MEANING AND INTENTIONALITY

The approach taken to Intentionality in this book is resolutely naturalistic, I think of Intentional states, processes, and events as part of our biological life history in the way that digestion, growth, and the secretion of bile are part of our biological life history. From an evolutionary point of view, just as there is an order of priority in the development of other biological processes, so there is an order of priority in the development of Intentional phenomena. In this development, language and meaning, at least in the sense in which humans have language and meaning, comes very late. Many species other than humans have sensory perception and intentional action, and several species, certainly the primates, have beliefs, desires, and intentions, but very few species, perhaps only humans, have the peculiar but also biologically based form of Intentionality we associate with language and meaning.

Intentionality differs from other sorts of biological phenomena in that it has a logical structure, and just as there are evolutionary priorities, so there are logical priorities. A natural consequence of the biological approach advocated in this book is to regard meaning, in the sense in which speakers mean something by their utterances, as a special development of more primitive forms of Intentionality. So construed, speakers' meaning should be entirely definable in terms of more primitive forms of Intentionality. And the definition is nontrivial in this sense: we define speakers' meaning in terms of forms of Intentionality that are not intrinsically linguistic.