Where intention is born.

Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognitionedited by B.F. Malle, L.J.Moses and D.A. Baldwin, MIT Press, 2001. $50.00 (434 pages) ISBN 0 262 13386 5In the 19th century, intentionality was construed as what Brentano called ‘the mark of the mental’. If there was anything fundamentally mental, it was this concept of intentionality. This position was held by Husserl (Brentano's student) and was reformulated by several diverse thinkers who emphasized the fact that intentional stances said something about the prediction of events (Dennett), linguistic and social behavior (Anscombe) and cognitive performance (Premack).As this book makes clear, we are social animals, and evolution has selected mechanisms that facilitate our social behavior and our learning of the rules that are embodied in the culture in which we happen to find ourselves. This is true for the neonate and continues throughout life. One mechanism that facilitates social understanding is our ability to understand others as intentional and to predict the behavior of others on the basis of their beliefs and desires.As the editors rightly note in their introduction, Intentions and Intentionality is a continuation of the discussion of the concept of intentionality in modern inquiry. The book represents a conference that brought together a number of leading figures in the field to discuss their somewhat diverse views about the concept of intentionality, and how it functions as an essential factor for social cognition and social understanding. It includes some of the history of thinking about intentionality and, importantly, extends the line of thinking to include the social.Intentionality has been described by a number of investigators as constituting a core piece of our folk psychology, and this idea is covered in several chapters of this book (Mele, Chapter 1; Malle and Knobe, Chapter 2; Ames et al., Chapter 5). Other chapters address the intentional stance of young children (Moses, Chapter 3), and the degree of sophistication surrounding the child's attribution of intention as well as their metarepresentational understanding of the actions and states of others (Astington, Chapter 4; Wellman and Phillips, Chapter 6). Of particular interest is the child's orientation to discerning the nature of the actions of others (Woodward et al., Chapter 7) and the child's attempts to discern the mental states of others through their actions. Even in the neonate, we see the beginnings of an association between goal-directed events and mental activity.As this book points out, this field might have begun in modern experiential guise with Premack and Woodward's seminal paper of 19781xDoes the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?. Premack, D. and Woodward, G. Behav. Brain Sci. 1978; 4: 515–526Crossref | Scopus (2510)See all References1, and has now expanded into a major focus across disciplines that seek mechanisms that will render social understanding possible. In their chapter, Meltzoff and Brooks (Chapter 8) suggest that the neonate has what they term ‘discovery procedures’ (what others might call heuristic devices) that help facilitate the understanding of the acts and the minds of others; being ‘like me’ is one such mechanism. At a very young age, children parse the world in terms of action and intention (Barid and Baldwin, Chapter 9); parsing action is a cognitive ability that we perform so early, so easily, so readily.This book has the intellectual virtue of not only providing a discussion of the significance of intentionality, but also highlighting the unresolved issues that surround the concept. Such discussion emphasizes the important point that intentionality exists not only in private mental space, but also in functional space with others. Importantly, several of the authors refer to having and discerning goals as operating within a psychological mechanism of intentionality; in other words, intentionality is a functional mechanism for social cognition linked to understanding means and ends in attaining goals. Some of the authors, without citing him directly, rejuvenate some of John Dewey's concerns, namely an emphasis on transactions with others in human development, social interactions and the discernment of goals in oneself and others in the organization of action (Gibbs, Chapter 5; Baird and Baldwin, Chapter 9; Meltzoff and Brooks, Chapter 8).This collection makes clear the disagreements that still abound in defining the core issues in the study of intentionality: first- and third-person assessment in understanding (Goldman, Chapter 10); whether we are the only species to instantiate the perception of intentions in others (Povinelli, Chapter 11); the discussion of beliefs and desires (Wellman and Phillips, Chapter 6); and metarepresentation in the context of explaining the psychological mechanisms of the intentional stance (Astington, Chapter 4). Amid these unresolved issues are fascinating empirical findings that demonstrate just how rich the field is.The latter part of the book discusses action explanation (Schueler, Chapter 12), folk explanation of intentional actions (Malle, Chapter 13), the link between attribution theory and theories of mind (Rosati et al., Chapter 14), questions of responsibility (Weiner, Chapter 16; Chandler et al., Chapter 17) and, finally, intentional agency and the senses of justice and responsibility (Kaplan, Chapter 18). Notably absent, except for a passing mention by Goldman (in Chapter 10) is an examination of the burgeoning literature on the cognitive neuroscience of social knowledge and intentional systems. Despite this absence, though, the book makes a valuable contribution to the contemporary empirical and theoretical discussion of intentional systems that facilitate social knowledge.