People judge that harmful side effects are intentional, e.g., a CEO who introduces a new program to increase profits that results in harm to the environment is judged to have intentionally harmed the environment. They judge helpful side effects are unintentional, e.g., a CEO who introduces a new program to increase profits that results in helping the environment is not judged to have intentiona...

To explain how stimuli cause consciousness, we have to explain causality. We can’t trace linear causal chains from receptors after the first cortical synapse, so we use circular causality to explain neural pattern formation by self-organizing dynamics. But an aspect of intentional action is causality, which we extrapolate to material objects in the world. Thus causality is a property of mind, n...

A study of electroencephalographic brain activity in behaving animals has guided the development of a model for the self-organization of goal-directed behavior. Synthesis of a dynamical representation of brain function is based in the concept of intentionality as the organizing principle of animal and human behavior. The constructions of patterns of brain activity constitute meaning and not inf...

By means of an intriguing physical example, magnetic surface swimmers, that can be described in terms of Dennett’s intentional stance, I reconstruct a hierarchy of necessary and sufficient conditions for the applicability of the intentional strategy. It turns out that the different levels of the intentional hierarchy are contextually emergent from their respective subjacent levels by imposing s...

The ontology of (merely) intentional objects is a can of worms. If we can avoid ontological commitment to such entities, we should. In this paper, I offer a strategy for accomplishing that. This is to reject the traditional act-object account of intentionality in favor of an adverbial account. According to adverbialism about intentionality, having a dragon thought is not a matter of bearing the...

In order to interact socially with a human, a robot must convey intentionality, that is, the human must believe that the robot has beliefs, desires, and intentions. We have constructed a robot which exploits natural human social tendencies to convey intentionality through motor actions and facial expressions. We present results on the integration of perception, attention, motivation, behavior, ...

Normativity is certainly a central feature, if not the true hallmark, of intentional phenomena. Believers are essentially things that can be correct or mistaken with respect to the way things are. So nothing warrants being called an account of belief without an attendant account of error. Accounts of intentionality thus ought to provide stories (couched in suitably informative or “naturalistic”...

1 James, Intentionality and Analysis

Robert Stalnaker argues that his causal-pragmatic account of the problem of intentionality commits him to a coarse-grained conception of the contents of mental states, where propositions are represented as sets of possible worlds. Stalnaker also accepts the ‘‘direct reference’’ theory of names, according to which co-referring names have the same content. Stalnaker’s view of content is thus thre...