In this chapter I shall be defending the mind-blindness theory of autism, by showing how it can accommodate data which might otherwise appear problematic for it. Specifically, I shall show how it can explain the fact that autistic children rarely engage in spontaneous pretend-play, and also how it can explain the executive-function deficits which are characteristic of the syndrome. I shall do this by emphasising what I take to be an entailment of the mind-blindness theory, that autistic people have difficulties of access to their own mental states, as well as to the mental states of other people.

Introduction

In a series of publications since 1985 Alan Leslie, Simon Baron-Cohen and others have argued that autism should be identified with mind-blindness – that is, with damage to an innate theory of mind module, leading to an inability to understand the mental states of other people. (See Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Leslie, 1987, 1988, 1991; Leslie and Roth, 1993; Baron-Cohen, 1989a, 1990, 1991a, 1993; and Baron-Cohen and Ring, 1994b.) I shall be concerned to elaborate and defend this proposal, showing that it has the resources to handle rather more of the relevant data, and rather more elegantly, than even its originators have realised.