Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 12, Issue 4, December 2003, Pages 773-776
Consciousness and Cognition

Shifting “goals”: Clarifying some misconceptions about the teleological stance in young infants

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Introduction

In their commentary Heineman-Pieper and Woodward (2003, HPW) formulate a number of theoretical criticisms and methodological worries concerning our paper. Since we feel that their theoretical disagreements are inherently related to their often shifting and at points mistaken interpretations of our theory of the infant’s teleological stance (TS), we shall try to answer them by pointing out the nature of the misconceptions on which they are based. Then we shall reply to their methodological objections arguing that HPW’s worries are unfounded.

Section snippets

Confusing action interpretation and production systems

TS is a model of action interpretation and goal attribution in infancy (Csibra & Gergely, 1998; Gergely and Csibra, 1997, Gergely and Csibra, 2003). HPW, however, treat TS as if it were a production system when they claim that it provides “a faulty analysis of teleological causation” and “recommend an alternative analysis” of “purposeful behaviour” that “demonstrates how a purpose can achieve…causal force through the operation of selection processes.” HPW then claim that the difficulty with our

Confusing the non-mentalistic, reality-based TS of the infant with the mentalistic ‘theory-of-mind’ of the adult

HPW also misconstrue our model when they describe the TS as a theory about “infants’ understanding of intentions” that “specifies cues” that should “reflect the flexible and nuanced ways adults (sic!) construe the purposes guiding behaviour.” In fact, Gergely and Csibra, 2003, Csibra and Gergely, 1998 have explicitly proposed that the explanatory elements of the TS are restricted to the interpreting infant’s own representations of current and future reality states that are not yet attributed to

Methodological objections

We believe that HPW’s worries that lacking proper controls we “run the risk of treating a single condition as a measure of goal-attribution in infants” is largely unfounded. In fact, we summarize and discuss a series of controls that we ran to clarify our results with 6-month-olds and to control for the ‘new-goal/newly mobile’ confound. In Jovanovic et al. (submitted) we report the details of these studies in which we tested 6-month-olds (a) on the familiar grasping-action with salient

Conclusion

We agree with HPW that it is important to bear in mind the different levels of interpretations in looking-time studies, and accordingly we have used a constellation of conditions and controls as the source for our conclusions. However, we also believe that when so many relevant new findings emerge, it is important to develop new theoretical models that suggest integrative explanatory frameworks for the phenomena uncovered. It is for this reason that we have outlined a candidate theoretical

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Cited by (0)

Reply to Commentary on Király et al. (2003). The early origins of goal attribution in infancy. Consciousness and Cognition, 12, 752–769. This article is part of a special issue of this journal on Self and Action.

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