goal directed behavior by humans and infer their desired outcome--and that meaning goes in the bucket. then someone asks 'what does this look like in children?' and chooses the ability to understand that others can hold false beliefs. so that goes in the same bucket. over time, other people have different ideas about what theory of mind means: perspective-taking; inferring others' beliefs, intentions, and desires; assessing your _own_ beliefs, intentions, and desires; predicting others' behavior; having a mind at all; recognizing that others have minds; and of course our favorite "reading minds". all of it goes in the bucket, because each contributor thinks their addition is just more of what's already in the bucket.

now the whole bucket gets passed around, under the label "theory of mind", and treated as a coherent concept, despite the fact that it's actually half a dozen (at least) concepts thrown together in a bucket. most people don't look inside the bucket anymore, because they’re convinced their preferred definition is the only one inside. if there's a disagreement, nobody finds themselves in the wrong because their preferred definition is, after all, actually in the bucket.

trying to take anything back out of the bucket would give us a different problem, because once we nix one of the definitions (like that ridiculous "mind reading" one) we invalidate an unknown number of past usages of the term. honestly, i'd go for it, but academia surely would not, because people wouldn't be able to reference any prior work on theory of mind without examining whether it relied on an extra bit of meaning we're getting rid of. so the bucket never shrinks, only grows. the term can only become more overloaded and less meaningful.

but for some reason, certain areas of research love these bucket terms. i've seen a number of them and i wonder if anyone really considers how deleterious to the advancement of science when people unknowingly use the same terminology for different things.

(edit: punctuation)