 Alvin Goldman (2006) has distinguished a descriptive from a normative epistemological problem of other minds.  Section 1  and  section 2  were largely concerned with the latter; this section will concern itself with the former. The descriptive problem is associated with what Goldman terms mind reading (or mentalizing). Mind reading involves the capacity to think about mind and is a second or higher order activity that involves representing or conceptualizing others (as well as oneself) as “loci of mental life” (Goldman 2006: 3). While many species of animal may be thought to have minds, only some will be capable of representing another as having minds. Questions of justification and conceptual difficulty are not of concern to the descriptive theorist, nor are metaphysical questions concerning the nature of mind; what concerns the descriptive epistemologist is how what she says measures up with what is being learned in the empirical disciplines of developmental psychology and neuroscience. Work on the descriptive problem is developing at a rapid pace and, while at first attention in all the relevant disciplines was concentrated on two prominent accounts of mind reading—theory-theory and simulation theory—a variety of accounts now exist which challenge both of these accounts (see  §3.2).  