Rebecca Saxe is at Harvard, and her work is fascinating. It is about cognitive neuroscience and our knowledge of other minds.
It’s also has links to some controversial claims, which we should be aware of. She discusses “the false belief task,” which has often been used to describe children with autism. That is, it is said that the neural-typical child passes the test between 4 adn 5 years old, and the neuro-atypical child with ASD does not. Other theorists have doubts about the test itself.
I think Saxe’s work is very interesting even if it is not a display of the full range of the dialectic. In putting it here, I do not mean to endorse an account of the symptoms of ASD.
Let me add that one conclusion some people draw is that the performance of children diagnosed as ASD in the false belief task shows that they do not have a theory of mind, or a basic way of modeling for themselves other people’s inner lives.
This very strong conclusion is hotly contested, and in my view rightly so. It places the neuro-atypical person in a drastic way outside of the human community, and appears to claim that the possibilities of variation in human understanding are very limited. An alternative and surely better view is to recognize human differences, rather than ranking them as those of outsiders.