The ends of behavior: Contemporary cognitive science, Merleau-Ponty, and the interpretation of behavior

In cognitive science, investigations into our social abilities have taken the form of a debate between those who understand social interpretive practices as the deployment of a psychological theory and those who model them after a projective simulation of another person's behavior. I argue that neither account addresses the crucial question of how people can know what immediate ends a person is trying to accomplish with a behavior. The means by which one discovers why a person is doing something is treated extensively in this debate, while how one discovers what that person is doing is all but ignored. Meanwhile, although many in the continental tradition of phenomenology have discussed the importance of understanding bodily behavior for comprehending another's activity, a highly detailed examination of the significance of another's person's bodily activity has yet to be worked out. Both cognitive science and phenomenology, therefore, need an account of how, in the perception of another person's behavior, one arrives at an understanding of that person's activity. I argue that we do not see bodily motions which are then imbued with intentionality but rather that the "atom" of perception is the already intentional behavior. I support this claim on both conceptual and empirical grounds, arguing that the behaviorist view cannot in principle account for well-established facts about infant learning. I also offer a phenomenological description that elucidates the structure of another person's behavior from the perspective of one's own embodied experience. In this structure it is my grasping the end or goal of another person's behavior prior to its completion that is constitutive of taking it as an intentional behavior. My conclusion is that the perception of mind in people's behavior comes about through a "direct" discernment of intentionality in their behavior.