ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some of the components of a model for the understanding of plans and social actions. The model is applied to narrative text, wherein actions of characters need to be interpreted as social actions. The chapter focuses on social actions and plans leads to a distinction between story analysis and story model analysis. The method of analysis that considers a reader's beliefs is clearly not just story analysis but story model analysis. Plans and social actions have been the focus of work in social psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive-social psychology, developmental psychology; philosophy, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The person who has difficulty in recognizing plans and social actions in the behavior of others will have difficulty in understanding episodes related in written form. One way in which a person can cope with the complexities inherent in social action recognition is to look for patterns of interactional behavior.
