Accounting for Intentionality and Its DevelopmentAuthor(s): Thomas R. ShultzSource: Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1990), pp. 267-268Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1449767 .

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COMMENTARIES 267

nology; and so I ask him: Is a levels model of intention just another type of mixed model?

Note

Joseph F. Rychlak, Department of Psychology, Loyola University of Chicago, 6525 North Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60626.

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Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 529- 566.

Rychlak, J. F. (1988). The psychology of rigorous humanism (2nd ed.). New York: New York University Press.

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Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (Eds.). (1962). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Accounting for Intentionality and Its Development

Thomas R. Shultz McGill University

Lewis reprises a critical issue from Piaget's (1936/1952) work on infancy, namely, the development of intention in the child. In doing so, he addresses several important, long- standing issues in developmental psychology, including in- tention, emotion, and consciousness.

Moreover, the article offers a golden nugget of insight, which will surely figure importantly in any further investiga- tion of this topic. This is the three-part argument that (a) goal-directed systems are intentional, (b) goals can be gener- ated by biology, thought, and self-awareness, and (c) the developmental process is a change in these goal sources.

For the rest, there are several serious problems created essentially by lack of theoretical precision, lack of evidence, and inadequate connections between theory and evidence. There is first, no clear conceptual analysis of intention. The field of philosophy of mind is a rich source for such concep- tual analyses. Outsiders cannot expect to find complete con- sensus in philosophy of mind on issues as complex as inten- tionality. But they can gain an understanding of the properties and aspects of intention.

Within philosophy of mind there is, for example, a major difference in emphasis between intention in the narrow sense and intentionality in the broad sense. Intentionality in gener- al is essentially synonymous with mental awareness or men- tal conception (Aquila, 1977; Brentano, 1874/1973). More narrowly, intention can refer to a mental state that guides or controls behavior (Meiland, 1970). Although Lewis never makes it clear which sense of intention he intends, one can infer from his emphasis on goals that it is the latter, more narrow sense. Lewis's analysis appears to have nothing to contribute to the mental awareness problem in intentionality.

Lewis argues that development of intentionality through its various levels is driven by increases in memory capacity and differentiation of the emotions. Unfortunately, he offers no theory of memory, nor even a clear idea of whether he refers to working memory or long-term memory. Presum- ably, he refers to working memory because no one seriously entertains the notion of an increase in long-term memory capacity. But he does not elaborate on what sort of concep- tion of working memory he is considering. Nor does he seem

to recognize that there is not a shred of evidence in the literature for changes in working-memory capacity, despite the fact that researchers have argued for it and looked for it in extensive experimental investigation.

Case (1972), for example, presented children with a series of numbers, all but the last of which were in ascending order. The child's task was to insert the last digit in its proper serial position. Case reported that the longest series on which chil- dren were consistently correct increased from two at 6 years of age to four at 10 years of age. However, such results are widely considered to be insensitive to the capacity of work- ing memory because they could instead reflect increasing familiarity with numbers or increased use of more effective strategies with increasing age. The fact that people overcome the assumed limitations of working memory by chunking familiar material and by other strategies has so far made it impossible to assess pure capacity of working memory in any valid way.

There is some provocative evidence of small increases in speed of accessing working memory from ages 9 to 17 years (Keating & Bobbitt, 1978), but it is not at all clear how these findings would affect Lewis's analysis of the development of intention across infancy.

There is likewise no adequate theory of emotional devel- opment in Lewis's article. Of course, the literature offers much data suggesting that children do experience and recog- nize a greater variety of emotions with increasing age. But it is quite remarkable that, even after many decades of re- search, we have little understanding of what emotion is, how it is produced, and how it develops. Thus, Lewis's argument can be characterized as trying to explain one mystery with an even greater mystery. This is about as useful as trying to build a house on sand. I am somewhat more persuaded by attempts to do the reverse-that is, to explain emotion by underlying intentional states (e.g., Searle, 1983), because intention seems rather more clear-cut than does emotion. Even the latter is an extremely difficult enterprise, but I am not per- suaded that Lewis has explained development of intention by pointing to emotional differentiation. One can easily imagine the child with a repertoire of only a single emotion intending

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268 COMMENTARIES

various actions, whether motivated by that emotion or not. A larger emotional repertoire is neither necessary nor sufficient for intention.

No satisfactory theory of consciousness is presented in the Lewis article, and, indeed, none can be cited in the current psychological literature. At Lewis's final, fifth level, the child supposedly becomes aware of his or her intentions, but there is no developmental explanation of where that con- sciousness comes from or how it affects intentional behavior. It is difficult to see how the term consciousness deserves to be mentioned in the article title.

Although Lewis relies substantially on goal satisfaction in his analysis, he presents no adequate theory here of goal- driven reasoning. Unlike some of the other notions he raises, however, it is possible to identify rigorous theories of goal- driven systems. Newell's SOAR program, for example, specifies how learning and problem solving can be tightly integrated in an intelligent system that creates and satisfies its own subgoals (Newell, 1990; Waldrop, 1988).

Although Lewis occasionally links the notions of intention and knowledge of causality, he does not make clear how the two are related. On the face of it, intentional action and knowledge about causation appear to exist at two quite differ- ent levels (action vs. reasoning, respectively). A much closer comparison would be between intentional and causal knowl- edge. At this level, it has been argued that children come to understand that behavior is caused by the enactment of inten- tions just as they come to realize that physical effects are caused by physical transmissions (Shultz, 1982).

Lewis criticizes Piaget's mixed approach to intention, which denies the existence of intention at one point but al- lows for its development at a later point. Lewis counters with what is by implication an unmixed model in which intention is always present but develops by levels depending on the source of the goals (biology through metacognition). Notice though that Lewis's model is also mixed in that levels which are absent at one point emerge at a later point. An alternative is a fully unmixed model in which intentionality at all levels is always present and it is the child's behavioral capacities that change, thus making different intentional behaviors pos- sible. Lewis alludes to this unmixed alternative by suggest- ing that it would leave nothing for developmentalists to work on. At our present state of uncertainty, I feel that the unmixed model deserves more serious consideration, even from de- velopmentalists. If this model were favorably evaluated, it

would not put developmentalists out of work but rather re- direct their efforts to more realistic pursuits.

The evidence Lewis reports on the infant's response to learning and extinction is extremely interesting and impor- tant. But Lewis draws no clear relation between this experi- mental evidence and his levels-of-intention theory. Although the gist of the theory is developmental, the evidence does not suggest any major developmental phenomena. Instead the evidence shows that infants do not alter their characteristic reactions to learning and extinction across the span of 2 to 8 months, although the older infants react more strongly.

In conclusion, I feel that Lewis's contribution to the prob- lem of intentionality is difficult to assess because so much of the discussion is vague and unsupported-most of it so vague that it is unclear how it could be either verified or contradicted by new empirical evidence. Much more rigorous theoretical work needs to be done. Lewis's notion of shifting sources of goals remains a promising avenue of approach.

Note

Thomas R. Shultz, Department of Psychology, McGill University, 1205 Penfield Avenue, Montreal, Quebec, H3A IB1, Canada.

References

Aquila, R. E. (1977). Intentionality: A study of mental acts. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Brentano, F. (1973). Psychologyfrom an empirical standpoint (A. C. Ran- curello, D. B. Terrell, & L. L. McAlister, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1874)

Case, R. (1972). Validation of a neo-Piagetian capacity construct. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 14, 287-302.

Keating, D. P., & Bobbitt, B. L. (1978). Individual and developmental differences in cognitive processing components of mental ability. Child Development, 49, 155-167.

Meiland, J. W. (1970). The nature of intention. London: Methuen. Newell, A. (1990). Unified theories of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Har-

vard University Press. Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children (M. Cook,

Trans.). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1936)

Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Shultz, T. R. (1982). Causal reasoning in the social and nonsocial realms. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 14, 307-322.

Waldrop, M. M. (1988). Toward a unified theory of cognition. Science, 241, 27-29.

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