Does Your Pet Know What You're Thinking?   |  Apr 10th 2008  | 
 6 Contributions  I recently read Mindreading, by Sanjida
O'Connell. The book discusses people's ability (or inability) to
understand the thoughts, needs, and desires of others.  It also
talks about animals' ability to understand the same thing. What
I gathered from the book is that nobody really knows the extent
to which animals are aware of others' consciousness. Sadly, my
enjoyment (and comprehension) of the book was hindered by
sentences such as this:  Other evidence which indicates that
joint attention is crucial to developing Theory of Mind comes
from autistic children who, as we have said, are not able to
show or understand triadic joint attention or protodeclarative
pointing and even sometimes have trouble with protoimperatives.
(O'Connell, Sanjida. Mindreading: Investigation into How We
Learn to Love and Lie. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Page 61.)
What? Was I supposed to understand that?  Pedantic bombast
aside, there has been a lot of ar