Teleological reasoning in infancy: the infant's naive theory of rational action. A reply to Premack and Premack

Abstract

We argue that Premack and Premack's criticism of our demonstration (Gergely et al., 1995) of interpreting goal-directed action in one year-olds in terms of the principle of rationality are ill-founded, and their suggested alternative test for goal-attribution is open to lower level interpretations. We show that the alterative model they propose for our data in terms of 'appropriate' change of means action is but a somewhat imprecise restatement of our account of the infant's naive theory of rational action. Finally, we elaborate and clarify our model of the teleological stance in infancy which we suggest is an as yet nonmentalistic precursor of the young child's later emerging causal theory of mind.