Comments on Foxall’s ‘Intentionality,symbol and situation in the interpretation of consumer choice’

The commentary addresses the relevant and difficult issue of interpreting psychological concepts within a sound and coherent theoretical framework about human behavior. The author’s theoretical model of consumer behavior, the Behavioral Perspective Model (BPM), was first formulated in the 80s, inspired by operant theory, which derives from a Skinnerian behavioristic orientation. The original idea was to present a theoretical framework that would serve as an alternative to cognitively oriented approaches, which, despite having been shown to be limited in the prediction of actual behavior, dominate the field excessively.

The BPM has been used by many researchers in different countries as a useful conceptual tool to interpret and investigate all aspects of consumer behavior. The model has been applied to several subjects, such as brand choice, searching behavior, atmospherics, ecological consumption, store choice, product substitutability, among others. This wide adoption of the model might have led its author to defend it inflexibly, exacerbating its qualities. But, instead, the author has been one of the first to raise queries concerning the comprehensiveness of the model and to discuss some of its epistemological and theoretical limitations. In doing this, Foxall, in this paper, displays legitimate intellectual enquiry and gives us an excellent example of academic honesty.

The paper addresses limitations of the BPM due to its adherence to an exclusively extensional language, which avoids propositional attitudes, that is, it does not use intentional language. Extensional language, according to the author, refers to brute facts, whereas intentional language implies necessarily social conventions and values. Foxall defends, as he has done previously, that the necessity of adopting intentional language arises in three situations: accounts of behavior that seek to comprehend its continuity or discontinuity, constructing a personal level of explanation for behavior, and delimiting behavioral interpretations more generally.

With the purpose of overcoming such limitations, the author proposes to adapt the extensional version of the BPM, as an attempt to implement in it intentional terms. Although recognizing that several intentional construals of the model are possible, Foxall presents one that is primarily focused on showing the role of collective intentionality in transforming part of informational reinforcement, as conceived by the extensional model, into symbolic reinforcement, belonging to the intentional model. So, the main suggested modification is to distinguish between informational and symbolic reinforcement, which, in the previous version, were interpreted as the same type of reinforcement.

The model would, then, include three types of consequences, namely, utilitarian, informational, and symbolic consequences. Symbolic consequences would be derived from what the individual thinks, believes, desires, or feels to be the case and are described in intentional language, involving social conventions and status conferring rules. This distinction, between extensional and intentional models, would not imply ontological assertions but only different levels of interpretation. That is, there would be two types of languages about the same phenomena, one of them suitable to offer prediction and control (associated to the possibility of applying the experimental method), whereas the other would serve to interpret psychological phenomena, with its behavioral continuity, personal level of explanation, and limitation of behavioral explanation.

The paper represents a solid and important contribution to the field, for it goes beyond the pure epistemological discussion of the theme and presents possible, concrete conceptual and theoretical adaptations to a model that has been extensively used to interpret and investigate consumer behavior. In this respect, it takes marketing theory to a new level of scholarship, with a well informed and articulated framework.

In my view, one of the strengths of the paper is the emphasis it gives to the social nature of psychological expressions, as explicated by Searle’s notion of collective intentionality. This is compatible with and similar to Peters' (1958) analysis of explanations of human action, especially his examination of rule-following behavior that makes explicit how, in ordinary language, when identifying our, and others', intentions, we consider what we know about what functions as means to what ends in our society, which Peters refers to as means-end fluxes.

This work will certainly instigate interesting discussions and further developments in the field. Three directions of such developments seem likely. One of them would involve the treatment of other kinds of psychological concepts found in ordinary language that have been avoided by behavioristic approaches. For example, the model should consider dispositional concepts, in general, as Ryle (1949) referred to them, which include, in addition to propositional attitudes, abilities, propensities, and emotions, such as skills (e.g. knowing algebra or how to play chess) and personality traits (e.g. vain, patriotic). Intentional idiom, such as beliefs and intentions, also have a similar logical operation in ordinary language, since they describe succinctly the things that a person has done and predict what the person is likely to do, in terms of if–then clauses. When we say that Peter believes that the ice is too thin, this implies that we know that he has done certain things under certain conditions, such as stating that the ice is thin or refusing to walk over it when asked to cross the lake, and we can predict that he will do certain thing, such as advise John not to walk over it if he sees his friend walking toward the lake. These are, as Ryle has called, open dispositional concepts because several different, but related, occurrences may fulfill the if–then clauses. If Foxall proposes to incorporate intentional idiom in the model, there seems to be no reason to leave out other relevant dispositional concepts (such as skills and personal traits).

The second point likely to be discussed, much related to the first, concerns the way of incorporating psychological concepts in the BPM. Considering that dispositional concepts describe, imprecisely, what individuals have done and predict what they are likely to do under certain situations, they are good candidates to be included in the description of consumers’ learning history. If Peter believes that Brand A is healthier than Brand B, one can predict certain actions and reactions given certain conditions. This can be based upon previous observation of Peter’s behavior, including the things he says about brands, or upon what others have told us about him. The paper suggests this (in Figure 2) but does not emphasize the role of intentional idiom in describing individuals’ history. In the text, the author stressed the possible distinction between informational and symbolic reinforcement, but did not explicate the important contribution of dispositional (or intentional) expressions in the description of consumers’ history.

Another point that might lead to interesting debates concerns the notion of symbolic (intentional) consequence as those that are based upon beliefs, thoughts, and such like, since this will bring to the fore the notion of self-reinforcement, which in itself is problematic. This might be an interesting theoretical concept but one that seems to require some qualification. If Peter can reinforce his own behavior, one could predict that he will do that most of the time and will become less and less dependent on the hardly earned social reinforcements. In other words, it seems that, if the notion of self-reinforcement is to become a relevant theoretical concept, one that does not threaten operant theory, one would need to qualify, even if only generally, the conditions under which the phenomenon occurs. Otherwise it could be loosely used to interpret, or explain, almost any type of human action.