The naïve theory of rational action of one-year-old infants:
An early non-mentalistic teleological action interpretational system
and its relation to theory of mind
György Gergely
Institute for Psychological Research
Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest
Converging recent evidence will be briefly reviewed to demonstrate that by one year
of age human infants can interpret, predict, and draw productive inferences about
other agents’ goal-directed actions. Alternative types of theories about how this early
competence relates to our ability to attribute intentional mental states to others will be
compared and contrasted with the presently proposed non-mentalistic teleological
model of the infant’s ’naive theory of rational action’ (Gergely & Csibra, 2003).
According to this theory, by 6- to 12-months of age infants apply a non-mentalistic
reality-based action interpretational system that is specialized for representing actions
in terms of a teleological explanatory structure by relating three relevant aspects of
reality (action, future goal-state, and current situational constraints) through the core
principle of rational action. The rationality principle the infant’s ’teleological stance’
captures two basic innate assumptions about the essentially teleo-functional nature of
actions: it assumes (a) that actions function to realize goal-states, and (b) that to do so
agents perform the most efficient alternative means available to them within the
constraints of the situation. This principle of rational action - that drives inferences
and provides well-formedness constraints for teleological action representations – is
proposed to be identical with the rationality principle of naive theory of mind that
guides inferences about the contents of causal intentional mind states (intentions,
desires, and beliefs). In this view, the mentalistic stance can be envisionned as a
developmental enrichment of the initially restricted domain of reality-based
teleological action explanations that becomes extended in theory of mind to include
representations of fictional and counterfactual worlds as well when that becomes
possible by the emergence of the infant’s metarepresentational capacity to represent
intentional mind states (such as pretence or false beliefs). It is speculated that the nonmentalistic teleological stance may have been selected as an independent evolutionary
adaptation to the wide-ranging presence of rational goal-directed organization of
behavior among animal species in our evolutionary environment providing a
specialized mechanism to discriminate and predict goal-directed actions of other
agents. In support of this hypothesis recent dissociative evidence is discussed
indicating that some apparently ’mindblind’ organisms such as non-human primates
and children with autism possess an intact teleological reasoning capacity, while
showing little evidence of understanding other minds.