Recipes for the simple-minded: A constructive account of original intentionality.

摘要

In recent discussions of the concept of original intentionality , Dennett raises an intelligible challenge to intentional realists, one that has not been adequately addressed by naturalistic theories of mental representation how can something be correct or mistaken about the way things are, where the applicable normativity is intelligible as such, without ultimately appealing (as we do with frogs and slot machines) to the background of purposes for which a subject has been designed or selected? I respond directly and constructively to this challenge by profiling in suitably informative vocabulary how creatures with certain expectation-based educable capacities could be originally intentional. By explaining how we can understand such critters as engaging in a kind of rational goal-directed activity that is intelligible quite apart from their designed purposes, I show how they are susceptible to two types of corresponding to distinct ways in which expectations can fail to pick out regularities in their environments. I then expand this simple account to show how critters with more sophisticated means of exploiting their environments are capable of further types of errors. I can therefore capture several distinct kinds of intentional activity, corresponding to different ways in which critters can be seen as getting things right or wrong, including primitive inferential capacities. I also sketch a meow by which members of a community can become beholden to norms that are socially instituted and maintained, although I don't pretend to capture our most sophisticated intentional capacities---those inferential and linguistic capacities in virtue of which we are able to reason with one another about how the world is---my account nevertheless shows that there are interesting pre-linguistic boundaries separating the relative intentional capacities of critters, boundaries that are liable to be overlooked by those (like Davidson) who insist that thought or reason is somehow limited to linguistic beings. This project, since it articulates the boundaries around the pre-linguistic intentional capacities from which our full-blown conceptual capacities plausibly evolved, is of evident value for the study of animal cognition, and should prove useful for the task of setting reasonable targets for AI research.