Intelligence involves intensionality: An explanatory issue for radical enactivism (again)
Synthese April 1, 2022 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1007/s11229-022-03527-y via Semantic Scholar
Summary
Intelligent behaviors require representing the purpose and environment in a specific way, not just reacting to stimuli. This challenges radical enactivism, which claims intelligence can be explained without representational content. Even basic actions like perceiving affordances depend on how the agent presents the situation, so they either are not truly intelligent or require representational content.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Intelligent behaviors, including affordance-related ones, require ascribing intensional contents and modes of presentation to the agent. |
Abstract
How can we explain the intelligence of behaviors? Radical enactivists maintain that intelligent behaviors can be explained without involving the attribution of representational contents. In this paper, I challenge this view by providing arguments showing that the intelligence of a behavior is reliant on ways of presenting the relative purpose and the environment in which that behavior is performed. This involves that a behavior is intelligent only if intesional contents are ascribed to the related agent. Importantly, this conclusion also concerns basic behaviors such as those related to the perception of affordances in the environment. Accordingly, either affordance-related behaviors are not instances of intelligent behaviors and can be accounted in a contentless way or affordance-related behaviors are intelligent, but cannot be accounted without involving contents and modes of presentation.