Original Intentionality and the Naturalist Challenge

In his insightful (and delightful) ‘The Intentionality All-Stars’, John Haugeland examines the problem of how there can be original intentionality within a naturalistic world-view. How, he asks, can any part of the natural world bear an intentional relation to any other part? ‘How can there be norms among the atoms in the void?’. I use ‘original intentionality’ here in Haugeland's sense: ‘original’ contrasts with ‘derived’, with the kind of intentional, semantic content that sentences and signs have. Since not all semantic content can be derived, the argument goes, there must be original intentionality. Put otherwise, original intentionality does not mean a particular kind of intentionality but rather ground-level, ‘original’ cases of intentionality that need to be understood in order for other cases of intentional content to be understood.

This is not to say that any particular item has its own intrinsic semantic content independent of all other semantic contents – that, I will show below, is an episode of the Myth of the semantic Given. Rather, it is to say that the entire relational system of semantic contents does not have its content conferred upon it by something else; intentional content is a holistic property of the system, not of any specific part of the system. Nor does “original” here mean ineffable, private, inexplicable, or unexplained.