The Hard Problem of Intentionality for Radical Enactive Cognition
Synthese April 21, 2026 Adrian Wieczorek
Radical Enactive Cognition attempts to explain basic intentionality—called Ur-intentionality—without mental representations, using only teleofunctional resources like information-as-covariance and natural selection. This paper argues that this approach fails. It identifies two problems: the Determinacy Problem, concerning how information picks out specific objects, and the Distality Problem, concerning how it relates to distant causes. Teleofunctionalism also risks reducing Ur-intentionality to stimulus-response behaviorism, which Radical Enactivism itself rejects as non-cognitive. The paper develops an enactive stimulus-response account showing teleofunctional mechanisms can explain adaptive behavior without intentionality. These issues pose a serious, overlooked challenge to non-representational, selectionist theories of cognition—the Hard Problem of Intentionality.