Intentionality, Function and Description

I don't think Dennett ever realy tells us how a bag of molecules can take an intentional stance, but his hierarchy has some appeal.

I offer the following version:

Physical
System (signalling)
System (function)
Intentional
Reflexive

And, as before, while we must attribute intentionality to an interlocutor, we may attribute otherwise if it 'works' (though always fallibly, from Kripke).

What I hadn't thought about properly until a talk with BT on Monday, is that there are circumstances where we must practically, as opposed to 'logically' (or to avoid undermining our own intelligibility), attribute intentionality (and function).  This is where lower level descriptions are just too complex.

Higher level biological systems are a good example:  a physical description of them woud be hopelessly complicated, and only a functional description is tractable.

With some computer systems, it is possible (depending upon the level selected) that even a system level descriptions would be too complex.  And it looks like brains might be like this too ....

These are still different reasons from the ones we have for treating interlocutors as intentional.  What I'm wondering, though, is whether there is some relationship here that I'm missing.

One of the reasons I'm wondering is that there isn't such a big difference between treating a system as law bound and treating it as functional.  Maybe.

And if we cannot maintain intelligibility without attributing intentionality on practical grounds, what then?

Indispensible Indexicals

(Maybe this is just more on Moore's Paradox ...)

Traditional approaches to formalising natural language have tended to treat indexicals as a kind of short-hand: as though they can always be substituted with non-contextual names or descriptions without changing the sense of the embedding expression.

I'm not sure whether this presumption has ever been thoroughly examined.  What would a language without indexicals look like?  If we always referred to ourselves by name, or by description, for instances ...

There would be an important epistemological difficulty, arising from the point I have made in earlier posts about Kripke's rule following argument:  While 'Mary is talking to John' is a corrigible intentional description of their behaviour, 'I am talking to you' is not.


Only the first and second person have this character - 'They are having a conversation' is subject to behavioural justification in a way in which 'We are having a conversation', or 'I am talking to you' are not.  We can probably alwasy replace 'they' with a context free name or description, but not so 'I' or 'you'.

If this is correct, then not only are the first and second person indexicals not dispensable, but their role is epistemologically fundamental.

Knowing the answer. Happy New Year.

If we could look into the future to see the answers to our questions, we would hear people uttering sublime truths without understanding.  They will even live their lives by them, and build and use machines which depend upon them.

But they will not have arrived at them via our questions, and, because they 'know' the answers, they will not understand our confusion.

We might live among them for a while thinking this, and then begin to wonder whether we had understood their language at all, or simply stumbled into a jungle of misleading homonymy.