Toward a science of other minds: escaping the argument by analogy

levels of representational redescription (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). But then what causal role is left for second-order intentional states? In our view, the highest level psychological descriptions of behaviors do not necessarily directly prompt the behavior they attend. To be sure, in some cases they may do so, but in many other cases they may serve to regulate behavior at a higher level of hierarchical description. In many cases, however, they may merely be convenient (and useful) ad hoc descriptions of our behaviors—behaviors that both can and do occur without such descriptions. Perhaps one troubling question remains. If the exact same behaviors can be produced without such explicit representation of mental states, why did the capacity for such representations evolve in the first place? If the view we have outlined here and elsewhere is correct, then the evolution of second-order intentional states may have initially occurred because of their advantage in subtle reorganizations of existing, ancient behavioral propensities, as opposed to the generation of entirely new classes of basic behavioral units. In this sense, the evolution of second-order intentional states may have allowed humans to reinterpret existing, extremely complicated social behaviors that evolved long before we did. Of course, once this new representational device was in place, there may well have been cascading effects on larger aspects of the system—in this case, material and social culture including pedagogy and ethics, to name but a few (for differing perspectives on these issues, see Premack, 1984; Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner, 1993; Povinelli & Godfrey, 1993). Figure 12 offers a model of both the traditional view of the relation between 533 ESCAPING THE ARGUMENT BY ANALOGY