The Emergence of Intentionality

Abstract

In Van Orden and Holden's (2002) article, “Intentional Contents and Self-Control,” they provide an outline for how a research program can preserve the notion of intentionality in goal-directed behavior without reifying it or treating it as a singular efficient cause all its own. In a conventional theoretical framework where intention is treated as something that spawns de novo from an individual cognizer every time he or she makes a freely willed decision (an act that simply has no preceding causes of its own), any scientific understanding of causality becomes profoundly compromised. Alternatively, in a simple deterministic framework where all behaviors (including intentional acts) are the direct result of a traceable number of linear preceding causes, the very notion of intentionality becomes nothing more than a descriptive convenience. In between these extremes, Van Orden and Holden point to a theoretical framework where a version of causality and a version of intentionality can coexist. By embracing circular causality (via autocatalysis) and emergent intentionality (via multiscale nonlinear interactions), Van Orden and Holden's article leads the way toward an understanding of intention that preserves ownership of action to some degree but dispenses with the scientifically problematic notion of free will as a causal source (or unique point of origin). Finally, this framework may allow for a form of conjoined intentionality to emerge amid multiple people who are influenced by shared causal forces.