The Teleological Stance

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How?

Infants can identify goals from around six months of age.

To more fully specify goal-tracking we need a theory that specifies both the models and the processes involved in goal-tracking.

1. models (How are goals and actions related from the point of view of a 9-month-old?)

2. processes (What links the model to the infant?)

first specify the problem to be solved: goal ascription

Let me first specify the problem to be solved.

As this illustrates, some actions involving are purposive in the sense that

among all their actual and possible consequences,

there are outcomes to which they are directed

In such cases we can say that the actions are clearly purposive.

Note that it isn’t part of our job to track the mental states, such as intentions, in virtue of which the outcome is a goal.

What we are tracking here are just outcomes to which the action is directed, not mental states.

Planning

1. This outcome, G, is the goal (specification)

2. Means M is a best available* way of bringing G about

3. ∴ adopt means M

Note that this is not exactly an answer to our question, How can infants track goals from nine months of age (or earlier)? It provides what Marr would call a computational description.

That is, it provides a function from facts about events and states of affairs that could be known without knowing which goals any particular actions are directed to, nor any facts about particular mental states to one or more outcomes which are the goals of an action.

Providing this function explains how pure goal-tracking is possible in principle.

But what we want to know, of course, is how infants (and adults) actually compute this function. If this is (roughly) the function which computationally describes pure goal tracking, what are the representations and processes involved in pure goal tracking?

An we need to know how they compute to which outcome a means is the best available.

To more fully specify goal-tracking we need a theory that specifies both the models and the processes involved in goal-tracking.

1. models (How are goals and actions related from the point of view of a 9-month-old?)

2. processes (What links the model to the infant?)

The Simple View

The Simple View is a view about the PROCESSES involved ...

Infants' (and adults') goal tracking depends on beliefs concerning relations holding quite generally between means and goals;
and they identify particular goals by making inferences from these beliefs plus their observations.

\begin{quote} Infants' (and adults') goal tracking depends on beliefs concerning relations which hold quite generally between means and goals; and they identify particular goals by making inferences from these beliefs plus their observations. \end{quote}

Infants and adults engaged in goal-tracking reason about to which outcome a means is the best available in fundamentally the same way that you or I do when trying to work it out explicitly.

[*TODO: illustrate with picture.]

Irrespective of who endorses it, the Simple View is a good starting point for at least three reasons. First, it involves postulating no novel psychological states, processes or systems. (It does not entail the existence of a goal-tracking module, for example.) Second, as just illustrated, it is a generalisation from cases in which its claim is known to apply. Third, there are no published, suitably detailed accounts of any alternative. So what if anything is wrong with the Simple View?

How?

Infants can identify goals from around six months of age.

The Teleological Stance is a proposed solution.

To more fully specify goal-tracking we need a theory that specifies both the models and the processes involved in goal-tracking. The Simple View gives us this; but as usual we will see in the next section that it generates incorrect predictions ...

1. models (How are goals and actions related from the point of view of a 9-month-old?)

2. processes (What links the model to the infant?)

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The Teleological Stance

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