Meaning Making and the Mind of the Externalist

This paper attempts to do two things. First, it recounts the problem of intentionality, as it has typically been conceptualized, and argues that it needs to be reconceptualized in light of the radical form of externalism most commonly referred to as the extended mind thesis. Second, it provides an explicit, novel argument for that thesis, what I call the argument from meaning making, and offers some defense of that argument. This second task occupies the core of the paper, and in completing it I distinguish active cognition from cyborg fantasy arguments for externalism, and develop the analogy between the extended mind thesis in the cognitive sciences and developmental systems theory in developmental biology. The rethinking of the problem of intentionality on offer leads not so much to a solution as to a dissolution of that problem, as traditionally conceived. To appear in Richard Menary (editor) The Extended Mind (Ashgate, 2005) Meaning Making and the Mind of the Externalist∗ Robert A. Wilson University of Alberta [email protected] 1. Intentionality and the Mind During the 1980s, many philosophers of mind, and even the occasional cognitive scientist, were very exercised about something called “the problem of intentionality”. The problem was something like this. There are certain things in the world that appear to possess, through their operation and functioning, a special kind of property, intentionality. This is the property of being about something, of having content about that thing, of carrying information about that thing. The problem of intentionality was threefold: to explain what intentionality was; to delineate which things had intentionality (and so which things didn’t); and to provide an account of just why they had not only intentionality, but the particular intentionality they had, their content. The third of these chores was the core one, the task of specifying in virtue of what certain things in the world were about the particular things they were about. The problem of intentionality was especially pressing within the naturalistic view of the mind that motivated much of the discussion of the problem. The idea was to view naturalism as a kind of constraint on what could count as an acceptable endeavour to complete the core chore: that one’s account of what made for intentionality could not itself rely on unexplicated intentional or semantic notions. An answer to the problem of intentionality must be given solely in terms of “naturalistically acceptable” notions, such as causation, counterfactual dependence, material composition, biological function, or phylogenetic history. To understand a little more about the problem of intentionality, we need to turn to its second part, the part that divides the world into things with intentionality and things without it. Two of the things that paradigmatically have intentionality are the language that people use to communicate, and the thoughts that people have (often, but not only, in those communicative acts). Of these, it is plausible to hold that the intentionality of language derives from that of thinking. That is because people mean something by making an