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Intentionality (Philosophy)
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Intentionality lies at the heart of Searle's Chinese Room argument against artificial intelligence which proposes that since minds have intentionality, but computational processes do not, minds cannot be intentional in virtue of carrying out computations. The whole point of the Chinese Room is to expound on the point that syntax does not imply semantics.
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Building upon his views upon Intentionality, Searle presented a view concerning consciousness in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). Searle argues that, starting with behaviorism (a view which then actually was not very influential any more), much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. In Intentionality, he parodies several alternative theories of consciousness by replacing their accounts of intentionality with comparable accounts of the hand:
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A collection about the intentionality of speech acts and propositional attitudes. The chapters in the first section develop a framework for pragmatics—the study of the interaction of speech acts and the contexts in which they are performed. The framework is used to defend and apply a pragmatic conception of presupposition, to account for the role of indicative conditional statements in reasoning, and to solve some puzzles about statements of identity and existence. The chapters in the second section concern the semantics of the attribution of belief and other propositional attitudes. They attempt to reconcile the possible-worlds analysis of propositional content with the phenomena, including de re belief attribution and the attribution of indexical or self-locating belief. The chapters in the third section defend an externalist account of the contents of thought.
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In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Searle sets out to apply certain elements of his account(s) of 'illocutionary acts' to the investigation of intentionality. (Intentionality, not to be confused with intensionality-with-an-s, is a technical philosophical term meaning roughly aboutness. It refers to mental states and their associated objects, such as written words, which refer to things in the world. Thus being anxious about a deadline is an intentional state, while free-floating anxiety is a non-intentional one. Intending to do something is just one kind of intentionality in this sense.) To a certain extent, Searle's account of Intentionality consists of the transfer of certain features, which he had formerly presented as features of speech acts, to Intentional states. For example, believing John has two candy bars is an intentional state with the psychological mode of belief and the propositional content that John has two candy bars.
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Searle provides a strong theoretical basis for the use of the notion of intentionality in a social context. Intentionality is a technical philosophical term meaning aboutness. Intentionality indicates that someone has attached some meaning to an object, such as a belief about it, possession of it, contempt towards it, and so on. It includes, but is somewhat larger than, the ordinary use of intent. In Collective intentions and actions Searle seeks to explain collective intentions as a distinct form of intentionality. In his previous work he has provided rules-based accounts of language and intentionality. He develops this theme by looking for a set of rules that are essential for collective intentionality.
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Argues that the concept of intentionality is not "invented;" not, at least, ab initio. The understanding an infant has of its own intentional actions is the most likely root of its understanding of the intentionality of other persons. What this means is that the concept of intentionality is not entirely invented, nor is it innate, on certain understandings of those terms. The concept develops naturally and organically out of the child's understanding of its immediate experience.
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Intentionality (Philosophy)