A Theory of Mind? Or A Theory of War....

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I take it that means you are not willing to go through the points mentioned in the link (or elsewhere in this thread) and explain why it is you think they are not examples of circular reasoning and poor research design and are not problematic for that reason. You are going to stick with intentionally distorting and misinterpreting any argument you disagree with so as to make actual discussion of the research with you impossible. That's a shame, feels like a missed opportunity for us both.

Given that TOM has become a meme - repeated continually in dogmatic ways by no small percentage of autism professionals, by the general public, within the AS community - it has now taken on the existence of a psychological folklore and is applied indiscriminately to all people on the spectrum, then the consideration follows: what are the flow on impacts in regard to life outcomes for AS people? If there are indeed flow on effects (eg employers as gatekeepers rejecting all AS applicants because of the meme) then the 1985 paper has led to consequences which perhaps SBC never intended.

Unless I am missing something, he has done little in the 31 years since to clarify the point that not all AS subjects (even though they were drawn from the far more "impaired" diagnostic criteria of the time) failed his 1985 test. Even in that early paper, he articulates the assumption that impaired TOM is a fact for all people on the spectrum - though his own data didn't support the claim.

What is strange about the way I write? Can you give specifics?
Most people who edit my writing never said my writing is atypical, they said it is clear and straightforward, nothing atypical mentioned.
I was able to get A grades on my english/humanities essays and science papers, so it seems that with two different styles of writing, my writing is conventional enough to be accepted by teachers grading to a certain conventional rubric.
But whether or not my writing is atypical, I doubt that I have difficulty understanding the simple language of the sally anne test as an adult. Also, that was not the only ToM test I failed, and failure at these simple ToM tests indicates to psychologists and myself deficits in ToM or social cognition, which is also what the research papers say about the autism groups that failed the same tests or scored lower on those or other tests of ToM or social cognition.

I was wondering what he meant by that too. You sound pretty normal to me when you write.

Well right now you are writing normally, probably because you are putting more effort into doing stuff, but generally your writing style is very idiosyncratic, with unusual capitalization, spelling, grammar, and just the way it's put together strikes as being written by someone with an unusual mind.

The point is despite how the term is memetically used, Theory of Mind is NOT the same thing as social cognition, it refers to a specific belief, like the preservation of ontology (objects continue to exist when no longer seen). Social cognition also has a ton of overlap with language processing.

I would be interested to know which diagnostic critieria were used to diagnose AS in the UK in the years 1980-1985, especially whether gross deficits in language development applied there as well as in the USA.

During those years the DSM criteria presumably applied in the USA at that time were:

DSM III (1980)
Diagnostic criteria for Infantile Autism

A. Onset before 30 months of age
B. Pervasive lack of responsiveness to other people (autism)
C. Gross deficits in language development
D. If speech is present, peculiar speech patterns such as immediate and delayed echolalia, metaphorical language, pronominal reversal.
E. Bizarre responses to various aspects of the environment, e.g., resistance to change, peculiar interest in or attachments to animate or inanimate objects.
F. Absence of delusions, hallucinations, loosening of associations, and incoherence as in Schizophrenia.


People may have had different diagnostic experiences then, however it is the formal criteria they were using in the UK at in the years 80-85 that is of interest to me vis a vis this topic.

People with autism can read emotions, feel empathy

social cognition is just a larger topic that encompasses tom, there is no clear definition of tom at neural level, but there are measurable deficits in social cognition from many tasks in autistic people, sally anne is just one, most of the reasons put forth by people who passed sally anne never made sense to me who failed it, i think they cannot intuitively understand what goes on in the mind of the person who failed, since they passed

Many neurotypical 13 year old girls really don't care if other people see them naked or not, that's a ridiculous conclusion. The question one is even more ridiculous, it sounds like SBC never heard of echophilia before.

I think you're clutching at straws there, it most certainly isn't considered normal for a 13 year old child to walk around naked while their parents are having a dinner party. As for the repeated question I have seen this myself with a few autistic people. Funnily enough one was regarding my birthday, he asked me every time I met when I was born in order to tell me what day it was and what the weather was like. He did this with everyone in the group. Similarly another guy would repeatedly ask me if I liked football and what team did I follow. No matter how many times he asked, the answer of "I don't like football" never changed, but it didn't stop him asking the same question numerous times in any given interaction.

Neither of these people had "echophilia", and the suggestion that such a condition could be mistaken for someone who repeatedly asks a certain, specific question is also a bit of a stretch.