This introductory chapter outlines how children are active agents with motives and intentions, and what practitioners can do to support children’s learning, development and well-being in different age periods. It is therefore relevant for adults who work with children from birth to late adolescence, both within and beyond formal institutions. We also intend it to be useful to researchers and other professionals concerned with children and young people.

Our aim is to look forward toward children’s futures and how they can be supported to benefit from and contribute to what society has to offer. We argue that, by taking children’s intentions and emotions seriously, we can create an education that benefits children across the age periods. When children move through the institutional practices that society creates for them, they will learn, acquire new motives and develop. Therefore, the tools that we offer will allow carers and practitioners to tailor their support to children in different age periods. These ideas underpin a caring relational form of pedagogy, which is particularly but not only, important when children are dealing with changes in society’s expectations for them. These changes occur as they move, for example, between family, day-care or school, and when new challenges arise in familiar situations.

This chapter removes some obstacles that interfere with the correct understanding of ‘Teleology’ in Hegel’s Logic. According to a common mistake, ‘Teleology’ addresses the external purposiveness of human intentions. This misconstruction emerges from Hegel’s discussion of ‘subjective purposes’ therein and then apparently of the means employed by a person trying to achieve them. Another important misunderstanding affects the kind of reflexive argument that ‘Teleology’ develops. Among those who take it that the chapter addresses the difficulties of realising intentions, some claim that it provides an anti-sceptical transcendental argument to prove the effectiveness of some purposes. I make my case against this kind of interpretation before I present my own alternative account in the following chapter.

Stage 7 of the journey moves to utterance meaning and to various ways of explaining how speakers communicate more than what the sentence says. It introduces the intention-and-inference-based concept of meaning in Grice’s and post-Gricean pragmatics, travelling though maxims, principles, and heuristics proposed by various scholars of this orientation. It then moves to introducing (i) approaches that advocate the ‘maximalist’, contextualist semantic content and (ii) semantic minimalism that preserves a much clearer boundary between semantics and pragmatics – suggesting ‘food for thought’ at many points in the discussion.

A concern that people ought to be given what they deserve, in both positive and negative senses, lies deep within the human psyche and strongly influences our sense of reciprocity. Views on the level of reward or punishment that a person deserves for their actions will differ across persons, places and time, but, I argue in this chapter, depend substantively upon some combination of intentions and outcomes. Using these characteristics, I propose a taxonomy of actions, ordered from most to least blameworthy, with, for example, it being suggested that for any particular level of harm an intentional yet unrealised harm is more blameworthy than an unintentional yet realised harm (a similar taxonomy can be developed for the positive domain of praiseworthy actions). The taxonomy is focused upon people’s actions towards others, but I finish the chapter with a discussion of desert in relation to people’s intentions towards themselves. Ultimately, I contend that the strength and sustainability of public sector services and welfare systems, not to mention our private relationships, rely upon the recognition that desert underpins our notion of justice.

In Chapter 1, we introduce the subject of pragmatics and cover some basic concepts, definitions, and topics that will be central to the ideas discussed in the rest of the book. We begin with some definitions of pragmatics, and a key distinction is made between approaches which focus on social factors, and those which take a more theoretical approach. We move on to think about the role that context plays in interpretation. This leads us to a key distinction between sentences and utterances, with utterances as the focus of pragmatics. We then consider two different ways in which meaning may be communicated: via code and via inference. As we will see, inference plays a central role in the interpretation of utterances. Next, we discuss the idea that the identification of intention lies at the heart of utterance interpretation. This leads to a discussion of the cognitive abilities that are thought to underlie inferential processes, including mindreading, metarepresentation, and theory of mind. We look at what it means to be able to have thoughts about other people’s thoughts and why this is key for pragmatic processing.

Relevance Theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory devoted to utterance interpretation. Its main assumption is that linguistic communication is guided by the communicative principle of relevance, which states that the addressee is invited to take the speaker’s contribution as optimally relevant. In intracultural communication, the crucial point is to understand how communication succeeds, since its success depends not on a complete linguistic decoding but rather on accessing the relevant contextual assumptions; that is, the assumptions that are closest to the speaker’s informative intention. This chapter’s first aim is to elucidate both how Relevance Theory is included in Grice’s legacy, and how it diverges from Grice. Its second aim is to discuss the place of Relevance Theory in pragmatics today, and more specifically to explore whether Relevance Theory makes different predictions than do neo-Gricean approaches. Its third aim is to give insights into Relevance Theory’s contributions to the intercultural pragmatics agenda, and in particular to discuss how Relevance Theory converges with but also diverges from the intercultural pragmatics paradigm initiated by Kecskes in 2014.

The chapter presents the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) to communication that serves as a theoretical frame for intercultural pragmatics. SCA was developed to explain the specific features of intercultural interactions and thus offers an alternative to the Gricean approaches that can be considered monolingual theories. There are two important claims that distinguish SCA from other pragmatic theories. First, SCA emphasizes that cooperation and egocentrism are not antagonistic features of communication. While (social) cooperation is an intention-directed practice that is governed by relevance, (individual) egocentrism is an attention-oriented trait dominated by salience that refers to the relative importance or prominence of information and signs. Second, SCA claims that pragmatic theories have tried to describe the relationship of the individual and social factors by putting too much emphasis on idealized language use, and focusing on cooperation, rapport, and politeness while paying less attention to the untidy, messy, poorly organized and impolite side of communication. SCA pays equal attention to both sides. The first part of the chapter explains the main tenets of SCA. The second part discusses how context, common ground and salience are intertwined in meaning creation and comprehension. The chapter closes with suggestions for future research.

An expansive body of research has investigated the adverse consequences of self-stigma of seeking psychological help on help-seeking tendencies. Therefore, this chapter provides a meta-analysis of the extant literature regarding the empirical relationship between self-stigma and help-seeking attitudes and intentions. An exhaustive review of the research literature was performed on all articles published in English that assessed a statistical relationship between self-stigma and at least one other help-seeking variable such as help-seeking attitudes, intentions, willingness, or future help-seeking behaviors. We extracted data from 145 articles and included them in the meta-analyses, of which, 120 were utilized to examine the relationship between self-stigma and help-seeking attitudes, 74 were utilized to examine the relationship between self-stigma and help-seeking intentions, 3 were utilized to examine the relationship between self-stigma and future help-seeking behaviors, and 4 were utilized to examine the relationship between self-stigma and decisions to seek online help-seeking information. The meta-analyses uncovered a strong negative relationship between help-seeking self-stigma and help-seeking attitudes, moderate negative relationships between self-stigma and help-seeking intentions as well as between self-stigma and actual future help-seeking behaviors, and a small effect size for the negative relationship between self-stigma and decisions to seek online help-seeking information.

Intentions are certainly an important step in the goal-pursuit process, as they clarify our course of action. Yet intentions are meaningless without action. Indeed, self-control is about more than simply knowing the course of action to pursue our goals; we must execute those actions as well. However, the reality is that the transition from intention to action can be incredibly difficult. Our inability to act in ways that adhere to our intentions can derail the goal pursuit process. However, there are ways to ease the course from intention to action, whether it be itemizing a step-by-step plan so that it becomes habitual, capitalizing on factors in our environment to nudge us toward action, or disrupting our environment to making on opportunities to change our behavior. Yet whatever the method, easing the transition from intention to action is essential to getting beyond merely stating our commitment to our goals and establishing a consistent pattern of action that maximizes goal pursuit.

This chapter demonstrates how seeking the Framers’ intentions by reviewing the debates and drafting history leading to the final versions of the Constitution can resolve the semantic summing problem in the case of two highly contested and frequently litigated clauses: the tax clauses and the Establishment Clause. In doing so, it shows how, in practice, a search for the Framers’ intentions – that is, the end–means policy choices they made – can be done in light of the nature of the documentary record, and how it can resolve otherwise difficult interpretive tasks for which public meaning approaches are inadequate. In these cases, there is also evidence that the Framers’ understandings were known to the ratifiers and the public, and thus point to the meanings that were likely to have been understood by the those groups as well.