The paper provides a summary of our recent research on preverbal infants (using violation-of-expectation and observational learning paradigms) demonstrating that one-year-olds interpret and draw systematic inferences about other's goal-directed actions, and can rely on such inferences when imitating other's actions or emulating their goals. To account for these findings it is proposed that oneyear -olds apply a non-mentalistic action interpretational system, the 'teleological stance' that represents actions by relating relevant aspects of reality (action, goal-state, and situational constraints) through the principle of rational action, which assumes that actions function to realize goal-states by the most efficient means available in the actor's situation. The

I am a philosopher of mind. In the early 1990’s I was primarily addressing metaphysical issues in the philosophy of mind raised by Brentano’s definition of intentionality a century earlier. My questions were: can intentionality be naturalized? Could the puzzling features of intentionality be accounted for by using concepts that would be