explanation seems to be pitched at too high a level. For recall that it is
absence of pretend play at 18 months which is one of the trio of diagnostic
criteria for autism. At that age it seems most unlikely, on a theory-theory
account, that the child can represent any of its mental statesas such. And at
that age the sorts of pretence in which normal children engage are pretty
simple – such as manipulating toy cars, or constructing towers out of
building bricks – and hardly deserving of being calledimaginativeplay. So
it seems rather unlikely that the rewards of pretence, at that age, either
derive from or involve the childrepresentingtheir own mental state of
imagining.
We are now inclined to propose that the rewards for simple forms of
pretend play presuppose a capacity to detect and to representagency– that
is, that in normal children it implicates Baron-Cohen’s (1995) ‘Inten-
tionality Detector’ (ID) or Wellman’s (1990) ‘simple-desire-psychology’.
ToWnd the actions of manipulating a toy car rewarding, on this account, a
young child must be capable of representing what it is doing asmoving the
object like a car, and of representing this as the goal of its action. For
without at least this minimum degree of meta-representational ability, it is
hard to see how pretend-actions could be diVerentially rewarding. (This is
not to say that representations of agency or goal aresuYcientfor the
rewarding nature of pretend play, of course; we only claim that they are
necessary. Quite what it is that makes pretence enjoyable and intrinsically
rewarding for young children is something of a puzzle. But note that this is
equallya puzzle for simulationism.) Then, on the plausible hypothesis that
autism will involve damage to, or a delay in the development of, the
Intentionality Detector (or the mechanism responsible for simple-desire-
psychology), we have a non-simulationist hypothesis to explain absence of
pretend play in autism.
5.2 Executive function deWcits and counterfactual reasoningExecutive function deWcits involve some sort of problem with planning,
and it is plausible to suppose that the problem is a lack of ability – or at
least an inferior capacity – to think ahead. Not being good at thinking
ahead is probably due to not being good atWguring outwhat would happen
or be the case ifsuch-and-suchwere so. This sort of reasoning has acquired
the label of ‘counterfactual reasoning’. It is not an altogether happy label,
because thesuch-and-suchset out in theif-clause might actually be, or
come to be, factual. The point is not that the ‘counterfactual’ bit of
counterfactual reasoning is not so, but rather that it is entertained merely
as a supposition.
The idea that there is some peculiarly intimate connection between
Accounting for autistic impairments 101