The practical other: teleology and its development

ABSTRACT

We argue for teleology as a description of the way in which we ordinarily understand others’ intentional actions. Teleology starts from the close resemblance between the reasoning involved in understanding others’ actions and one’s own practical reasoning involved in deciding what to do. We carve out teleology’s distinctive features more sharply by comparing it to its three main competitors: theory theory, simulation theory, and rationality theory. The plausibility of teleology as our way of understanding others is underlined by developmental data in its favour.

KEYWORDS:

• Theory of mind
• teleology
• theory theory
• simulation theory
• rationality theory
• reasons for action
• perspective taking
• counterfactual reasoning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Josef Perner received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Toronto. He was Professor in Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex and is now Professor of Psychology and member of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Salzburg. He is author of “Understanding the Representational Mind” (MIT Press, 1991) and over 180 articles on cognitive development (theory of mind, executive control, episodic memory, logical reasoning), consciousness (perception versus action), simulation in decision-making, and theoretical issues of mental representation and consciousness. He served as President of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academia Europaea, the Leopoldina, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Association for Psychological Sciences, holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel, and was awarded the William Thierry Preyer Award for Excellence in Research on Human Development by the European Society of Developmental Psychology (ESDP) and the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis for the interdisciplinary nature of his research.

Beate Priewasser studied Psychology and Pedagogy at the University of Salzburg. In her PhD Thesis, she investigated the development of understanding subjective reasons in preschoolers under the supervision of Josef Perner. Since 2015, she is a Senior Scientist at the University of Salzburg and a member of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and heads the Department’s “Theory of Mind – Kinderlabor.” Her research interests are the development of understanding reasons for action from infancy to preschool age and the metacognitive foundation of mindfulness.

Johannes Roessler received his DPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He is Reader in the Department of Philosophy at Warwick University. He has published numerous articles on epistemology and the philosophy of mind and action, and has co-edited three interdisciplinary volumes with OUP. He is currently secretary of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

ORCID

Josef Perner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7855-0788

Notes

1. This is only required in Goldman’s (2006) version. Gordon (1995) suggested replacing introspection with ascent routines (Evans 1982). Whether this is possible for all mental states is still controversial (Barlassina and Gordon 2017, Section 6.2).

Additional information

Funding

The collaboration of the authors was financially supported by Austrian Science Fund Project I637-G15, ‘Rule understanding, subjective preferences, and social display rules,’ as part of the ESF EUROCORES Programme EuroUnderstanding initiative.