Schlicht Tobias
Institute of Philosophy II, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2018 Aug 28;9:1497. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01497. eCollection 2018.
Traditionally, intentionality is regarded as that feature of all and only mental states - paradigmatically beliefs and desires - in virtue of which they are directed at or are about something. The problem of intentionality is to explain how it fits into the natural order given the intuition that no physical entity can be intentionally directed in this sense. The basic assumption of this paper, proposed by enactivists, is that failure to naturalize intentionality and mental representation is partly due to the fact that most participants in the debate take intentionality and mental representation to be equivalent. In contrast, it is proposed to treat intentionality as a feature of whole embodied agents (paradigmatically organisms) who can be directed at objects and states of affairs in various ways, while representation should be regarded as a feature of mental states (and their respective vehicles or underlying mechanisms). The present paper develops and motivates the distinction, applies it to Metzinger's project of naturalizing phenomenal representation, and demonstrates the range of theoretical options with respect to a delineation of cognition given the enactive proposal. It is taken as problematic that enactivism takes the realm of cognition to be identical to the realm of biology. Instead, a constraint on a theory of intentionality and representation is that it should delineate the subject matter of cognitive science and distinguish it from other sciences, also to leave room for the possibility of artificial intelligence. One important implication of the present proposal is that there can be creatures which can be intentionally directed without having the capacity to represent. That is, their intentionality is restricted to being able to be directed at existent things. Only creatures in possession of the right kind of neurocognitive architecture can produce and sustain representations in order to be directed at non-existent things. It is sketched how this approach conceives of intentionality as a developmental and layered concept, allowing for a hierarchical model of varieties of intentionality, ranging from the basic pursuit of local environmental goals to thoughts about fictional objects.
传统上，意向性被视为所有且仅有心理状态（典型的如信念和欲望）的一种特征，凭借这一特征，它们指向或关乎某事物。意向性问题在于，鉴于不存在物理实体能在这种意义上被有意指向这一直觉，解释它如何融入自然秩序。本文由生成主义者提出的基本假设是，未能将意向性和心理表征自然化，部分原因在于辩论中的大多数参与者将意向性和心理表征视为等同。相比之下，有人提议将意向性视为整个具身主体（典型的如生物体）的一种特征，这些主体能够以各种方式指向对象和事态，而表征应被视为心理状态（及其各自的载体或潜在机制）的一种特征。本文阐述并论证了这一区别，将其应用于梅青格尔对现象表征进行自然化的项目，并展示了鉴于生成主义提议在认知界定方面的一系列理论选项。生成主义将认知领域等同于生物领域这一点被视为有问题。相反，对意向性和表征理论的一个限制是，它应界定认知科学的主题并将其与其他科学区分开来，同时也要为人工智能的可能性留出空间。当前提议的一个重要含义是，可能存在一些能够被有意指向但没有表征能力的生物。也就是说，它们的意向性仅限于能够指向现存事物。只有拥有合适神经认知架构的生物才能产生并维持表征，以便指向不存在的事物。本文概述了这种方法如何将意向性构想为一个发展性的分层概念，从而允许建立一个意向性种类的层次模型，从对局部环境目标的基本追求到对虚构对象的思考。
