Commonsense and theorizing about action control agree in assuming that human behavior is (mainly) driven by goals, but no mechanistic theory of what goals are, where they come from, and how they impact action selection is available. Here I develop such a theory that is based on the assumption that GOALs guide Intentional Actions THrough criteria (GOALIATH). The theory is intended to be minimalist and parsimonious with respect to its assumptions, as transparent and mechanistic as possible, and it is based on representational assumptions provided by the Theory of Event Coding (TEC). It holds that goal-directed behavior is guided by selection criteria that activate and create competition between event files that contain action-effect codes matching one or more of the criteria—a competition that eventually settles into a solution favoring the best-matching event file. The criteria are associated with various sources, including biological drives, acquired needs (e.g., of achievement, power, or affiliation), and short-term, sometimes arbitrary, instructed aims. Action selection is, thus, a compromise that tries to satisfy various criteria related to different driving forces, which are also likely to vary in strength over time. Hence, what looks like goal-directed action emerges from, and represents an attempt to satisfy multiple constraints with different origins, purposes, operational characteristics, and timescales—which among other things does not guarantee a high degree of coherence or rationality of the eventual outcome. GOALIATH calls for a radical break with conventional theorizing about the control of goal-directed behavior, as it among other things questions existing cognitive-control theories and dual-route models of action control.

关于行动控制的常识和理论一致认为人类行为（主要）是由目标驱动的，但没有关于目标是什么、目标来自哪里以及它们如何影响行动选择的机械理论。在这里，我提出了这样一个理论，该理论基于这样的假设：目标通过标准（GOALIATH）指导有意的行动。该理论的假设是简约和简约的，尽可能透明和机械化，并且它基于事件编码理论（TEC）提供的代表性假设。它认为目标导向的行为是由选择标准引导的，这些选择标准激活并创建了包含与一个或多个标准匹配的动作效果代码的事件文件之间的竞争——这种竞争最终形成有利于最匹配事件文件的解决方案。这些标准与各种来源相关，包括生物驱动力、后天需求（例如，成就、权力或归属）以及短期（有时是任意的）指导目标。因此，行动选择是一种妥协，试图满足与不同驱动力相关的各种标准，这些驱动力的强度也可能随着时间的推移而变化。因此，看似目标导向的行动源于并代表着一种试图满足具有不同起源、目的、操作特征和时间尺度的多重约束的尝试——这除其他外并不能保证最终结果的高度连贯性或合理性。 GOALIATH 呼吁彻底打破有关目标导向行为控制的传统理论，因为它对现有的认知控制理论和行动控制的双路径模型提出了质疑。