Abstract
In their target article, Hutto and Satne eloquently articulate the failings of most current attempts to naturalize mental content. Furthermore, we think they are correct in their insistence that the only way forward is by drawing a distinction between two kinds of intentionality, one of which is considerably weaker than—and should be deployed to explain—the propositional variety most philosophers take for granted. The problem is that their own rendering of this weaker form of intentionality—contentless intentionality—is too weak. What’s needed is a species of intentionality distinct from both the industrial-strength version beloved by philosophers and the intentionality lite recommended by Hutto and Satne. We briefly motivate and sketch this alternative, and say a few words about the account of cognition that it spawns.
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Notes
The corollary in the field of AI is that it is impossible to construct physical mechanisms that exhibit targeted behaviour without equip** them with some knowledge of their targets. Some AI theorists did flirt with the idea of “intelligence without representation” in the latter years of the twentieth century, and even managed to construct devices that could circumnavigate a room by bum** off the walls (Brooks 1991). But after a brief diversion, most of these researchers recognised the limits of this approach. As everyone knows, Rodney Brooks has gone back to writing code.
Incidentally, this analysis does vindicate Hutto and Satne in one regard: in their diagnosis of the failings of teleosemantics. As a number of philosophers have pointed out, teleosemantic theories get the explanatory dependencies backwards. Such theories ground mental content in the (success of) the very behaviours at issue, thereby rendering it immaterial to the actual mechanisms of intelligence.
Indeed, as they admit (fn.7), it’s questionable whether the idea of contentless intentionality is conceptually coherent in the first place, given that both content and intentionality are unpacked by philosophers using the highly technical notion of “aboutness”.
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O’Brien, G., Opie, J. Intentionality Lite or Analog Content?. Philosophia 43, 723–729 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9623-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9623-5