In an interview on Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Your fourth book is The Intentional Stance by Daniel Dennett.

Dennett is a philosopher at Tufts University, near Boston. This actually links with our earlier discussion about theory of mind. One of Dennett’s goals was to take philosophical ideas and make sure that people in neighbouring disciplines were thinking about them. He was particularly targeting psychologists but appealed to primatologists just as much.

The notion was how we understand other people, and in particular, whether we adopt the ‘intentional stance’ – that is to say, whether we approach other people by assuming that they have minds, with beliefs, intentions, emotions, and desires. One of the problems with philosophy books is that only philosophers can understand them, but Dennett wrote a book that was very readable – he didn’t compromise the academic complexity of his subject, but he wanted to ensure that it was widely accessible.

This book gave rise to a lot of the research that was carried out in developmental psychology into how children understand other people, and how they develop the capacity to ‘mind-read’. It certainly inspired my work in understanding children with autism. Why is it that they are not developing the capacity to mind-read, or developing the ‘intentional stance’?

It’s interesting that someone who is such a long way away in academic terms (philosophy) can have such a big impact in fields like psychiatry and neuroscience.

You touched on this before – the importance of coming from all different directions in academia. Do you think that this is necessary for scientific progress?

Not all scientists work that way. Many are happy to focus on one problem, and study it from one discipline. But I guess that my experience in research is to take the broader approach and try to integrate from a range of different approaches and disciplines. That might reflect my training as a human scientist – my undergraduate degree – which itself is a kind of hybrid: it doesn’t expect any one discipline to be able to answer a particular question. It acknowledges that a discipline like social anthropology or psychology can contribute one part of the answer, but that ultimately what we should be aiming for are integrated answers that bring in different approaches, such as genetics or brain scanning. That’s how we work in the Autism Research Centre – collaboratively across disciplines – and the Pinker and Dennett books are good illustrations of how that works.