@ian i stand corrected, to some extent.
original paper disputing theory of mind in animals (Penn and Povinelli 2007) [~300 citations]:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2346530/a more recent paper that discusses the arguments in the 2007 paper (Fletcher, Carruthers 2013) [13 citations]:
http://faculty.philosophy.umd.edu/pcarruthers/Behavior-reading%20versus%20mentalizing.pdfthis is a controversial subject and there are strong proponents of both sides. to quote a line from the later paper:
"What is really at stake is whether or not the animals in question represent and reason about some of the mental states of other agents."
i haven't read the entirety of the second paper but it looks like the mentalization that is being ascribed to animals is the mentalization that occurs in human infants before the ability to complete the false belief task (a "Stage 1 theory of mind").
it honestly looks like a bit of a semantics argument - the terms aren't defined clearly enough for either point of view to be clearly correct over the other. the latter paper definitely looks like a good read though and if you want to talk about this let me know and we can both read the paper and then continue discussion
