A growing amount of research on intentionality within Anglo-American philosophy of mind has been focusing on the notion of phenomenal intentionality. How to characterize phenomenal intentionality is not a straightforward matter, but one relatively neutral option is in terms of counterfactual dependence: an intentional state has phenomenal intentionality just in case if it were not phenomenal it...

The discovery of mirror neurons has given rise to a number of interpretations of their functions together with speculations on their potential role in the evolution of specifically human capacities. Thus, mirror neurons have been thought to ground many aspects of human social cognition, including the capacity to engage in cooperative collective actions and to understand them. We propose an eval...

The capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one's life is the essence of humanness. Human agency is characterized by a number of core features that operate through phenomenal and functional consciousness. These include the temporal extension of agency through intentionality and forethought, self-regulation by self-reactive influence, and self-reflectiveness about one's capab...

The idea that intentionality is the distinctive mark of the mental or that only mental phenomena have intentionality emerged in the philosophical tradition after Franz Brentano. Much of contemporary philosophy is dedicated to a rejection of the view that mental phenomena have original intentionality. In other words, main strands of contemporary philosophy seek to naturalize intentionality of th...

I examine a model of artifact creation developed by (Houkes & Vermaas 2009). I suggest a way to extend the model by regarding the agents involved in the design and making of new artifacts to be cooperating in the ‘we-mode’ as described by Raimo Tuomela. Contrary to the authors’ own claims, I suggest that their model then becomes largely compatible with the ‘intentionalist’ view of artifacts pro...

In my reply to critics I address a raft of issues raised by the commentators to Fault Lines of Globalization. These issues include: the radicalization of the Husserlian concept of intentionality as differance; the irreducibility of a-legality to (il)legality; the relation between legal orders and society; legal pluralism; the relation between power and place; contingency and modernity; fear and...

A Two-Levelled Ontology In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues for a two-level ontology along the following lines. Facts on the lower level – which he calls brute facts – can exist independently of human beings and their institutions. Facts on the upper level, which he calls institutional facts, depend on human institutions and above all on an associated ‘collective intention...

People excel at attributing intentionality to other agents, whether in simple scenarios such as shapes moving in two dimensions or complex scenarios such as people interacting. We note that intentionality attributions seem to fall into two categories: low-level intentionality in which an observer has a theory of mind about an agent, and high-level intentionality in which an observer believes th...