In this paper we shall argue that mentalistic action explanations, which form an essential component of a mature theory of mind, are conceptually and developmentally derived from an earlier and purely teleological interpretational system present in infancy. First we summarize our evidence demonstrating teleological action explanations in one-year-olds. Then we shall briefly contrast the structu...

A well-rehearsed move among teleological realists in the philosophy of biology is to base the idea of genuinely teleological forms of organic self-reproduction on a type of causality derived from Kant. Teleological realists have long argued for the causal possibility of this form of causality--in which a whole is considered the cause of its parts--as well as formulated a set of teleological cri...

Humans show a strong and early inclination to interpret observed behaviours of others as goal-directed actions. We identify two main epistemic functions that this 'teleological obsession' serves: on-line prediction and social learning. We show how teleological action interpretations can serve these functions by drawing on two kinds of inference ('action-to-goal' or 'goal-to-action'), and argue ...

Knives, birds' wings, and mountain slopes are used for certain purposes: cutting, flying, and climbing. A bird's wings have in common with knives that they have been 'designed' for the purpose they serve, which purpose accounts for their existence, whereas mountain slopes have come about by geological processes independently of their uses for climbing. A bird's wings differ from a knife in that...

Computer graphics consists of two main activities: modeling, which is the science of making mathematical abstractions of objects, and rendering or visualization, in which images are made from the mathematical abstractions. In this talk, teleological modeling is presented, a developing approach for creating abstractions and mathematical representations of physically realistic time-dependent obje...

The purpose of this article is to analyze the nature of the deontological and teleological evaluations in the Hunt and Vitell model and offer a revision that more accurately reflects how the process actually occurs. Previously published works concerning ethical business models identify or imply limitations with the “core” decision-making process. In particular, concerns exist with (1) the proce...

We describe a method for constructing a teleological model of an unlabelled 2D line drawing by analogy to a known model of a drawing with similar structure. The source case is represented as a schema that contains its line drawing and its teleological model represented at multiple levels of abstraction: the lines and intersections in the drawing, the shapes, the structural components and connec...

The current research extends our framework for embodied language and action comprehension to include a teleological representation that allows goal-based reasoning for novel actions. The objective of this work is to implement and demonstrate the advantages of a hybrid, embodied-teleological approach to action-language interaction, both from a theoretical perspective, and via results from human-...