The Structure and Development of Understanding Actions and Reasons

Welcome to the website of the interdisciplinary research project investigating the Structure and Development of Understanding Actions and Reasons. It is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Swiss National Fund (SNF) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)

This site provides you with information about the goals of the project, about its subprojects, about our first workshop, and about upcoming events as well as publications and presentations in relation to the project.

This project is jointly funded by German Science Foundation, Swiss National Fund and Austrian Science Fund. Three research teams work on subprojects yielding a conceptually sound and empirically tested theory of understanding actions and reasons.

In Bochum, Albert Newen and Tobias Schlicht investigate theoretical aspects of the project, concerned with the cognitive architecture of reasons and with the overall background theory of intentionality and representation in question.

In Zürich, Hans-Johann Glock investigates the notion of reason and reason explanations against the state-of-the-art debate on the notion and function(s) of reasons in our practice of explaining action. These theoretical projects are supported by empirical work carried out by Josef Perner‘s team in Salzburg. Their investigations are guided by the assumption of a broadly teleological framework of children‘s cognitive development with respect to understanding and explaining actions and reasons.