The structure of intentionality: insights and challenges for enactivism

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the paper is twofold. It first aims at clarifying and developing an important tension within enactivism concerning the relations between intentionality and content, once representationalism has been abandoned. In which sense(s) do enactivists (still) say that intentionality is contentful and not contentful? Secondly, it puts this tension in perspective with two paradigmatic ways of defining the relations between intentional states and their objects: Husserl’s theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations, and Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics.

KEYWORDS:

• Intentionality
• content
• representationalism
• enactivism
• phenomenology
• semiotics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Not to be confused with Tony Chemero’s Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Chemero 2009), which also endorses claims (a) and (b).

2 Shaun Gallagher’s enactivism must also be mentioned (Gallagher 2017, 2020). It shares with autopoietic enactivism a commitment to phenomenology; along with radical enactivism it criticizes representationalism; and with sensori-motor enactivism it grants a crucial role to action, but also to interactions and social institutions in the study of cognition. It also endorses intentionalism, as I discuss it in this paper.

3 See Steiner (2014) for a description of the various forms of enactive non-representationalism.

4 We should not underestimate the divergences lying behind this common stance. For instance, an important difference between autopoietic enactivists and radical enactivism concerns the scope one grants to natural selection for explaining intentionality: for radical enactivism, natural selection and adaptation explain the teleosemiotics at the core of intentionality. For autopoietic enactivism, the primary explanatory resources are not located in the natural relations between organisms and their environments; they are to be found in the autonomous organization of organisms and in their adaptivity.

5 Crowell (2013, 105 n. 5) defines this phenomenological sense of ‘representation’ as being non-ontological, since it is not related to the presence of an intermediary entity. Cromwell insists that ‘representation’ is clearer than ‘presentation’, and ‘represent’ better than ‘present’: in experience, things in the world do not merely present themselves, they present themselves in meaningful (but not necessarily conceptual) ways, or in normatively structured ways.

6 See the letter to Lady Welby, October 1904 :

A sign is therefore is an object which is in relation to its object on the one hand and to an interpretant on the other in such a way as to bring the interpretant into a relation to the object, corresponding to its own relation to the object. (Peirce 1958, 390)

7 On this topic, see West and Anderson (2014).

8 As it is for instance proposed by Hutto and Robertson (2020). In Steiner (2020), I argue that another form of pragmatism on habits – a pragmatism defended by John Dewey – may even allow us to dispense with intentionality as a basic and sui generis form of object-directedness.

9 I thank the two reviewers of this paper for their constructive criticism and their encouragements.