AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

In the Sally-Anne false belief task (Wimmer & Perner 1983), autistics and three year-olds ascribe beliefs to others based on their own knowledge of the truth rather than on the other person's justified beliefs. This phenomenon is known as the "reality bias" or "curse of knowledge." I suggest that several famous philosophical puzzles arise from the same intuition, that is the theorist's knowledge of how the world really is (eg Gettier). For Donnellan (1974) the semantics of language may only be given from the "outside" by the "omniscient observer of history" and Kripke's puzzle cases of naming arise from "ignorance and error" on the part of a subect. Burge (1988) says “We take up a perspective on ourselves from the outside” and Kaplan (2012) says that the theorist “surveys another’s thought” from a point of view “independent of whether the subject’s thought corresponds to reality.” That is, philosophers make the same mistake that children grow out of by the age of four. Chomsky (1962) warns “Reliance on the reader’s intelligence is so commonplace that its significance may be easily overlooked” and Fodor suggests “The question is not what is obvious to the theorist; the question is what follows from the theory.”