It has been argued that people have an innate Theory of Mind. They use it to theorize about perhaps the most important thing we theorize about: other people.
So if someone drinks water, we surmise that they were thirsty (desire) and had the belief that drinking water would quench the thirst.
There is one big debate on whether people have a set of rules that they look up (unconsciously), or if they have a little "human simulator" where they throw in the action and out comes a belief/desire configuration. This is characterized as the debate between the "Theory Theory vs Simulation Theory").
Some theorists believe that autism is a disorder of this mechanism. Stated another way, some theorists believe that autists don't have a Theory of Mind. Consider this: in order to follow your gaze I would have to believe that you will look in a certain direction only if you are a person who would not want to look off in some random direction, and that you would look at something that is interesting or noteworthy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
Anyway, if these scientists can produce a successful model that doesn't rely in explicit rules or a theory -- a neural net -- then others might look for evidence of this sort of computation in the brain. Alternatively, they could demonstrate that this model essentially encodes a set of rules, or perhaps they could collapse the debate into a hybrid theory.