Bertram F. Malle - Intentions and intentionality: foundations of social cognition

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Intentions and Intentionality

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Foundations of Social Cognition

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

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2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Set in Sabon by The MIT Press.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Intentions and intentionality: foundations of social cognition / edited by Bertram
F. Malle, Louis J. Moses, and Dare A. Baldwin
p. cm.
''A Bradford book."
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-13386-5 (hc: alk. paper)
I. Intentionalism. I. Malle, Bertram F. II. Moses, Louis J. III. Baldwin, Dare A.
BF 619.5.I58 2001
153.8dc21 00-064590

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The concept of intention had a rather checkered, indeed a somewhat scandalous history in the twentieth centurymore so in the human sciences, perhaps, than in philosophy. It was typically neglected and caricatured as a topic for empirical research, rarely finding its way much beyond formal philosophy. Intention seemed an embarrassing idea to hard-nosed psychological theory. This volume goes a long way toward bringing intention back as a focus for empirical psychological research and theory. But, beyond that, it also marks a turning point: in these pages, philosophical and psychological issues are treated not as if they were separate, from different worlds, but as two related perspectives on the same set of issues. The analytic concerns of the philosopher can no more be ignored by the psychologist than the psychologist's empirical findings can be ignored by the philosopher.

What has produced this change? The chapters that follow have much to say on this matter, but it might help to add a brief, rather more historical perspective to the interesting conceptual perspectives the various chapters bring to the matter.

The fact is that there was little room for a concept like intention in the self-professed ''tough" psychological theorizing of the twentieth century. For the very idea of intention implies that somebody carries out an act in the light of some preconceived goal that he or she has in mind, and that the person who has so acted can therefore supply proper or "correct" reasons for having done so. But invoking intention in this way violated most the self-imposed taboos that psychology thought it had to honor to become a full-fledged member of the natural sciences.