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It is necessary to note that the hypothesis that the mind constructs the goal and means
together does not imply that an individual deliberately cannot search through possible
options as a method to determine an appropriate means. Indeed, the conscious idea to apply
searching along with the awareness of several possible options may be the result of the
ongoing synthesis.
The validation of the JSH is easy. Indeed, because the hypothesis suggests that the mind
constructs the goal and means of an action jointly following the criterion of minimal
construction costs. This means that if there are no explicit preferences to choose among
several possible actions then an action requiring minimal mental costs to be constructed is
preferable. This action should be selected without intensive searching among probable
alternatives. On the other hand, this choice should not be a result of the activation of a
routine procedure and can be changed deliberately. A real experimentation to test these
suppositions is possible but beyond the scope of this article (Prudkov &Rodina, 1999,
Rodina &Prudkov, 2005). Instead, I consider a thought experiment, which, in my opinion, is
sufficient to demonstrate the relevance of the JSH.
Imagine that two individuals participate in this experiment, one of them is Experimenter,
the other is Subject, accordingly, and the experiment takes place in London. The participants
are discussing some problem and at a certain moment, Experimenter asks Subject to give
him a pen without specifying the location of the pen. Many people have a pen in their
pockets, and it is very probable that Subject is among them. Subject takes the pen out of the
pocket and gives it to Experimenter. It is very reasonable to suggest that the construction of
this action needs minimal mental costs. In response, however, Experimenter asks, “why did
Subject take the pen out of the pocket instead of calling New York?” Subject is astonished by
this question and then Experimenter says that there are many pens in New York and Subject
could find a pen there. The astonishment of Subject means that his mind did not find among
possible alternatives of the pen's location but one may argue that this reflects the fact that
Experimenter's request is performed by the activation of a corresponding routine. It is
obvious, however, that if Experimenter would merely ask Subject to find a pen in New York
then Subject could easily convert this idea to a sequence of actions. Such a rapid adjustment
to the situation cannot be provided by a routine. This is the result of a special goal-directed
process. In my opinion, this simple situation, which can be easily repeated in reality,
demonstrates the appropriateness of the idea of joint synthesis.
Although the joint synthesis is a basic attribute of humans as goal-directed systems, the
consideration of this characteristic alone may be insufficient to understand the whole
diversity of human actions. Humans, of course, have innate mechanisms necessary for
survival and reproduction and those, although are under control from more modern
systems, influence actions and therefore, to a certain degree, humans can be considered as
the goal-directed systems of the first class. On the other hand, using language and complex
social skills, an individual can "emulate" the separation between goals and means. Indeed,
by discussing some ideas with other people or by writing the ideas down and afterwards
thinking about them, an individual can concentrate either on the goals or on the means of a
goal-directed activity. The fact implies, to some extent, humans can be considered as
systems with the separate and arbitrary construction of goals and means. However, it is the
joint synthesis that determines the involvement of the other classes of goal-directed systems
in human actions.
