Objectivist naturalists about life's meaning regard it as implicating no world but the natural one, and yet as deriving from more than just subjective attitudes or interests. Such naturalists must obviously deny prominent religious conceptions of meaning. But must they further deny that it can be found in religious pursuits? In this article, I defend a negative answer by arguing that, contrary to a prima facie plausible consideration in support of a positive answer, and by many objectivist naturalists’ own lights, the meaning of life can be found in pursuits predicated on false belief.

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations of knowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind – one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it.

A total of 104 children aged between 41 and 47 months were selected to study the relationship between language and false belief understanding. Participants were assigned to four different training conditions: discourse, labelling, control (all with deceptive objects), and sentential complements (involving non-deceptive objects). Post-test results showed an improvement in children’s false belief understanding in the discourse and the labelling conditions, but not in the sentential complements with non-deceptive objects or the control group. Furthermore, the most remarkable improvement in false belief understanding occurred in the labelling group. These results suggest that some types of linguistic experience promote the development of false belief understanding, provided that differing perspectives are confronted.

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute independent mental states to self and others to explain and predict behavior. Impairment of ToM is well established in developmental pathologies. In neurological populations, investigation of ToM is still rare but data suggest that ToM impairment could contribute to behavioral and social disturbances. In addition to neurological signs, multiple sclerosis (MS) presents with disorders of cognition and behavior directly related to brain damage. The aim of this study was to assess ToM abilities and recognition of facial emotional expression in adults with MS. We compared 64 patients with relapsing MS and 30 matched healthy controls on three levels of ToM tasks, a facial emotion recognition task, and a neuropsychological assessment. MS patients performed significantly worse than controls in emotion recognition and all ToM tasks (p < .02). These deficits were not correlated with demographic variables or neuropsychological test performance. These findings underscore the importance of assessing ToM and facial recognition in MS, as dysfunction in these areas may impact upon social interaction and, thus, impair quality of life for both patients with MS and their families. (JINS, 2011, 17, 1122–1131)

Theory of mind tests are regularly used in childhood research and clinical practice for autism spectrum disorders in Australia. Despite this, there is little empirical evidence that the tests used in the United Kingdom and the United States have validity for Australian children. Furthermore, many tests believed to assess ‘advanced’ or ‘higher-order’ theory of mind have not had their reliability or validity rigorously evaluated. In the current study, seven theory of mind tasks were administered to 216 Australian children aged 6 to 12 years as part of a larger research project. While Australian children performed similarly to previous research samples on some tasks, there were marked discrepancies on others. Despite these differences, the validity of using a three-factor structure of first-, second-, and higher-order theory of mind tasks was supported by subsequent confirmatory factor analysis. Methodological issues accounted for some differences between the Australian and previously reported data. However, there were also some cross-cultural aspects of the results that require further investigation.

Deaf children aged 4 to 16 years were given a false-belief test of theory of mind. Although the children experienced difficulty with the test, relative to hearing children, confirming a report by Peterson and Siegal (1995), performance was age-related, with a significantly higher proportion of 13- to 16-year-olds passing the test. It was concluded that deaf children raised in a spoken language environment show a developmental delay in theory of mind acquisition. This delay is consistent with the assumption that their early opportunities for learning about mental states are relatively restricted and that the normal development of theory of mind is dependent upon such opportunities.