FOLK PSYCHOLOGY WONT GO AWAY - RESPONSE

Responding to Alien and Bekoff's (this issue) critique of Heyes and Di ckinson's (1990) analysis of the intentionality of animal action, we r eiterate that our approach does not assume that a hypothesis can be de finitively falsified by the results of a single experiment, and argue that the evolutionary analysis favoured by Alien and Bekoff insulates intentional accounts of animal behaviour from rejection in the usual ' holistic' process of scientific evaluation. Specifically, we present d ata showing that the maintenance of behaviour on an omission schedule cannot be construed as rational because on these schedules it is rewar d for withdrawal that restores approach. In addition, we argue that, s ince behaviour can be affected by the non-intentional properties of re presentations such as search images and cognitive maps, whether or not these representations have intentional properties can be assessed emp irically only through research on instrumental behaviour.