Intelligence involves intensionality: An explanatory issue for radical enactivism (again)

Intelligent behavior requires attributing representational contents to agents, including for basic actions like perceiving affordances. Radical enactivists claim intelligent behaviors can be explained without representational content, but this paper argues that intelligence depends on how purposes and environments are presented to the agent. Therefore, either affordance-related behaviors are not intelligent and can be explained without content, or they are intelligent but require content and modes of presentation. The argument challenges contentless accounts of cognition.

Study at a glance

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.