ABSTRACT
It is widely accepted that the complexities of hominid social life are responsible for the evolution of distinctively human mental capacities. Certainly one distinctive feature of human intelligence is social intelligence, and this is often expressed as the idea that we are ‘mind-readers’, able to develop an intentional profile of other agents in the course of explaining and predicting their behaviour. 1 Mind-reading and the capacity to negotiate the social world are not the same thing, but the former seems to be necessary for the latter: people with autism are extremely restricted in their comprehension of mental states and they have comparable difficulties in negotiating the social world. And no wonder: while not every social fact is a mental fact, and not every social property definable in mentalistic terms, our basic grip on the social world depends on our being able to see our fellows as motivated by beliefs and desires we sometimes share and sometimes do not. Social institutions are, then, intelligible as (imperfect) devices for harnessing the agreement and resolving the conflict. So it is no surprise that in evolutionary and developmental theories of social intelligence the primary focus has been on our capacity for detecting, thinking about and responding to the mental states of conspecifics, particularly with a view to co-operating and/or competing with them. Clearly such social understanding is deeply and almost exclusively mentalistic. It is that subdomain of social understanding which concerns us here.
