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The Teleological Stance

The ‘Teleological Stance’
~ The goals of an action are those outcomes which the means is a best available way of bringing about.

Csibra & Gergely

Planning

1. This outcome, G, is the goal (specification)

2. Means M is a best available* way of bringing G about

3. ∴ adopt means M

Tracking

1. This means, M, has been adopted (observation)

2. G is an outcome such that: M is a best available* way of bringing G about

3. ∴ G is a goal of the observed action

So planning is the process of moving from goals to means, whereas tracking goes in the reverse direction, from means to goals. But what is common to the two is the relation between means and goals. In both cases, planning and goal-tracking, the means that are adopted should be a best available way of bringing the goal about.
Note that this is not exactly an answer to our question, How can infants track goals from nine months of age (or earlier)? It provides what Marr would call a computational description.
That is, it provides a function from facts about events and states of affairs that could be known without knowing which goals any particular actions are directed to, nor any facts about particular mental states to one or more outcomes which are the goals of an action.
Providing this function explains how pure goal-tracking is possible in principle.
But what we want to know, of course, is how infants (and adults) actually compute this function. If this is (roughly) the function which computationally describes pure goal tracking, what are the representations and processes involved in pure goal tracking?
An we need to know how they compute to which outcome a means is the best available.

The Simple View

Infants' (and adults') goal tracking depends on beliefs concerning relations holding quite generally between means and goals;
and they identify particular goals by making inferences from these beliefs plus their observations.

Infants and adults engaged in goal-tracking reason about to which outcome a means is the best available in fundamentally the same way that you or I do when trying to work it out explicitly.
[*TODO: illustrate with picture.]
Irrespective of who endorses it, the Simple View is a good starting point for at least three reasons. First, it involves postulating no novel psychological states, processes or systems. (It does not entail the existence of a goal-tracking module, for example.) Second, as just illustrated, it is a generalisation from cases in which its claim is known to apply. Third, there are no published, suitably detailed accounts of any alternative. So what if anything is wrong with the Simple View?

How?

Infants can track goals from nine months of age (or earlier).