Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition

by Bertram F. Malle, Louis J. Moses, Dare A. Baldwin

Overview

Social interaction requires social cognition--the ability to perceive, interpret, and explain the actions of others. This ability fundamentally relies on the concepts of intention and intentionality. For example, people distinguish sharply between intentional and unintentional behavior; identify the intentions underlying others' behavior; explain completed actions with reference to intentions, beliefs, and desires; and evaluate the social worth of actions using the concepts of intentionality and responsibility.

Intentions and Intentionality highlights the roles these concepts play in social cognition. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it offers cutting-edge work from researchers in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and in philosophy, primatology, and law. It includes both conceptual and empirical contributions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262632676
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	01/24/2003
Series:	A Bradford Book
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	434
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dare A. Baldwin is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	ix
	Preface	xiii
	Introduction: The Significance of Intentionality	1
I	Desires, Intentions, and Intentionality
1	Acting Intentionally: Probing Folk Notions	27
2	The Distinction between Desire and Intention: A Folk-Conceptual Analysis	45
3	Some Thoughts on Ascribing Complex Intentional Concepts to Young Children	69
4	The Paradox of Intention: Assessing Children's Metarepresentational Understanding	85
5	Intentions as Emergent Products of Social Interactions	105
II	Detecting Intentions and Intentionality
6	Developing Intentional Understandings	125
7	How Infants Make Sense of Intentional Action	149
8	"Like Me" as a Building Block for Understanding Other Minds: Bodily Acts, Attention, and Intention	171
9	Making Sense of Human Behavior: Action Parsing and Intentional Inference	193
10	Desire, Intention, and the Simulation Theory	207
11	On the Possibilities of Detecting Intentions Prior to Understanding Them	225
III	Intentionality and Behavior Explanations
12	Action Explanations: Causes and Purposes	251
13	Folk Explanations of Intentional Action	265
14	The Rocky Road from Acts to Dispositions: Insights for Attribution Theory from Developmental Research on Theories of Mind	287
IV	Intentionality and Responsibility In Social Context
15	The Social Folk Theorist: Insights from Social and Cultural Psychology on the Contents and Contexts of Folk Theorizing	307
16	Responsibility for Social Transgressions: An Attributional Analysis	331
17	Moral Responsibility and the Interpretive Turn: Children's Changing Conceptions of Truth and Rightness	345
18	Intentional Agency, Responsibility, and Justice	367
	Bibliography	381
	List of Authors	411
	Index	415

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"...a new revolution is underway; the excellent volume edited by Malle, Moses, and Baldwin is the latest manifesto." Philip David Zelazo Contemporary Psychology

The MIT Press

Editorial Reviews

... a new revolution is underway; the excellent volume edited by Malle, Moses, and Baldwin is the latest manifesto.

--Philip David Zelazo, Contemporary Psychology

From the Publisher

... a new revolution is underway; the excellent volume edited by Malle, Moses, and Baldwin is the latest manifesto.

—Philip David Zelazo, Contemporary Psychology

Reviews

... a new revolution is underway; the excellent volume edited by Malle, Moses, and Baldwin is the latest manifesto.

Contemporary Psychology - Philip David Zelazo