ABFH Gernsbacher is not the only fish in the pond when it comes to confounding the earlier studies into ToM from the linguistic viewpoint, there are studies that have tried to eliminate any confusion there and the further from a task requiring specific levels of understanding in instruction, the more equivocal the results get.

As for ToM we all know one of the great progenitors of the Thery, SBC who took the notion from Premack and Woodruffs study of Chimpanzees in the first place, has moved on in search of another great oversimplification of autism.

He has moved on but his bloody book still finds reprints and new editions. Just as much as Happes repudiatiated study of autitistic autobiography is still in print in the latest edition of Friths book which apart from the translation of Asperger’s original paper is well out of date now.

That’s the problem, the cutting edge moves on but for the more scientifically inclined general reader, or beginner into a course of study on autism, the old stuff is still out there perpetuating a particular meme, based on a shallow understanding of what empathy is or might be.

I have long had this contention with thery of mind, in that all it is is a trope, a literary fiction, a philosophic position and no real thing in itsef at all. It’s no more than a thery of unicorns, because the whole notion of mind is in itself up for grabs.

Mind is essentially in itself a construct that allows the manipulation of certain kinds of data for social interaction, but can’t necessarily be said to exist as any kind of entity independant of the brain and body, and consciousness is no less elusive as a concept either, it may be nothing more than the momentary shift in attention between a series of motoric funtions, which begs the question whether there can even be such a notion that is described as experience.

That very much seems to be the position of a lot of cutting edge neuroscientists anyway, at least those who understand philosophy, rather than the more down to earth ones who just write no more than scientific journalism.

At a mundane level however we do have to come down from the high flown philosophy to adopt a pragmatism, fictive though a lot of it may be.

Just as Dr Johnson metaphorically kicks his toe against hard matter that is not at all what it appears to be at a higher level of resolution.

In other words, theory of mind may be partly a result of a pruned right hemisphere, a condition, the current common default condition, that also results in language facility.

http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/pdf/Gernsbacher_autistic_modules.pdf

She points out that language impairment is a major confounding factor in theory of mind studies, thus rendering any conclusions about lack of theory of mind highly questionable, and that brain imaging studies have not shown any structural deficits in autistic brains with regard to theory of mind.