QUESTIONS ABOUT THE PHENOMENON Three Puzzles of Mindreading 2 Three Puzzles of Mindreading BERTRAM F. MALLE M indreading is the human activity of inferring other people’s mental states. Literatures from multiple disciplines have advanced our knowledge on this phenomenon, and we now know quite a bit about the development and functional use of mindreading in the human species (e.g., Astington, 1993; Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 2000; Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001; Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990) and are even beginning to sketch a picture of its evolutionary ori- gins (Baron-Cohen, 1999; Bogdan, 2000; Malle, 2002; Povinelli, 2001; Whiten, 1999). But as we try to integrate this growing knowledge and perhaps work toward a unified theory of mental state inference, many problems and puzzles emerge. In this chapter I focus on three such puz- zles. Each of them, I will argue, has a credible solution, but what is per- haps more important is that each of these solutions points to the same general conclusion about mindreading. THE FIRST PUZZLE: BEHAVIOR AS INPUTS AND OUTPUTS OF MINDREADING The first puzzle concerns the relationship of behavior to inferences of mental states. On the one hand, most researchers assume (or explicitly theorize) that people typically infer mental states by observing the ac- tor’s behavior, making perceptions of behavior an important input to 26 This is a chapter excerpt from Guilford Publications. Other Minds, How Humans Bridge the Divide between Self and Others, Bertram F. Malle and Sara D. Hodges, Eds. Copyright © 2005