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psychology itself has noticed that different systems of thinking seemed to be necessary for understanding mind and matter. The main preoccupation of much of psychology in the twentieth century was translating mind talk into mechanism talk on the assumption that the two were entirely interchangeable. A telling quote from Donald Hebb (1946) on how psychologists should understand chimpanzees highlights what happened as a result:
    A thoroughgoing attempt to avoid anthropomorphic description in the study of temperament was made over a two-year period at the Yerkes laboratories. . . . All that resulted was an almost endless series of specific acts in which no order or meaning could be found. On the other hand, by the use of frankly anthropomorphic concepts of emotion and attitude one could quickly and easily describe the peculiarities of individual animals, and with this information a newcomer to the staff could handle the animals as he could not safely otherwise. Whatever the anthropomorphic terminology may seem to imply about conscious states in the chimpanzee, it provides an intelligible and practical guide to behavior . (88)
    This realization suggested to Hebb and others that the earnest project of eliminating mind entirely from the scientific explanation of behavior (Bentley 1944; Werner 1940) was misguided. You have to think about the animals’ minds in order to keep from getting mugged by them. A mental system for understanding even chimp behavior seems highly preferable to a mechanical system.
    Perceiving mind and causal agency is a significant human ability. It is possible that this achievement is accomplished by a fairly narrow mental module, a special-skill unit of mind that does only this, and that in different individuals this module can thus be particularly healthy, damaged, or even nonfunctional. Leslie (1994) has called this set of skills a Theory-of-Mind-Mechanism (ToMM), and Baron-Cohen (1995) has proposed that such a mechanism may be injured or missing in some forms of autism. He suggests that each of us has an “intentionality detector” that does the job of looking for actions that seem to be willed, in both self and others. The absence of this detector leaves us looking for physical or mechanistic explanations when psychological ones would really be better. Baron-Cohen has documented the “mindblindness” of autistic individuals in some detail, suggesting just how difficult life can be if one doesn’t have a quick and natural ability to comprehend other people’s minds. An example comes from Kanner’s (1943, 232) description of an autistic child: “On a crowded beach he would walk straight toward his goal irrespective of whether this involved walking over newspapers, hands, feet, or torsos, much to the discomfiture of their owners. His mother was careful to point out that he did not intentionally deviate from his course in order to walk on others, but neither did he make the slightest attempt to avoid them. It was as if he did not distinguish people from things, or at least did not concern himself about the distinction.” 11
    The idea that mind perception is variable has also been noted by philosophers. Daniel Dennett (1987; 1996) has captured this observation in suggesting that people take an “intentional stance” in perceiving minds that they do not take in perceiving most of the physical world. The degree to which we perceive mindedness in phenomena can change, so that under some circumstances we might see our pet pooch as fully conscious and masterfully deciding just where it would be good to scratch himself, whereas under other circumstances we might have difficulty ex-tending the luxury of presumed conscious thought and human agency even to ourselves. It is probably the case, too, that the degree of mechanical causality we perceive is something that varies over time and circum-stance. Viewing any particular event as mentally or mechanically caused, then, can depend on a host of factors and