ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief description of the intervening variable approach and some straightforward applications of the causal modeling framework that it suggests. It examines several significant obstacles for using causal models to think about mindreading; these raise questions about whether people can appropriately represent mindreading via causal models and, if so, how people could know which causal model best represents some actual subject's cognitive process. Model selection criteria are attempts to formally describe trade-off between fit and complexity. While model selection considerations shed light on the advantages of using a model containing intervening variables, they don't provide a methodology for testing for them. Andrew Whiten argues that mindreading models are thus simpler and "more economical of representational resources". The best candidates for mindreading are large-brained primates and corvids, suggesting that the process of positing intervening variables to capture complex patterns requires significant neural and cognitive resources.
