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by Bertram F. Malle, Louis J. Moses and Dare A. Baldwin MIT Press, 2001 Review by Adam Kovach, Ph.D. on Jul 18th 2002 
The volume brings together eighteen
articles by participants in an interdisciplinary conference held at the
University of Oregon in 1998. Most of the essays are by social psychologists
and cognitive-developmental psychologists. A few are by philosophers, and one is
by a legal scholar. Several of the essays show that there is an active dialogue
between psychologists interested in conceptual distinctions drawn by
philosophers and philosophers interested in experimental data.
Cross-fertilization between the social and cognitive-developmental work appears
to be at the beginning stage. The editors' goal is "to integrate current
knowledge" on the topic of intentions and intentionality. The book succeeds
at this by giving snap shots of current research, from which a constructive reader
can put together an interesting but incomplete panorama.
Intentions are a particular kind of mental state
involving a purpose, plan or decision, which potentially motivates action.
Intentionality is a feature of actions, their being intentional. As the editors
of this volume remind us, intentions and intentionality "permeate human
social life" so much that we can easily overlook the obvious fact that our
understanding of intention is a prerequisite to many other social skills. We
can no longer overlook it once this volume makes us aware that children only
gradually acquire the ability to recognize intentional behavior and to
attribute intentions to others, and that these complex and poorly understood
abilities may be uniquely human. Because this is a volume about social
cognition, there are only hints here for those interested in what intentions
and intentionality really are. The focus is how on we think about intentions
and intentional actions, and how we come to think about them.
The book is organized by topic into
four sections. The articles in Part I. "Desires, Intentions and
Intentionality" are about how intention and related concepts are defined
in a "folk theory" (a prescientific understanding) of the mind. Those
in Part II. "Detecting Intentions and Intentionality" are about how we
perceive human action and detect underlying intentions and motives. Eleven of
the essays, including most of the best, are in these first two sections. Since
over half of them are by developmentalists, the acquisition of the concepts and
perceptual capacities is a main theme. The smaller Parts III. and IV. are, respectively,
about commonsense explanations of intentional behavior, and the relationship
between intentions and people's assessments of responsibility for actions.
Understanding intention appears to
be a complicated cognitive achievement. According to Bertram Malle and Joshua
Knobe, competent adults recognize five conditions as necessary for an action to
be intentional: The person who acts must (1) desire some outcome, (2) believe
the action will lead to that outcome, (3) intend to do the action, (4) have the
skill to do the action (so the action doesn't succeed due to mere luck) and (5)
be aware that he is fulfilling his intention in acting. Most of the authors in
the volume maintain that an adult ability to attribute intentions to others involves
quite sophisticated thinking about people as having minds capable of representing
goals and environments.
Long before children give a sign of
having sophisticated conceptions like these, however, they respond differently
to intentional behavior than they do to mere motion, and they begin to discern
people's motives. By 12-18 months, a child can distinguish reaching for an
object from other hand motions, follow pointing, track the object of a person's
attention by following their gaze, recognize people's preferences, recognize when
a person fails to achieve a goal, distinguish between a completed action that fulfills
an intention and one that is incomplete, complete another person's failed
attempt, and begin to use the word 'want'. By 3 years, a child can describe what
a person is "trying to do," but the ability to distinguish what a
person wants to do from what they intend to do, and to say whether or not
something was done "on purpose" seems not to emerge until the late
preschool years, and the ability to blame or approve of a person for a motive and
not just for the outcome of their action doesn't emerge until even later.
The question arises how the early
capacities to detect intentional actions are related to the slowly emerging adult
ability to think about and talk about people's intentions, desires and other
mental states. Should we think of these as distinct abilities, perhaps based on
separate cognitive mechanisms, or as a single developing competence or body of
knowledge, a child's theory of mind?
Are these abilities acquired or innate? Several of the authors darkly suggest
that the early perceptual capacities are stepping stones on the path to
acquiring mature concepts of intention and intentionality, which leads to the
question, what exactly is it that allows the child to take the steps? How do
the perceptual capacities trigger or support the emerging competence? Since research
is at an early stage, we can have only speculative answers to these questions. One
interesting lead is Andrew Meltzoff's revival of the classic proposal that mental
concepts are acquired by introspection and attributed to others on the basis of
inference by analogy. In action, infants have the capacity to know their
intentions first hand. Meltzoff presents evidence that they also have the innate
ability to recognize equivalences between their own actions and the perceived
actions of others. Together these are the prerequisites for inferring by
analogy that the intentional behavior of others "like me" depends on the occurrence of mental states
like the child's own.
Some of the best essays in the
volume challenge the perspective presented so far. For example, one may wonder
if the developmental target has been set right. Al Mele's carefully argued paper
gives counter-examples to Malle and Knobe's five-condition account of the
concept of intentionality. This raises the possibility that this concept may be
simpler than Malle and Knobe claim. The most interesting challenge comes in the
paper by Daniel Povinelli, who for more than a decade has studied the chimpanzee's
art of social cognition. Povinelli has come to the conclusion that while great
apes are capable of sophisticated reasoning about the behavior of others, they
do not think of others as having mental states. If they do not attribute mental
states, how are chimps so adept at perceiving and predicting purposive actions?
Povinelli hypothesizes that the human
capacity to attribute mental states is an evolutionarily recent development,
while apes rely on evolutionarily more ancient systems for producing and
responding to complex behaviors. If this is true, we may expect that the old and
new systems coexist in human minds. It follows that we should be cautious about
chalking up human infants' skill at detecting intentional action to an emerging
adult understanding of intention. Like the chimps, infants may rely on ancient
systems that emerge in development separately from the ability to reason about
mental states.
This book surveys an interrelated body
of work by researchers, many of whom are in constructive dialogue. The data are
interesting, and the nascent theory stimulates further thought. Its publication
is a sign that intention is back as a topic of empirical psychological research
after decades of neglect. The book will appeal mostly to specialists, although
there is nothing particularly technical or difficult about it that might deter
the interested lay reader. A collection of articles that opens our eyes to how
much we more we might learn about a subject matter that "permeates human
life" is welcome. These articles do that for the topic of intention. Even
better, they suggest many directions in which to look if we want to learn more.
©
2002 Adam Kovach
Adam Kovach is a
visiting assistant professor of Philosophy at Haverford College.
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