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Jerry Monaco also noted this article or one very much like last week. I intended to acknowledge it and thank him, but I got lost in Iraq, radicalism and ancient memories of Vietnam era...
I want to disagree a little with the wording, `they expect other individuals to perform the most rational action...'' It's probably better to say, ``they expect others to perform, as they would...''.
This latter wording reflects what I intended when I tried to write about an `empathic' mind, minds with shared precepts of intention. It isn't exactly the usual meaning of empathy. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't discount the more emotive ladened meaning of empathy, only because it probably is the emotive nature of primate minds that lays at the core of these perceptions of intention. In social societies, it is almost required that individuals know who is pissed, who is safe to crash near in the shade with during the heat of the day, and who is interested in hanky-panky.
(BTW, the office ladies report they have been around each other long enough to be in sync. So, once a month the office goes crazy. The guys in the shop (techies) roll their eyes...It's looney tunes, like a John Brenner science fiction story. The voyage of the space ship WOB goes off course into the dark nebula of chaos...)
Getting back to the above quote, I am not sure what the word rational is doing here. I agree it is a rational expectation that such and such an action or gesture `means', such and such a frame of mind. But a more technical view is that these are expectations based on some form of `inner' knowledge or experience with the state itself.
In any event, the reason I was so interested in this kind of work is because it relieves language and symbolic communication of a tremendous burden. Since there is such an `empathic' or non-linguistic based perceptual system in place, later development of symbolic-linguistic systems is already provided with the world of its primary contents---the state of mind of the other. It means that language only has to `name' the state, to communicate it---since it is already being mimicked and shared in some mental fashion---as direct a consequence of the immediate social context.
Under a more nuanced argument, this empirical finding relieves the development of thought and language of a representation theory at least in its evolutionary developmental phase, since these mental states and knowledge of them are simply contiguous with themselves. Hence they don't have to be mentally represented, or mediated, since their general parameters are integrated into social perception, as its primary content.
Just to extend this discussion to an even more difficult problem consider the difficulties of identifying the neurological and evolutionary developments that underlay our concept of space.
This is actually how Cassirer begins his analysis of symbolic forms.
CG
ps. Note to Mike Smith. Yes, they all sound like that. You just have to ignore the overlay and figure out if the science under the narrative sounds about right. Didn't some group of Harvard students put a chimpanzee through to a bachelor's degree back in the 60s or 70s?