Cognitive Foundations of Ascribing Intentional Action
by Isa Garbisch
Date of Examination:2024-07-12
Date of issue:2024-08-09
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Hannes Rakoczy
Referee:Prof. Dr. Hannes Rakoczy
Referee:Dr. Claudia Fichtel
Persistent Address:
http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-10664
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Abstract
English
Understanding and interpreting actions is fundamental for profoundly social beings like humans. We explain and predict intentional actions of others by reference to mental states, such as beliefs, desires and intentions. The ability to ascribe mental states to other has been referred to as Theory of Mind (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). How we understand and interpret the actions of others, what constitutes an action, and what action is brought about intentionally has been an important topic for philosophers, cognitive scientists and developmental psychologists. The present dissertation aims to provide important insights into sophisticated action understanding and interpretation, both with adults and children. The first project (n = 504 adults, n = 116 8-10-year-old’s) builds on existing work on act trees as a window to understanding action (Goldman, 1970; Knobe, 2010; Levine, Leslie, et al., 2018; Mikhail, 2007) and investigates complex cases of intentional actions in moral dilemmas. Using more coherent ways to analyze participants responses, it partially replicated and expanded existing results on main- and side-effect distinctions. From a developmental perspective the question arises when and how such sophisticated forms of action understanding and interpretation develop. Central to such an understanding is the appreciation of intentions in their fully-fledged subjective, metarepresentational sense. That involves an understanding for the aspectuality of intentions. Intentions are aspectual as it depends on the description under which agents represent their actions whether the action can be considered intentional or not (Anscombe, 1957; Searle, 1983). The examination of the development of the ascription of the subjectivity of intentions, however, has been neglected within cognitive developmental research. There is much more research on early forms of action understanding, but less on subjective forms. For example, we know from many studies that children understand goal-directed action and can differentiate accidental from intentional actions already quite early in development (e.g., Behne, Carpenter, Call, et al., 2005; Carpenter et al., 1998; Meltzoff, 1995). Less is known about the the understanding of the subjectivity of intentions. Children seem to have difficulties solving these tasks before the age of 5 to 8 years (Kamawar & Olson, 2011; Proft et al., 2019; Schünemann, Proft, et al., 2021). This goes along with a phenomenon termed the Paradox of Intentions (Astington, 2001): Very young children appear to easily detect goal-directed action, but fail until very late in more sophisticated intention ascriptions. The question remains why this is the case. Therefore, the second and third project investigated reasons for the comparatively late development of the understanding of the subjectivity of intentions. In the second project (N = 246 4-7-year-old’s), we developed a new experimental design to investigate whether linguistic performance factors mask children’s competence to understand subjective intentions. No evidence was found that linguistic performance factors play a role. The third project (n = 88 adults, n = 138 4.5-8-year-olds) then showed that children probably need to grasp the counterfactual dependency between actions and intentions in order to appreciate intentions in their full subjectivity. Across all projects, various forms of the subjectivity of intentions, which are central to a more nuanced understanding of actions, were examined. Investigating the ontogentic development suggested that subjective intentions, which are subjective due to epistemic factors (agents are unaware of or misrepresent a description), are presumably understood earlier than subjective intentions based on nuanced conative aspects (agents foresee side-effects, but do not act in order to achieve them). This dissertation provides more evidence for a comprehensive understanding of action understanding and interpretation with a notion of (subjective) intention at its core.
Keywords: Intention; Intentionality; Action Understanding; Theory of Mind; Intentional Action; Cognitive Development
