ABSTRACT
In their 1978 paper, psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff posed the question, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” They treated this question as interchangeable with the inquiry, “Does a chimpanzee make inferences about another individual, in any degree or kind?” (526). Here, we offer an alternative way of thinking about this issue, positing that while chimpanzees may not possess a theory of mind in the strict sense (to be explained shortly), we ought to think of them as enactive perceivers of practical and social affordances. As such, we reframe the question: “Are chimpanzees socially enactive?”
