Defending Non-Derived Content

Abstract

In “The Myth of Original Intentionality,” Daniel Dennett appears to want to argue for four claims involving the familiar distinction between original (or underived) and derived intentionality.

1. Humans lack original intentionality.

2. Humans have derived intentionality only.

3. There is no distinction between original and derived intentionality.

4. There is no such thing as original intentionality.

We argue that Dennett's discussion fails to secure any of these conclusions for the contents of thoughts.

Keywords:

• Original Intentionality
• Derived Intentionality
• Daniel Dennett

Notes

Notes

[1] We think thoughts have non-derived semantic content. We believe natural language, street signs, and other artifacts derive their content from thoughts. We can image someone thinking that it goes the other way around—that there is meaningful language first and thoughts derive their semantic content from language. Maybe one thinks that vervet calls have semantic meaning (predator above or predator below) and do not derive this meaning from voluntary, intended mental states, but from involuntary responses. Perhaps one thinks that “language happens” replete with meaning and then becomes internalized and that is how thoughts acquire their content. This would put things the other way around from the way we believe things go. Nonetheless, if semantic content of natural language did not derive from semantic content of thoughts, there would still be non-derived semantic content of just the sort Dennett says cannot exist. It may even be that the causal conditions of one of the naturalized semantic theories we refer to below could be adapted to explain the origin of the semantically non-derived content of language. So while we offer thoughts as the paradigm cases of things with non-derived content, we could adapt our arguments for non-derived content to apply to whatever has it–thoughts, language, or whatever.

[2] Cf. “We may call our own intentionality real, but we must recognize that it is derived from the intentionality of natural selection” (Dennett, 1990, p. 62).

[3] Cf. “But this vision of things, while it provides a satisfying answer to the question of whence came our own intentionality, does seem to leave us with an embarrassment, for it derives our own intentionality from entities—genes—whose intentionality is surely a paradigm case of mere as if intentionality!”(Dennett, 1990, p. 60).

[4] Perhaps the human ontogenetic process gives rise to some innate representations and innate knowledge, but they are not representations for the genes. Such knowledge does not consist of representations genes use.