Understanding infants' understanding of intentions: two problems of interpretation.

The article by Kiraly and colleagues (henceforth KJPAG) is an important contribution to an age-old debate: what can a person know about another person s mind, and on what grounds can he or she know it? KJPAG focus this question on the initial character of infants understanding of intentional actions and the course and causes of the development of that understanding. Any approach to these questions necessarily rests on (1) assumptions used to pose the questions and (2) the kinds of evidence deemed relevant to answering them. KJPAG raise interpretive problems within each of these issues. The first issue concerns the bases on which people—in particular, infants—interpret observed actions as intentional. KJPAG analyze the structure of teleological causality as a three term relation among behavior, goal, and situation. Next, they propose criteria to define the forms of the three-term relations that will count as teleological (the rationality principle ). From these criteria, they derive necessary and jointly sufficient cues for identifying particular instances of observed behavior as purposeful. On this account, infants are born not just with the capacity for intentional understanding but also with concrete specifications for the surface appearance of behaviors that are to count as intentional. Infants are presumed to attribute intentionality indiscriminately to any behavior that matches the specified cues. We believe that this framework rests on a faulty analysis of teleological causation that distorts the intentional understanding of both adults and infants. We recommend an alternative analysis that enables scientists to account for the nuances of teleological understanding: Wimsatt (1972) analyzes purposeful behavior as behavior for which the purpose explains the existence and/or form of the behavior. He then demonstrates how a purpose can achieve this causal force through the operation of selection processes. On his account, teleological understanding is conditioned not only on the relevant behavior, purpose, and environment, but also on, for example, the perceiver s (folk or explicit) background theory and perspective on the system in question. Wimsatt explicitly demonstrates how his analysis accords with pertinent commonsense and philosophical intuitions. This alternative analysis highlights two difficulties with KJPAG s theoretical framework. First, KJPAG analyze teleology in terms of rationality rather than in terms of selection processes. Their framework reduces intentionality to rationality (thereby conflating irrational actions with