There's been a ton of research over the last decade or two on what is often called folk psychology or theory of mind (the latter is a bit theoretically loaded). That research concerns who has the ability to reason about other minds -- do young children? autistic children? chimpanzees? dolphins? elephants? -- and what that ability looks like. In most research on the subject, what people consider minds to be, and who they consider to have minds, has largely been taken for granted. While that...