Sellars’s treatment of mentalistic concepts as similar to theoretical concepts has been cited as an inspiration for the “theory-theory” in developmental psychology.  This is the notion that the mechanisms we utilize to detect and attribute thoughts in ourselves and others operate via a kind of tacit theory application and that there is a developmental stage in children during which they acquire a “theory of mind” and learn to apply it.  (See Astington et al. 1988; Gopnik and Wellman, 1994; Wellman, 1990; Garfield et al., 2001.)  This creative extension of Sellars’s proposal is not something he is committed to; he is not engaged in empirical theorizing. 