A Reconsideration of Monday’s Reading and Conference

[Jessiebanana]

A Reconsideration of Monday’s Reading and Conference

After conference I decided that my retrospective exploratory should cover new ground. In an effort to ensure that I gave mentalism the proper chance and consideration, I am taking a second look at the data as if I weren’t already swayed by teleology. You may blame this bipartisan behavior on the elections. I just want to make sure that my record states that I have always reached across party lines and that I am open minded to different ideas .
The knowledge of desire may play a role in understanding the knowledge of intentional action to infants if we look at action parsing in terms of imitation. I propose that the breaking down of action into sections coupled with the ability to imitate could give infants a greater understanding of desire than we previously thought. If infants have the ability to imitate facial expressions innately is combined with the physical expression eliciting emotion within us, than it would be logical, as Meltzoff’s chapter suggested, for infants to learn emotions and sympathy from imitation. If infants are capable of combining these learned emotions with the specific goal of parsed actions, than I don’t think it would so far fetched to suggest that infants have a primitive understanding of desire in intentional action. This understanding might not be complex or able to express itself in all intentional action sequences, but it could be there for some common behaviors.
It would be interesting to see an experiment where infants were shown an adult attempting to grasp an environmentally consistent desired object, i.e. ice cream or the remote control. In one condition infants would see the attempt completed with a smile and the failure or interruption to complete the action would be accompanied by a frown. In the reverse condition, infants would see the action completed with a frown and the incompleted action with a smile. If my theories were right than infants would look longer in the second condition at the completed action with a frown and would show no preference either way in the first condition.
So while I may not believe that infants have an innate ability to understand desire behind intent, they may be equipped with enough innate tools to develop some primitive understanding of desire long before theory of mind kicks in.