 Goldman’s Three-Stage Model explains this mindreading act in the following way. FIRST STAGE: I imagine believing what Tom believes (i.e., I imagine believing that (1) and (2)); I then feed those belief-like imaginings into my reasoning mechanism (in the off-line mode); as a result, my reasoning mechanism outputs the imagined belief that (3). The SECOND STAGE of the process consists in introspecting this simulated belief and categorizing it as a belief. Crucially, in Goldman’s model, “introspection” does not merely refer to the capacity to self-ascribe mental states. Rather, it picks out a distinctive cognitive method for self-ascription, a method which is typically described as non-inferential and quasi-perceptual (see the section Inner sense accounts in the entry on  self-knowledge).  In particular, Goldman (2006) characterizes introspection as a transduction process that takes the neural properties of a mental state token as input and outputs a categorization of the type of state. In the case that we are considering, my introspective mechanism takes the neural properties of my token simulated belief as input and categorizes it as a belief as output. After all this, the THIRD STAGE occurs: I project the categorized belief onto Tom, through the judgment Tom believes that Fido enjoys watching TV. (You might wonder where the content of Tom’s belief comes from. Goldman (2006) has a story about that too, but we will leave this aside).