ABSTRACT
Our common understanding of people's actions in terms of mental state concepts has often been referred to as 'the theory of mind', or 'folk-psychology', in cognitive science, psychology and philosophy. Many philosophers and psychologists further argue that such knowledge constitutes a theory, not fundamentally different from genuine scientific theories. In this paper, I first analyze two versions of the Theory of Mind hypothesis. On the one hand, we have the strong Theory of Mind hypothesis, advocated by Fodor (1987) and Baron-Cohen (1995) who propose the innateness and the modularity thesis. On the other hand, we have the moderate Theory of Mind hypothesis by Wellman (1990) and Perner (1991) who endorse the cultural universality and the domain specificity of the Theory of Mind. I argue that both versions of the Theory of Mind hypothesis inadequately try to explain the meaning of mental expressions by reducing it to some internal structures or processes. I propose instead that the meaning of mental expressions is in the tripartite relation between the agent, the linguistic symbols and the environment. I present some evidence for the dynamic interactions of the three elements in the ontogenetic linguistic development of children and in the diachronic changes of a language.
