ABSTRACT
The mental events by which the consumer represents the contingencies of reinforcement and punishment include desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions. While previous expositions of the Intentional Behaviorist research strategy have concentrated on desires and beliefs, the present approach seeks to balance this by exploring the place of perceptual contingency-representations, including emotions, in the consumer’s pre-behavioral mental depiction of the contingencies. This is especially pertinent in view of recent arguments that the understanding of human action in cognitive decision-making terms should be wholly or significantly replaced by an account based on simpler perceptual processes. The concept of perceptual contingency-representation is introduced and refined in this chapter and shown to be a necessary component of the conative, cognitive, and affective composite variable contingency-representation, which collectively depicts past and present contingencies of reinforcement and punishment that consumer choice reflects. In seeking the perceptual component of contingency-representation, we consider, first, the nature of perception and representation and, second, the requirements of perceptual contingency-representation. The required concept must represent the consequences of future actions that the consumer can only imagine and do this on the basis of the consumer’s learning history with respect to the physical, social, and perceptual outcomes of previously performed actions of a similar kind. In addition, it must incorporate her reflections on this experience and the other-rules and self-rules received/developed in imagination since the actions to which the learning history refers were performed. And it must allow all of these considerations to be combined into a final summative contingency-representation which allows the selection of an appropriate action from among those considered. Contingency-representations that accomplish these tasks include desires and beliefs that represent 40the contingencies in their specific ways but the analysis focuses on the perceptual component of contingency-representation.
