The Existential Theory of Mind

Abstract

The primary causal explanatory model for interpreting behavior, theory of mind, may have expanded into corridors of human cognition that have little to do with the context in which it evolved, questioning the suitability of domain-specific accounts of mind reading. Namely, philosophical-religious reasoning is a uniquely derived explanatory system anchored in intentionality that does not clearly involve behavior. The presence of an existential theory of mind (EToM) suggests that individuals perceive some nondescript or culturally elaborated (e.g., God) psychological agency as having encoded communicative intentions in the form of life events, similar to a person encoding communicative intentions in deictic gestures. The emergence of EToM is discussed from ontogenetic and phylogenetic perspectives; autism is examined to determine whether alternate core explanatory models (e.g., folk physics) are used by those with deficits in theory of mind to derive existential meaning.