Klappentext

Can we account for our minds, our thoughts, feelings and actions without intentionality? Can we describe our intelligence purely in terms of elaborate responses to certain situations without invoking a mind that has states about other states? This dissertation will attempt to clear a path towards such an account, arguing that theories which rely on intentional states are not only conceptually flawed but ultimately collapse into purely response-based accounts of intelligence. Historically, the intentional account of intelligence was cemented as the default position during the cognitive revolution of the 1950s. It was at this time that the computationalist account of the mind was clearly articulated. This still dominant theory is predicated on an understanding of intelligence as an act of symbol manipulation. The presence of symbolic states is said to distinguish intelligent, or cognitive systems, from non-cognitive ones. These symbolic states are best understood as being contentful, that is, that they are states about features of the world or even abstract ideas. Those in favour of computationalism posit the role that content plays in cognition as a necessary component in explanations of intelligence. Computationalists were (and still are) motivated by the desire to offer a genuine alternative to behaviourism, which claims that the mental is nothing more than certain physical behaviours. Behaviourism seems unpalatable because without content, human behaviour appears purposeless, robotic and without genuine intelligence. The conceptual intermingling of content (aboutness) and intentionality (directedtowardness) that occurred during the cognitive revolution provided a basis for an understanding of intelligence as mediated cognition. While there are arguably subtle differences in the concepts of content and intentionality, for the purposes of this dissertation I will follow tradition by treating them as interchangeable