Every aspect of human behavior involves the pursuit of goals. Sometimes these goals are rather simple, like brushing your teeth to prevent decay. Sometimes they are quite unconscious, like having your mind search for similar experiences when you encounter some new experience. And, sometimes they are quite complex, like trying to build high-quality educational software as a means to effect change in the school system.

When goals are simple, we really don't think about them much. When they are unconscious, we don't think about them at all. And, when they are complex, we may think about them, but find the going so rough that we hone in on the simplest ones and lose the forest for the trees.

Understanding how people pursue goals is a critical aspect of understanding cognition. For computers to really understand human stories, they would need a complete model of the goals people pursue: the plans, the use, and the complexities that arise. The issue is this: If goals underlie human behavior to the extent that we cannot understand a story or what someone says or wants, without a clear assessment of the underlying goals and the interaction of those goals, then it follows that goals are at the root of human learning. Why would anyone learn anything if not to help in the pursuit of a goal? Why would anyone try to understand anything if not because he had the goal of learning new information from what he was trying to understand?