The Biosemiotic Glossary Project: Intentionality

Abstract

In 2014, Morten Tønnessen and the editors of Biosemiotics officially launched the Biosemiotic Glossary Project in the effort to: (1) solidify and detail established terminology being used in the field of Biosemiotics for the benefit of newcomers and outsiders; and to (2) by involving the entire biosemiotics community, to contribute innovatively in the theoretical development of biosemiotic theory and vocabulary via the discussions that result. Biosemiotics, in its concern with explaining the emergence of, and the relations between, both biological ‘end-directedness’ and semiotic ‘about-ness’, would seem a fertile field for re-conceptualizing the notion of intentionality. The present project is part of a systematic attempt to survey and to document the current thinking about this concept in our field.

Appendix

The Complete Set Of Survey Questions And Responses To The Biosemiotic Glossary Project’s Online Questionnaire About “Intentionality”

Please note: The following constitutes the complete set of online survey responses submitted to the questionnaire at the time of its compilation. Aside from anonymizing the respondents, no efforts have been made to alter, edit, or change the responses in any way. All misspellings, missing citations, etc. appear here exactly as submitted, as the purpose of the Appendix is merely to present the raw data and to allow interested readers to pursue more fully responses that we either abbreviated or failed to include in our article. – DF & AG

Part 1: Responses to Questions Regarding the Concept of “Intentionality”

Q1: For the purposes of compiling this Biosemiotic Glossary, we would like to ask you to share with us, in as succinct a manner as possible, your answer to the Central Question that this survey is attempting to gather information on, i.e.: How would you define the term ‘intentionality’ within a biosemiotic perspective?

RESPONSES TO QUESTION 1:

• 1. Teleonomic self-induction with direction to fit [Searle] (or engagement direction [teleonomic engagement, see Castro 2011]). Cognition process but non consciousness yet. May be propioception has possible. Embodiment making decision to his Umwelt. Also linked with Bourdieu’s “habitus” biologized by colonies as ants as Dictyostelium discoideum or any prokaryotes

• 2. Intentionality is the power of optionality, i.e., the power created by logical incompatibility.

• 3. As aboutness, i.e., the content of a sign as interpreted by a (part of a) biological system: Signs are about their objects for their interpretants within a biosystem as the interpreter.

• 4. Intentionality is the teleonomic use of symbolic representations of self and the other in the context of an (anticipated) future Umwelt.

• 5. It is an attempt to convey a concept of philosophy to biology, thus expanding its meaning previously restricted only to human beings, to every living being.

• 6. I don’t like definitions. Here follows a short explanation from my not yet published book: "The word intention comes from the Latin verb "intendere" which means something like "inclined toward” or “aiming at". It therefore seems reasonable to use the word intentional about all processes that occur "in order to” or “for the sake of" something else. Mental processes occur - like life processes in general - always "in order to” or “for the sake of" something and therefore they are, as I wrote, guided by an "intentional logic". The implicit purposes, hiding in the expressions "in order to” or “in preparation for", need not be specific. We are often in states in which we open ourselves to impressions without searching for anything in particular, but even then a deeper biological "in order to” is operative at the basic biological level of our body. Bodies are inherently semiotic and intentional entities.

• 7. Intentionality is a semiotically acquired capacity to deal with causality. It entails learning how to distinguish object-oriented ontology from subjective perceived causation and, on the subject’s behalf, to confer a goal-directed dynamics to things or events in the attempt of satisfying its constitutive incompleteness. The resulting relationship may eventually lead to the development of a proper awareness of how inner and external environments are causally constrained by their physicality.

• 8. I don’t have a ‘biosemiotic perspective’ (thank God!) Its too damn limitiing

• 9. Intentionality of a sign is its object (Peircean framework). In general, intentionality is the scope of sign objects under some interpretation. It is _not_ the scope of the interpretation (or interpretant of the sign or collection of signs involved). I believe this is compatible with Husserlian usage.

• 10. A complex system of habits, arranged along three broadly Peircean levels -- emotions, actions and thought --, each resting on the other and generally working in synergy but also contradicting each other during moments in which change is inevitable and catastrophe is imminent. Resolving the contradiction brings the living system to a new stage, initially not necessarily better or worse than the previous, but that through lived experience can be finally judged as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ by an observer.

• 11. The aboutness of meaningful information as managed by biological entities.

• 12. interaction toward a goal

• 13. the ‘aboutness’ or ‘directedness’ that characterises the experience or behaviour of all living things. It can operate pre-reflectively as exemplified in Uexkull’s description of the Umwelt; cannot be reduced to a dyadic relation. Must be seen as biologically-based - i.e., embodied intentionality (Husserl; Merleau-Ponty)

• 14. Intentionality, within a biosemiotic perspective, refers to the ends-directed behavior of a living system.

• 15. An organism’s physical (i.e. ‘cognitive’ at its broadest) sense of ‘aboutness’.

• 16. The intentionality of a communication is what it is about, its message. The problematic is whether or not agency is involved; and the degree of consciousness of agents.

• 17. the fact of and the particular direction expressed by a meaningful action. Actually, it depends on aspects, environs, context

• 18. Intentionality is goal-directedness.

• 19. The capacity of a certain class of living organisms to be directed towards worldly objects on the basis of unreflective embodied know-how.

• 20. Biologically, ‘intentionality’ means, to me a non-conscious informational networking with other biological informational systems, to exchange data and to develop potential solutions to both regular and novel environmental realities.

• 21. Everything related to the perception, action, or cognition for every organism need to have a content, which is not that thing in itself: percepts usually are not about perception, but the thing perceived, thoughts are not about thoughts in themselves but what is being though, etc.

• 22. intentionality expresses the gist or consensus of the combined inherited and acquired interpretants in use by a system of interpretance.

• 23. Any act, action, or inter-action, initiated by a living organism or plant that furthers their contextual adaptive advantage.

• 24. Intentionality is the ability of living organisms to form representations of objects and their properties and to act in respect to anticipated changes, where anticipation is either mental or evolutionary encoded

• 25. The relationship between and within organisms which fulfils, in one way or another, the agentive action of one or both entities in the relationship.

Q2: The above is the Official Query, but we would also love to learn and to compile your thoughts on the following three related questions, should you choose to address them. How do you see the relation(s) between intentionality in the human phenomenological sense (i.e., the ‘content’ of thought or mental ‘about-ness’) and intentionality in the broader biological and/or ecological sense of ‘deliberate purposefulness’, ‘end-directedness’ or ‘aiming toward some particular goal or end’or ‘being towards another’?

• 1. There is a turning point in both intentionalities: the start, the ignition. The question is about the properties (neural or biochemical foundations) that start the making decision and the possibilities of making senses. The word “Intention” proceed of the Latin root “intendere” (in-tendere) or “tendency to”. While neural aspect, the emergence of the mental appears, in biology (especially in unicellular organisms) becomes complex thinking emerging from the mental, and seek in the material ignitions (eg in enzymes and their ability to discriminate signals of noise).

• 2. These are different forms of intentionality as optionality, i.e. the particular cases (and different levels) of the more general power.

• 3. There are levels of intentionality, just as there are levels of sign action. Human intentionality is more complex but includes and presupposes more basic levels of intentionality.

• 4. In living being, the openness toward future occurs in different degrees of consciousness. It starts from the blind “waiting for something” of the tick described by von Uexkuell, it goes through the active pursuit of the prey by the animal with exploratory behavior (to which already Aristotle attributed imagination, memory and, perhaps, anticipation of the future), and it arrives to the semiotic use of stimuli in human consciousness, where for the first time an image (or a word...) can stand for an absent entity, and therefore even for a future event.

• 5. I think it’s welcome every attempt to make more general a concept already established. This is how some concepts (eg: information, entropy, energy) pierced rigid disciplinary boundaries.

• 6. The Brentano-Husserl kind of phenomenology never transcends dualism, but stays firmly inside it. Therefore their conceptions in general, and concerning intentionality in particular are doomed to mislead us.

• 7. To justify intentionality exclusively in terms of thought contents or mental aboutness entails mis-acknowledging the selective history that has brought life to develop individualities endowed with the capacity (1) to choose between non-equivalent alternatives and (2) to learn from the eventual asymmetries of their anticipated effects. On the contrary, to see intentionality in the broader biological sense entails accounting for the constraints that life has encountered in developing these capacities.

• 8. Answers to this were detailed in y previous responses. But few people’s thoughts are adequately end directed and too many end in depression, drunkenness of other iniquity.

• 9. I see biosemiotic intentionality much as I do human intentionality: the organism uses signs to represent what it takes to be signified. This interpreted in terms of survival of the organism or its lineage, which gives it motive to act for this end if the sign is there.

• 10. Human intentionality, if reduced to the content of thought, rests on the broader biological intentionality. Sometime the two systems have autonomous existence, i.e. one expressed intentionality with words and perhaps actions but unreflectively established emotions travel in an opposite direction. Control is negotiated between the two systems, giving us the impression that intentionality rests with thought alone. But when basic needs are frustrated I would imagine the biological/emotional intentionality takes over. Hence the emergence of acute psychosomatic distress.

• 11. Intentionality in the human phenomenological sense uses performances that animals do not possess like self-consciousness, language or free will. A broader biological perspective should consider taking basic life as a starting point and introduce an evolutionary thread leading to humans. This introduces the notion of bio-intentionality (http://philpapers.org/rec/MENBAM-2)

• 12. Same thing. If not, the physics or definitions are wrong.

• 13. the 2 are united in respect of ‘pre-reflective’ intentionality or ‘operative intentionality’ (Merleau-Ponty). ‘deliberate purposefulness’ is only one form and the least interesting.

• 14. We assume that, in the human phenomenological context, that we have some access to “inner” intentionality - the rational direction of thought into action. I think my actions intentional because I (think I) can *will* action. I assume (arguing from analogy) that other human beings can likewise will action. And, by a series of weaker analogical arguments, I extend this assumption to all and only living systems. Non-living systems - like thermostats - can direct action but the biosemiotician is committed to claiming that intention is lacking in such systems. Ignoring the old philosophical problem of other minds, the biosemiotician believes that all and only living systems share the same type (albeit to differing degrees) of intentionality as human individuals, whereas non-living systems are intentional only in that end-directed broader sense of the term.

• 15. All are semiotic forms of responsiveness, but only humans and possibly some other animals (including birds) seems to experience the abstraction of knowing that they know. A human driving a car whilst thinking about something else is probably a good example of this kind of habit-driven purposiveness.

• 16. If agency is involved, then the first sense must also include the second sense.

• 17. The general concept: Anticipatory Systems. (R.Rosen). Biosemiotics: the patterns expressing the possible ‘meaning’. Evolutional Biology: Survival, development’ actually transferred to the situation. .

• 18. The phenomenological sense of the term, as I understand it (e.g., Brentano), is a postulate, whereas the biological sense of the term is publicly observable, and this is true irrespective of the theoretical stance of the observer. Objectively, intentionality is a configuration in time and space.

• 19. All intentionality is first and foremost embodied intentionality. I believe that human “mental content” can and should be explained similarly.

• 20. Biological intentionality does not require consciousness; that is, the biological Mind [as outlined by Peirce, eg, CP 4.551] is not equivalent to a conscious agenda. The agenda is survival, via a dynamic, constant networking of informational exchanges among organisms within a shared ecological domain. These exchanges are not necessarily driven by individual will, but by the community-of-individuals within the domain.

• 21. The content of intentionality is not teleological in the sense of purpose or end goal. This goes for all living organisms.

• 22. In human phenomenology intentionality expresses personality. In the broader sense this narrows the number of possible ‘ends’ a system might promote

• 23. Human intentionality is by definition mental, of the “mind,” composed of both conscious thoughts as well as unconscious drive derivatives: broader biological intentionality is more instinctual.

• 24. Human intentionality is mostly mental and individual. We need to include evolutionary intentionality which is lineage-specific (Hoffmeyer) (2) Intentionality is not equivalent to semiosis. It is a specific kind of semiosis which is likely not present in bacteria. However bacteria have “normativity” which includes evolutionary-encoded preferences in actions and signal-processing (including context-dependent semiosis).

• 25. In short, intentionality in anthroposemiosis is overplayed. The intentionality of the broader biological/ecological sphere sheds more light on the anthroposemiotic sphere than customary conceptions of the goal-directed human phenomenon.

Q3: In what way do you think that traditional or previous understandings of the notion of ‘intentionality’ may be incomplete or misleading? (NB: “Previous understandings” here can refer to the ways in which the term is conceptualized in common parlance, or in scientific discourse, or in philosophy/phenomenology, or across all three – so please remember to specify in your reply which of these domains that you are referring to.)

• 1. There is a tendency to believe that for begin an action is necessary to create in a workspace of our mind the image that indicate the signals that belong to actions or pre-actions. If you want to move the right hand you create a signal (linguistical or picture) for prepare the action in nanoseconds. Is like the Matrix discourse of Morpheo with Neo at the virtual space to fight... You don’t thinking that you hit to me, punch me.

• 2. Quite often, the previous ones were more superficial.

• 3. In common parlance it is often seen in a too narrow human context, the more basic biosemiotic context is then excluded.

• 4. The main limitation of the common-sense concept of intentionality is that it refers to individual acts of planning; instead, a properly philosophical concept of intentionality should refer to the overall structure of the human being, who is structurally open to the future and “forced” to take in account both the data coming from sense-perception and the (anticipated) future events.

• 5. It is difficult for a non specialist to answer this question.

• 6. Common parlance – As conceptualized in common parlance, intentionality may be understood as equivalent to the will of acting or doing something irrespective of the physical and social conditions that allow it to be expressed Scientific discourse – In scientific terms, intentionality may be reduced to the activity of neuronal correlates that allow it to be expressed. As a result, the mind-body duality is eventually reduced to an identity monism whereby mental states are supposed to correspond or simply be equivalent to kinds of brain states. Phenomenology – The phenomenological conception of intentionality is based on a first person knowledge of experience and is therefore independent of any relation with the external world. It follows that the intentionality of an act does not depend on the nature of the object represented, but on the way it is conceived.

• 7. Intention is intention period. Most people only do things with some goal in mind. Why muddy the waters?

• 8. t has nothing to do with intentions in the usual sense. It is distinct from intension in that, though it has to do with the scope of meanings, it always determines (Peircean sense) a particular sign, not some class, especially not a class of signs, like intensions do.

• 9. In common parlance ‘intentionality’ is seen as wholly conscious, dictated by willpower, arranged along thought alone, hence the fundamentally moral labels of effective (positive) or manipulative (negative) get attached to it.

• 10. The traditional philosophical understanding of intentionality is incomplete as it focuses on human mind and does not explicitly consider basic life.

• 11. Mysticism in believing there is a diff, and claiming human uniqueness.

• 12. In philosophy, as the mark of the ‘mental’ (Brentano) - may introduce unwanted Cartesianism. 2. may wrongly be confined to ‘consciousness’ thereby ruling out ‘embodied’ intentionality 3. in analytic philosophy can sometimes be reduced to a dyadic (causal) relation.

• 13. Traditional understandings of intentionality might be incomplete or misleading in at least two ways. First, they might assume that all and only human beings are intentional. This might be incorrect either because not all human beings are intentional or because not only human beings are intentional. Second, they might assume that the “right kind of intention is necessarily linked something internal - the equivalent of the will. This might be incorrect because, perhaps, any ends-directed system - from thermostats to trees to human beings - is intentional in the same way, and only differs in degrees of possible responses.

• 14. More traditional philosophical uses of ‘intentionality’ do not seem to allow that knowing is first in the body and its relation to the umwelt and to forms of memory (habit).

• 15. Communication implies bi-directionality between organism and environment; both have agencies. The major part of communication is non-conscious.

• 16. no comment

• 17. In cognitive science, there is a dominant psychological process model that holds intentional and epistemic states to be causal in the behaviour of organisms. I think that there are two recent findings that significantly challenge the mental causation model in cognitive science: Libet’s (e.g., 1985) discovery that conscious awareness of intention to act follows efferent motor signaling and Nisbett’s and Wilson’s (1977) demonstration that people make up stories about why they act in the way that they do, under controlled experimental conditions. These findings open the door to serious contemplation of the axiom that “intentions” are frequent concomitants of actions, at least in our species, but not causal in behaviour.

• 18. I find the idea that intentionality necessarily involves “mental representations”, a view commonly held in philosophy and cognitive science (maybe even biosemiotics), very unhelpful.

• 19. Previous understandings operate within the human linguistic and rational domain of consciousness. This ignores the very real agendas of survival within the biological realm, where information exchange takes place without linguistic or conscious symbols.

• 20. Intentionality should not be confused linguistically with “to intend to”, “intention”. Otherwise we are making philosophy out of semantics. The similar roots of the words do not lend insight into the content of the concepts.

• 21. no comment

• 22. Not enough emphasis on the unconscious primitive and drive/emotional related motives .

• 23. See above. They are prone to all the exaggerations leaning towards ideas of unitary (Cartesian and rational) consciousness.

Q4: What do you think that the biosemiotic definition that you have provided as your response to Question 1 adds to the traditional definitions that you noted above in Question 3?

• 1. Not only intentionality in animals with nervous system. There is intentionality in start of chemotaxis or end of starvation. Early discrimination of environment’s noise there are a switch turn. In this moment there are no clear what do it this turning. Are there advance discrimination? Is a chemical memory the answer to turn on?

• 2. It adds understanding of the source of intentionality, its mechanism.

• 3. It has provided an evolutionary dimension and a more universal conceptualization of intentionality within a general semiotics.

• 4. My definition adds to the traditional notion of intentionality the relevance of the human symbolic consciousness, that can expand the perceptual environment through complex concepts (such as “the future”, “the self”, our future actions and their consequences, our death and the world after our death, etcetera). This expansion creates around human animals a much wider field of intentionality, in which all the elements of the previous environment, and especially the conspecifics, take on a different meaning.

• 5. Life as an evolutionary phenomenon. It opens a way for transcending the dualism implicit in both science and phenomenology - in fact the dualism, where science took res extends and phenomenology took res cogitates, makes science and phenomenology a set of Siamese twins.

• 6. It emphasizes intentionality as a relational property, i.e. as the agent’s capacity to elaborate a weltanschauung or “world view” in relation to the perception of its own needs and the nature of the cognitive tools at its disposal.

• 7. Nothing

• 8. My answer to 3 should distinguish intentionality from intentions and related ideas, and also from the notion in logic of intension. Both are required by the intention being the object of a sign. A particular, and not necessarily deliberate. It just is when there is a sign.

• 9. Just that intentionality has a strong unconscious, uncontrollable, unreflective component, that is most evident when the living system comes across a historical or evolutionary contradiction.

• 10. The biosemiotic definition that has been provided for intentionality introduces an evolutionary perspective that allows the usage of intentionality for animals and for humans.

• 11. Rationality.

• 12. shifts intentionality from mind/consciousness (problematic notions because of Cartesianism) to (non-reductionist) biological processes thereby allowing us to generalise it to all living things

• 13. Yes, by differently constraining the scope of intention to all and only living systems.

• 14. It emphasises relationality as fundamental to the ontology of the living, and also emphasises a non-dualistic (non-Cartesian) ontology.

• 15. The distinction between content and agency; multiple agencies; and levels of consciousness.

• 16. as any concept in biosemiotics it should ideally be a defined subtype of the general concept related to anticipatory Life systems. To clarify not only the concept, but likewise the context it is used in.

• 17. I think that the definition I provided in Question 3 is less theory-laden than the traditional definition cognitive science--one does not have to believe that “minds” have influence on bodies to measure intentional behaviour. Another advantage is that the definition leaves open the systemic level at which one is investigating--rather being limited to the subset of organisms with brains, intentionality can be explored at all levels from cells to ecosystems; i.e., in the sense that G. Bateson (1972) posited that mental systems exist in neural and non-neural substrates.

• 18. It irradiates the need to posit mental representations as a constitutive component of intentionality.

• 19. It doesn’t add to the traditional definition of intentionality which is based within the human mind. It suggests a non-human Mind that organizes matter within the biological and physico-chemical realm.

• 20. Traditionally the capacity for intentionality is highly limited, usually by language or reason or somesuch. The “aboutness” of nearly any act of cognition applies to the overwhelming number of species. Biosemiotics is about the more-than-human. Intentionality exists far, far beyond the confines of the human species.

• 21. It specifies for biosemiotics the locus of intentional bias

• 22. It specifically includes the biological, drive derivative underlay.

• 23. It’s expressed with a view to neutrality, is applicable across different realms of life and is not based upon preconceptions regarding goals.

Q5: If you wish, please provide a quote and citation, whether of your own or of another author, that you feel well reflects a viable biosemiotic understanding of the concept of “intentionality.”

• 1. “To say that living creatures harbor intentions is tantamount to saying that they can differentiate between phenomena in their surroundings and react to them selectively, as though some were better than others. Even an amoeba is capable of choosing to move in one direction rather than another. It will, for example, generally gravitate toward the richest source of nourishment. And although there is a purely practical, biochemical, explanation for this faculty the true explanation must perforce be of a historical nature, since it has to be able to account for how, in evolutionary terms, such a faculty has originated.” (...) "The advantages of being in possession of a sophisticated umwelt are many and various. The most important of these is perhaps anticipation, the possibility that the umwelt offers the organism of predicting events which it can then defend itself against or make use of in some other way." Hoffmeyer (1996) Signs of Meaning in the Universe. pp. 47–48, 58–59.

• 2. I’ll try to find it and send later

• 3. This qoute should be seen as synechdochic (pointing to Hoffmeyer’s whole paper): "this triadic notion of semiosis (...) entails intentionality since to the interpreter (the system in which the interpretant is formed) the sign obviously is “about” something, and on the other hand Peirce did not conceive of the interpreter as being necessarily a human person”, p. 104 in “The Natural History of Intentionality. A Biosemiotic Approach”, in T. Schilhab et al. (eds.), The Symbolic Species Evolved, Biosemiotics 6, Springer 2012.

• 4. " With symbolic forms, a conduct appears which expresses the stimulus for itself, which is open to truth and to the proper value of things, which tends to the adequation of the signifying and signified, of the intention and that which it intends. Here behavior no longer has only one signification, it is itself signification. " M. Merleau-Ponty, The Structures of Behaviour, Beacon Press, Merleau-Ponty 1963, p. 122

• 5. Shared or collective intentionality is the ability and motivation to engage with others in collaborative, co-operative activities with joint goals and intentions (Tomasello et al. 2005).

• 6. I could not tell / Whether the things did there / Themselves appear, / Which in my spirit truly seemed to dwell,/ Or whether my conforming Mind / Were not alone even all that shined. THOMAS TRAHERNE ‘My Spirit’

• 7. I think that Fred Dretske’s “digital” sense of information, given counterfactual relevance through causality, in Knowledge and the Flow of Information, is very close, but too subtle to put into a single quote. His version is not considered semiotically, however.

• 8. ‘the philosophical notion of intentionality is closely related to the notion of meaning’ (T. Crane)

• 9. It from Bit. Object from Distinction.

• 10. I like Hoffmeyer’s (Peircean-inspired) suggestion of characterising intentionality as semiosis (The Natural History of Intentionality: A Biosemiotic Approach T. Schilhab et al. (eds.), The Symbolic Species Evolved, Biosemiotics 6, 97. 2012 pp. 97–116)

• 11. On the intentionality of signs: “This is not a ‘substitution theory’ of signs, according to which a sign takes the place of its object. Not at all! For the noise is interpreted by the deer’s behavior as a sign of danger just because that behavior is not a flight from the noise which evoked it but is a flight from a supposed predator... Just because the action, B, is elicited by stimulus A, but is directed toward goal C, it interprets A as signifying an object, O, which, if it obtains, would make B a means for achieving C. And herein we find also an account of the intentionality of the sign B. For this object, O, need not obtain... The crash that startled the deer might not have been caused by a predator... Since we are able to explain in this way how something can be a sign of what does not exist, it follows that we have accounted for the intentionality of signs.” (Tom Short 1981: 208) And about the understanding others as intentional: “The fact that we might be unable, in practice, to make opaque attributions of belief to, for example, Brenin does not mean that we are unable to develop the expertise necessary to do so. Presumably such expertise would require a detailed investigation of the structure and evolutionary history of that part of Brenin’s brain responsible for representing the world coupled with a detailed ethological investigation of the ways in which Brenin and other dogs behave with respect to trees. But there is no evidence to suggest that such studies, or the knowledge that results from them, is beyond our grasp.” (Mark Rowlands 1998 177)

• 12. The ego is not master in its own house. Sigmund Freud

• 13. Robert Rosen: Anticipatory Systems. Recently: Andreas Wagner: The Arrival of the Fittest. Penguin 2015

• 14. CP4.551. "Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals and through the purely physical world....Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there".

• 15. The dilemma of Umwelt for traditional philosophy is well expressed by this quote from Francis Wolff, “Dire le monde” (the quote is about humans, but in the end it’s about intentionality more generally): "Everything is inside because in order to think anything whatsoever, it is necessary to 'be able to be conscious of it', it is necessary to say it, and so we are locked up in language or in consciousness without being able to get out. In this sense, they have no outside. But in another sense, they are entirely turned towards the outside; they are the world's window: for to be conscious is always to be conscious of something, to speak is necessarily to speak about something. To be conscious of the tree is to be conscious of the tree itself, and not the idea of the tree; to speak about the tree is not just to utter a word but to speak about the thing. Consequently, consciousness and language enclose the world within themselves only insofar as, conversely, they are entirely contained by it. We are in consciousness or language as in a transparent cage. Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out."

• 16. I pass

• 17. Deacon 2012: "To make sense of conscious intentionality, and ultimately subjective sentience, we need to look beyond the neuronal details to explore the special forms of teleodynamic constraints they embody and perpetuate. I believe that only by working from the bottom up, tracing the ascent from thermodynamics to morphodynamics to teleo- dynamics and their recapitulation in the dynamics of brain function, will we be able to explain the place of our subjective experience in this otherwise largely insentient universe."

Part 2: Responses to Questions Regarding the Concept of “Intentionality”

In this part of the survey, respondents were asked:

For each quote below, please indicate how suitable you find the use of the word “intentionality” for capturing or advancing a biosemiotic understanding of the term, by selecting one of the four response choices below:

• I find the above quote perfectly suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term

• I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor changes I would make to it

• I find the above quote somewhat suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, but there are some major changes I would make to it

• I find the above quote not at all suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term

Q1: “Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity... In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied; in love, loved; in hate, hated; in desire, desired and so on. This intentional inexistence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.” — Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. London: Routledge. 1874/1995:88–89.

RESPONSES TO QUOTE 1:

I find the above quote perfectly suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	0.00% 0
I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor changes I would make to it	13.64% 3
I find the above quote somewhat suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, but there are some major changes I would make to it	50.00% 11
I find the above quote not at all suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	36.36% 8
Total	22

COMMENTS TO QUOTE 1:

• 1. Assuming that ‘mental’ is a term used as co-extentional to semiosic, this is perfect. ‘Intentional inexistence’ can be interpreted as T. Deacon’s ‘absence’ or ‘incompleteness’.

• 2. The idealistic and cartesian nature of the presupposed metaphysics makes the quote only suitable for a historical intoduction to the biosemiotic conception.

• 3. The above quote should take in account the possibility of a behavioral intentionality, i.e., a kind of intentionality where the action is directed toward an object even without a full awareness of it by the living subject.

• 4. The idea of “intentional inexistent” hits the core quite well as a way to explain mental intentionality. But seen in an evolutionary perspective one will have to ask how the mental is related to animal intentionality. The term “intentionality” itself is derived from latin “intendere” which means something like “inclined toward” or “aiming at”. There is no reason to assume that only animals with a distinct mental capacity (probably mostly birds and mammals) are “inclined toward” certain activities. On the contrary living beings in general are intentional beings in this sense. Semiosic activity without even the faintest track of intentionality is simply absurd. Why interpret anything if not “in order to” or “for the sake of” something - which of course is the core of intentionality?

• 5. It does not say anything as to how reference to a content was acquired. To know something (to cognize it) is equivalent to recognize it in a perceptual field. A mental object is not a given, but a context dependent acquisition, where context is to be defined in a relational mode.

• 6. Most people have thoughts and dreams that are entirely UNINTENTIONAL (in the common sense meaning of the word. Only those whose minds are pure enough, in the sense of free of stress and sanskaras, have thoughts that are only INTENDED thoughts. Besides, for the enlightened, thoughts are God-given, and thought they provide direction to action, their INTENTIONALITY is void.

• 7. Obviously, it is biased towards the mental. His “direction toward an object” comes close to be neutral enough, however.

• 8. A biosemiotic usage of intentionality should avoid using human specificities (love, desire, ...) but should rather start with basic life and explicit a possible evolutionary background leading to humans. Also, the sentence ‘which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing’ looks as uncorrect for a biosemiotic usage (the sight of a cat means ‘danger’ for a mouse)

• 9. Too human-centred; vulnerable to a Cartesian interpretation. However, OK if one accepts a Peircean notion of key terms like ‘mind’, ‘inexistence’

• 10. This statement tends to define intentionality in anthroposemiotic circumstances. The statement does make sure that intentionality is a mental phenomenon that is not limited to purposive control, though intentionality ‘contains an object’ is misleading.. It would have been better to state, more simply as Korzybski once did that, ‘the map is not the territory’ but that this involves many conditions in drawing the map, including rules and habits about mapping

• 11. Following Brentano (or Deely) in drawing on Scholastic and Medieval views on intentions propels the anthropocentric idiom and denies the broader perspective many biosemioticians take on intention in the natural world.

• 12. Brentano addresses the potential for objectivity that inheres in a proposition whose f(unction) cannot exist alone. But “mental phenomena” entail an organism whose characteristics will set the parameters on what are “mental phenomena”. This definition is focused on fully conscious man, he who presents, judges, loves, hates, desires---as if that exists and as if nothing else does. So, interesting in the history of the term but too limited for biosemiotics.

• 13. Distinguish: Intentionality as an ‘inexistant’ quality of (the perception) of an objects probable meanings and Intentionality of the actor in an actual situation focused on a target The term ‘mental Phenomena’ is very broad here, teh definition rather confined

• 14. This definition in effect reduces the directed-ness relation (that between the agent and environment) to an internal “mental object” (that between an agent and a “mental representation”). It takes the organisms out of the world and encases it within its own “internal” realm.

• 15. It requires that there be a conscious Agent, focused on a particular Object. Biosemiotic intentionality, in my view, denies both requirements. Instead, biosemiotic intentionality is focused on information-gathering within a communal network - a network made up of multiple, diverse biological organisms. This is not a conscious action but it is certainly a MENTAL action - and permits ‘surprises’ and novel experiences - where the biological organism must develop some kind of pragmatic response to these surprises/novel experiences and adapt.

• 16. It is an example of old-school dualism, in that the world is neatly divisible into two: the mental and the physical. And the two are depicted as exclusive. Intentional content is there in the quote, which is fine, but biosemiotics is not about seventeenth century metaphysics.

• 17. There is the classic bifurcation and polarization of human vs natural phenomena.. the quote limits the very conceptual dimension of “intentionality” that is most valuable to an inclusive, expanded biosemiotic definition of the concept..

• 18. The term “inexistence” is new to me, but I can understand its potential value. This definition, however, does not include what Hoffmeyer called “evolutionary intentionality”, and this is the main weakness.

QUOTE 2: “Above all, intentionality is property of thought, a prerogative of its immateriality, whereby being in itself, posited ‘outside it’ – i.e., being which is fully independent of the act of thought – becomes a thing existing within it, set up for it and integrated into its own act through which, from that moment, they both exist in thought with a single, self-same suprasubjective existence.” – Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge. New York: Scribner’s. 1959:103.

RESPONSES TO QUOTE 2:

I find the above quote perfectly suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	0.00% 0
I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor changes I would make to it	4.55% 1
I find the above quote somewhat suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, but there are some major changes I would make to it	45.45% 10
I find the above quote not at all suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	50.00% 11
Total	22

COMMENTS TO QUOTE 2:

• 1. Too narrow, limited to ‘thought’.

• 2. It may be used for a translation exercise into a biosemiotic point.

• 3. I think that traditional traits such as immateriality and suprasubjectivity, attributed to thought, may affect the possibility to see intentionality as a natural cognitive faculty and to attribute it, perhaps in a different form, even to non-human animals.

• 4. Same as above

• 5. It misses to convey the idea that, when fully embodied, intentionality is no longer a thought in itself but a way of acting made more or less automatic by progressive habituation (see for instance the concept of extended mind).

• 6. Some (enlightened) people’s thoughts come from above and in that sense are ‘suprasubjective’. Most people’s don’t and it would be idiocy to think so. What about ISIS leader Abu-Bakr Baghdadi? His thoughts, like Hitler’s and Stalin’s come from the depths of iniquity and are infra-subjective. I do find this discussion totally naive.

• 7. “immateriality” makes this nonsense to me.

• 8. The suggestion of ‘immateriality’ seems to conflict with the idea of a naturalised account of intentionality - which is what biosemiotics needs

• 9. Confusion piled on confusion. This quote should lead to a discussion about levels in ‘intentionality’ and also include whether intentionality is only a property of the act of thought. Illusions, for example, play upon intentional misperception, as does confidence trickstering play upon miscommunication. But intentionality as having ‘self-same suprasubjective existence’ is gobleydook.

• 10. Maritain’s verbosity is not helpful. “Suprasubjective” is a neologism in this context (outside of the context of Maritain’s work) and does not help us clearly or coherently define intention.

• 11. I agree that intentionality is a property of thought, perhaps independent of thinking (“act of thought”) per se. Not clear what “supra subjective existence” means unless it means ‘does not require a thinker’. Nevertheless, this definition seems neither large enough nor nuanced enough to encompass all a biosemiotic understanding of the term would require.

• 12. too complex without an introduction - and a little complicated- Evaluation needs the context of the book quoted

• 13. Same as my previous comments.

• 14. Since I define ‘Mind’ and ‘Thought’ as properties of the biological realm and not simply of human consciousness, then, I can see Maritian’s point, which is that the thought-exchange beween self and other[s] develops a ‘suprasubjective existence. This can lead to adaptive qualities being developed...which affect both self and other.

• 15. As long as “being in itself” is a category for philosophy, this quote is actually very good. If the “normal” state of living beings is being "fully independent of the act of thought", this quote would describe the appearance of intentionality on the scene very well. But, to quote the classics, it isn’t, so it isn’t.

• 16. This definition seems too restrictive (property of thought). I do not understand in what sense "being which is fully independent of the act of thought".

QUOTE 3: “The usual conception of intentionality…misconstrues the structure of the "self-directedness-towards" [….] An ego or subject is supposed, to whose so-called sphere, “intentional experiences” are then supposed to belong…. [However], the mode of being of our own self, the Dasein, is essentially such that this being, so far as it is, is always already dwelling with the extant. The idea of a subject which has “intentional experiences” merely inside its own sphere and is not yet outside it, but encapsulated within itself, is an absurdity.” – Martin Heidegger. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1927/1982: 63–64.

RESPONSES TO QUOTE 3:

I find the above quote perfectly suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	0.00% 0
I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor changes I would make to it	40.91% 9
I find the above quote somewhat suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, but there are some major changes I would make to it	40.91% 9
I find the above quote not at all suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	18.18% 4
Total	22

COMMENTS TO QUOTE 3:

• 1. The quote is ok, but it would require a comment that Heidegger’s common usage of Dasein limits it with humans. However, in Heidegger’s early work the animal Dasein was allowed (e.g., see Bailey, Christiane 2011, The Genesis of Existentials in Animal Life: Heidegger’s Appropriation of Aristotle’s Ontology of Life. Heidegger Circle Proceedings 1(1):199–212.

• 2. Heidegger’s limit is that his idea of intentionality is valid only for the Dasein, i.e. for human beings, and excludes non-human animals.

• 3. As I understand it, to say that dasein is always dwelling with the extant implies that the structure of the intentional “self-directedness” is given once for all, for it is already in the world and qualified as a prior expressed attitude. In my mind it does not tell how dasein has become what it is and how it has developed by relating with the world.

• 4. Heidegger expresses the view of an enlightened being, whose actions have nothing to do with his small self, and are performed in service to the divine in a suprasubjective was posited in the previous point. But this applies only in rarified cases. Most people take the ‘fruits of their actions’ for themselves and suffer the (karmic) consequences. So Heidegger’s point does NOT apply to most of the population, MOST of human experience.

• 5. I would reference what I have called the autonomy instead of the self for the biosemiotic case. Otherwise, and that is a big “otherwise”, the quote is correct for biosemiotics.

• 6. The Heidegger ‘Dasein’ needs a consciousness of being in the world, a self-consciousness that basic life does not possess.

• 7. Likely to be too ‘existential’, too human-centred for biosemiotics

• 8. The ontological underpinnings of this sort of statement have bedevilled biosemiotics from its outset.In Peirce, intentionality is linked with anticipation, which is a much improved ontological statement but - and this is quandary - Peirce, lacks appropriate pragmatics enabling discussion on behaviour and learning = both of which should be a minimal condition of biosemiotic research. Morris tried to make up for this only to be denied more than three times by the Peircians..

• 9. Heidegger’s phenomenological context aligns with Uexkull’s own and fits the biosemiotic context well. The same problem arises as with the other quotes, however; namely, that we’re pulling quotes out of the context of the author’s development of them and, in so doing, losing some of their coherence.

• 10. Heidegger is very good at directing attention to the absurdity of Being (Dasein) as separate from the world---e.g., apart from, prior or “supra”. He also speaks to the traps of language (e.g., propositions) that introduce agency/subject vs. object, before & after (e.g., the linearity of syntax) vs. the “always already”. The downside: Focusing in on phenomena so intently, while trying to eschew abstract terminology, forces Heidegger to twist everyday vocabulary (e.g., being, thrownness, always already) so that it’s hard to agree on what he’s saying and, paradoxically, it’s a struggle to apply his ideas to actual phenomena like people or ravens or viruses---individuals that develop/evolve over time.

• 11. again: to little context, the basic models behind. One had to read ‘Sein und Zeit’ once more. Notable: intentionality is part of the dialogue between the ego and the environment, the actual situation. See

• 12. For Heidegger, only Dasein is intentionally directed - always already - the world. But only human beings are said to be Dasein, other living organisms are mere mechanical puppets for Heidegger. Heidegger’s concept of intentionality, although certainly on the right track, is far too narrow in scope and thus needs to be broadened so as to make room for other living organisms.

• 13. The focus on a network, an exchange of ‘experiences’ as being actually, The Experience, works for a biosemiotic analytic frame.

• 14. Non-academic comment: I dislike Heidegger, but this particular quote is spot on. The idea that intentionality is something that a ready-made subject *does* after already being a fully formed subject is entirely non-biosemiotic, non-uexküllian.

• 15. to me-incomprehensible!! intention by definition is goal oriented and context or environment specific-- it has o be an ecologically embedded concept.

• 16. Many aspects of this approach are reasonable, however it misses “evolutionary intentionality”

QUOTE 4: The skin has both an inner side and an outer side, and an asymmetry is therefore established by the skin between that which is inside and that which is outside. The ‘self’ exists only in so far as that which is inside contains an intentionality toward, or reference to, that which is outside – an aboutness, as it is often called. But this outward reference rests upon a corresponding inward reference, such that one could say: other-reference presupposes self-reference.– Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics. An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs. Chicago: Scranton. 2008:174.

RESPONSES TO QUOTE 4:

I find the above quote perfectly suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	21.74% 5
I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor changes I would make to it	56.52% 13
I find the above quote somewhat suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, but there are some major changes I would make to it	13.04% 3
I find the above quote not at all suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	8.70% 2
Total	23

COMMENTS TO QUOTE 4:

• 1. Self requires ‘other’, the ‘other’ not always being ‘outside’. Otherwise perfect.

• 2. but of course more needs to be said - and a further interpretation given

• 3. The skin, or more generally a borderline, between the inside and the outside of a living whole is a precondition for the one to represent the other, but it is not the reason for the former to have an intentionality toward. Something more may be needed and this something may be identified with the perception of the proper incompleteness such as to look outside for its satisfaction.

• 4. The ‘Self’ exists in its own right, and is the ultimate referent to which all experience is cognized and remembered, whether sensory, mental or affective. The little ego, to which most people refer as ‘self’ is built out of our experience and shields unelightened awareness from its true inner nature - beyond all space-time limitations.

• 5. I don’t see why the skin is the dividing line. Otherwise, same response as for the Heidegger quote.

• 6. The last sentence may not fit with a biosemiotics background. ‘References’ call for representations and the representations of outside elements in the animal world do not presuppose a self-representation. The representation of cat for a mouse does not presuppose that the mouse has a self-representation. Self-representation is close to self-consciousness which is a high level outcome of evolution (see http://philpapers.org/rec/MENPFA-3)

• 7. Good start, but it also needs the concept of goal-direction, such as described below by Stjernfelt,

• 8. My only concern is with the notion of ‘self-reference’ here. Not sure what to read into this. Also, I would want to see reference to triadic semiosis

• 9. The metaphor of membrane implied here is very suitable because it highlights the notion of interaction at an interface. However this does not sufficiently take into account whether ‘aboutness’ is a context of self-other at a different level of expression seen by the observer, as compared to ‘inside interactions’ as seen by the participants.

• 10. At least Hoffmeyer is writing in no other context than biosemiotics.

• 11. I find it difficult to think of inner and outer, self and other, without including the concept of “imposing boundaries” and, following Bateson, logical types. Is there no “aboutness” to hunger pangs, heartache, loneliness, mourning? This quote presents too much of a gap between self and other for my taste.

• 12. complies well with e.g. evolutional biology,

• 13. Agreed - the self is differentiated from the not-self but the self cannot be isolate; the organism MUST be capable of informational interaction with the not-self. But, I quibble about the other-reference being a full description of the self; I’d say that multiple other references - over time - are necessary for this full description of the self. And, it is always flexible, adaptive and requiring interaction. BUT -we must still consider the CONSTRAINTS on informational exchange between the self and not-self. The organism has its ‘habits-of-organization’ which set up constraints of interaction and adaptibility.

• 14. The converse is also true: there is no “self-reference” without distiction from the other. We must be wary of not falling into the trap of currently existing conditions. We live in an individualistic society. And as such we tend to phrase things in the manner which emphasises the individual while relating it to the background, like Hoffmeyer does here. As he says: the others PRESUPPOSE the self, meaning that the self is the condition of possibility of the other. But, once again, the converse is also true. There’s no distinction of the self without others, therefore the self is a derivative of others. “Self-reference presupposes other-reference.”

• 15. the word “reference” is problematic in the spheres of nature likewise the word “self” pertains presumably only to human(?)

• 16. This quote overemphasizes the connection between intentionality and spatial separation (outside versus inside). We can be intentional to our inside in the same way as to outside. Semiotic distinctions and relations should not be confused with physical boundaries. But in general, I agree with Hoffmeyer’s approach to intentionality.

QUOTE 5: It is the cyclical organization of metabolism which makes it meaningful to speak of ‘intention’ (whether conscious or not), because the directedness of intention, be it inside the organism or directed outwards into the niche is governed by the cyclical attractor of metabolism. …Thus the biosemiotic vocabulary centered, like Kant predicted and Cassirer further argued, around the concept of intentionality, of telos, formally interpreted as cyclic pattern or order, gives meaning in relation to the notion of the cyclical flow of metabolism. – Frederik Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology: An Investigation on The Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics. Dordrecht: Springer. 2007:222.

RESPONSES TO QUOTE 5:

I find the above quote perfectly suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	42.86% 9
I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor changes I would make to it	28.57% 6
I find the above quote somewhat suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, but there are some major changes I would make to it	23.81% 5
I find the above quote not at all suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	4.76% 1
Total	21

COMMENTS TO QUOTE 5:

• 1. Too broad. This is an important take, but would require a more precise formulation. ‘Cyclical organisation of metabolism’ is not sufficient – it should be at least autocatalytically cyclical.

• 2. but of course more needs to be said - and a further interpretation give

• 3. Somehow Stjernfelt’s definition of intentionality is complementary to the one given above by Hoffmeyer, in that it confers sufficient causality to the metabolism for developing an intentionality toward. However, it still misses the point of having to explain how a complex metabolism may eventually develop the capacity to act in the attempt to satisfy its incompleteness. By development here I mean the gradual transition from a condition in which (1) metabolic precursors are simply taken up to a condition in which (2) they are actively searched, up to one in which (3) their absence is cognitively represented.

• 4. In my long discussions with Soren Brier, we generally agreed that without a complexity input, the basis of (gestalt) cognition, and creative response in action, cannot begin to be understood. Complexity biology identifies loci of control of biological and psychological processes at INSTABILITIES, notably criticality. The resulting model seems to embody his principles of Cyber-semiotics, BUT I am doubtful about Biosemiotics.

• 5. A bit too vague about what is meant by “cyclic” in this work, I think.

• 6. Good definition, a little hard to follow for the average biosemiotician, perhaps. The problem with all these definitions is that they appear out of context. If Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt could work together to come up with a definition suitable for a glossary, that might be best

• 7. the reference to Kant is a bit of a worry - Husserl and Merleau-Ponty both wanted to distance intentionality from Kant.

• 8. But the statement here highlights the substantive flows of order, which should be accompanied by communicative flows ordering order as well. As Millikan has argued the ‘intentionality’ of a mother hen calling its chicks to come for food should meet every criterion of ‘intentionality.’. One only needs, she says, to be careful in delimiting the contexts of ‘aboutness.’ Instead of leaving that term with a connotation of vague generality delimit intentionality to characteristics of local and naturally local order in which animates dwell.. .

• 9. Intentionality as telos conflates an Aristotelian view of the world as directed-toward with a phenomenological or psychological conception of intentionality as a state of mind. In so doing it moves too quickly past the central question as to the scope of intention, which is a core question for biosemiotics.

• 10. I do like the addition of “metabolism” to a biosemiotic definition of intentionality because it speaks to the mutual interdependence of inner-outer, self-other, Being-in-the-world, although “cyclical” introduces “time”----a complex additional element that Heidegger struggled with, too.

• 11. survival, procreatioan, development

• 12. Agreed - the informational network is interactive- whether it is ‘cyclical’ is another question.

• 13. I do not understand this quote.

• 14. not necessarily only metabolism..this too biologistic

QUOTE 6: To become the other in intentional being is precisely to assimilate vicariously the form of the other – not its substantial form, but aspects of its being and activity conveyed initially through environmental interactions. – John Deely, Intentionality and Semiotics. Chicago: University of Scranton Press. 2007:181–182.

RESPONSES TO QUOTE 6:

I find the above quote perfectly suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	28.57% 6
I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor changes I would make to it	23.81% 5
I find the above quote somewhat suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, but there are some major changes I would make to it	23.81% 5
I find the above quote not at all suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	23.81% 5
Total	21

COMMENTS TO QUOTE 6:

• 1. Seems to be too narrow because sounds as a description of imitation. However, ‘form’ can be understood in a more general sense, therefore it would benefit from an additional comment.

• 2. but of course more needs to be said - and a further interpretation given

• 3. To complete Deely’s definition of intentionality I would ask him to specify how environmental interactions are to be experienced by the intentional subjects and which conditions would they require for the interactions to be constructive and directed toward specific telos.

• 4. I suggest you read Thomas Traherne’s poem, ‘My Spirit’ (I can email it on request), because it accurately describes the way an enlightened being’s transcendence of ego and identification with the wider ‘Self’ allows him / her to ‘become the other in intentional being’, and in a way far deeper that mere empathy can achieve.

• 5. I think this is just wrong because it starts with a postulation of an impossibility.

• 6. This statement has the problem of leaving everything vague while addressing nothing. What is supposed to be the range of ‘environmental interactions?’

• 7. Deely’s approach is clear although this quote isn’t defining intention but, instead, defining a

• 8. This quote further explores Stjernfelt’s “metabolism”. I like it because it can be applied to assimilation on many different levels---e.g., physical incorporation and psychological internalization.Piaget saw assimilation as but one type of adaptation; the other type being accommodation. (With these two poles he integrated his beginnings as a biologist with his psychoanalytic training; from the latter he took the polarity of “pleasure” (assimilation) and “reality” (accommodation) principles.)

• 9. but that only particular one of many aspects

• 10. I agree with the informational exchange - and focus that such exchanges of data are not assimilation but - exchanges - constrained with the habits-of-organization of each being, self and other.

• 11. A quote about biosemiotic ethics.

• 12. “to become the other” ....?? incomprehensible to me... ‘environmental interaction’ -yes-- but not “to become the other

• 13. This is not the best quote from the volume that could have been chosen.

QUOTE 7: Mental life is animated by an intentional striving that aims toward and finds satisfaction in disclosure of the intentional object. In this way, intentionality is teleological …Given this conception of intentionality, It follows that neither the mental act nor that which it intends can be understood in isolation. Every mental act is the very act it is in virtue of that which it intends, and every Object is constituted in and through the temporally extended course of intentional experience. – Evan Thompson, Mind in Life. Cambridge: Harvard. 2007:22–24.

RESPONSES TO QUOTE 7:

I find the above quote perfectly suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	15.00% 3
I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor emendations I would make	40.00% 8
I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor changes I would make to it	25.00% 5
I find the above quote somewhat suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, but there are some major changes I would make to it	20.00% 4
Total	20

COMMENT TO QUOTE 7:

• 1. More narrow than Brentano’s. Intentionality may not include striving or intending.

• 2. Even though I agree with Thompson’s definition of intentionality, I should remark that he does not saying anything as to how this capacity has been biologically acquired and how it is socially sustained by the emerging relationships

• 3. Those that fail to strive to actualise their dreams become despondent and depressed. Thompson’s position idealizes human mental life, but fails to account for the fact that a large percentage of humanity (over 30% in Australia) is diagnosed as depressed, simply because they fail to live up to this fact of life, and because society fails to teach them (Those who can do, those who can’t teach????)

• 4. I think this puts too much emphasis on the teleological aspect, which brings in the interpretant unnecessarily.

• 5. incorporates both the ‘aboutness’ and the ‘teleological’ aspects of intentionality.

• 6. The issue here seems to be that it infers conscious thought in relation to ‘purpose’ and ‘control.’ Is there no condition of ‘play’ in biosemiotic life. What is the ‘intentional striving’ in play. Moreover, I think anyone who has played second base in baseball who have a field-day with the notion that ‘every mental act is in virtue of that which it intends...’

• 7. Thompson is reflecting the ecology of being that other quotes point us toward: that action and being and environment and intention are all bound up together

• 8. I am not clear on what Thompson means by “disclosure”. The first part of his last sentence seems to be what Brentano was saying, while the end introduces “time” again (cf, “cyclical” and syntactic linearity).

• 9. I would emphasise that ‘mental life’ (cognition as usually understood) is semiotic, and that it arises from embodied biosemiosis circulating in and between a body, an umwelt and a recording (memory) system

• 10. allowing for that the intentionality can be unconscious of subsconscious

• 11. No. A biological organism isn’t simply ‘mental life’; but Matter-is-effete Mind {Peirce 6.277) - so the above statement is meaningless to me.

• 12. I do not understand how the two parts of the quote relate to one another. Everything starting from “Given this..” is fine for biosemiotics. But why would this be teleological? The first part of the quote sounds to me as if saying "If I think of an apple, an apple also thinks of me." It looks like in this quote “teleological” has taken on a wholly different meaning from its origin.

• 13. comes closer but “mental”...is again a problematic word fr biosemiotics not inclusive enough of what isnt mental yet still exhibits intentionality

QUOTE 8: [Terrence Deacon suggests replacing the overly-mentalistic term intentional with the broader category term “ententional”, which he defines as:]a generic adjective to describe all phenomena that are intrinsically incomplete in the sense of being in relationship to, constituted by, or organized to achieve something non-intrinsic…[such] ententional phenomena include functions that have satisfaction conditions, adaptations that have environmental correlates, thoughts that have contents, purposes that have goals, subjective experiences that have a self/other perspective, and values that have a self that is benefited or harmed. – Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature. New York: Norton. 2012:27.

RESPONSES TO QUOTE 8:

I find the above quote perfectly suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	33.33% 7
I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor changes I would make to it	28.57% 6
I find the above quote somewhat suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, but there are some major changes I would make to it	14.29% 3
I find the above quote not at all suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	23.81% 5
Total	21

COMMENTS TO QUOTE 8:

• 1. To use the term ‘ententionality’ in case of non-human intentionality is a good solution. An alternative possibility would be to extend the term ‘mind’ (stating that semiosic and mental are coextensive) – then the Brentano’s definition would coincide with ententionality.

• 2. again, more needs to be said - and a further interpretation given

• 3. I appreciate the biological and ecological wideness of the new notion of ententionality, but I don’t find the term very intuitive and immediate.

• 4. It provides a full spectrum of biological conditions for justifying the subject’s tendency to be directed toward in the attempt to satisfying its incompleteness

• 5. Biological survival is by learned choice and vast failures. Human achievement is on the basis of inspired learning, practice, and striving for success - a vision driven act of constant intentionality. I fail to see the parallels as sufficiently strong for an artificial term that spans the divide and includes both. (I lecture in detail on both in my Mind-Body Medicine lectures, attacking both the basis in biology, and its development in cortically based minds.)

• 6. I think that the list of relationship here is oriented to the subjective experience of human beings, it is therefore anthroposemiotic rather than biosemiotic. Otherwise, expressing intentionality in terms of relationship seems to me to be fundamental

• 7. Deacon’s neologism isn’t helpful in defining intentionality since it claims to want to do away with the term.

• 8. I find Deacon’s proposed adjective, “ententional”, to be too generic, gathering together too many disparate entities---satisfaction conditions from philosophy of language, adaptation from biology, subjective experiences from psychology, values from ethics.... Such an overly inclusive term threatens to obliterate the distinct histories of vocabulary within each of these discipline. Sometimes a new term is useful (biosemiotics, for example) but “ententional” obscures rather than enlightens.

• 9. This is closest of all the quotes so far to my own understanding.

• 10. none

• 11. To broad in scope, appears to incorporate phenomena which we would not usualy consider intentional.

• 12. Too reductionist.

• 13. The most suitable for biosemiotics.

• 14. I don’t like inventing confusing terms such as “ententional”.

• 15. Deacon’s phrasing of the issue is far more circumspect and even-handed than the others. It comes from the angle of incompleteness rather than simply conceiving this as an adjunct

QUOTE 9: The “intentional object” of philosophy is recast here as the holistic self-organized dynamics of a system, which exists for the purpose of self-maintenance, and that constrains the parts’ behaviors, which serve the purpose of forming the system. (A “system” can be any emergent, e.g. an abiotic form, an adapted species, a self, a conditioned response, thought, or a set of ideas.) The self-organized whole, which is represented to the parts in their own constrained behaviors, assumes the guiding function so long attributed to the mysterious “intentional object.”– Victoria Alexander, “The Poetics of Purpose.” Biosemiotics 2009 (2):77–100.

RESPONSES TO QUOTE 9:

I find the above quote perfectly suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	27.27% 6
I find the above quote generally suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, though there are some minor changes I would make to it	18.18% 4
I find the above quote somewhat suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term, but there are some major changes I would make to it	45.45% 10
I find the above quote not at all suitable for conveying a biosemiotic understanding of the term	9.09% 2
Total	22

COMMENTS TO QUOTE 9:

• 1. Self-maintenance is a product of intentionality and not its purpose, in the first place.

• 2. It simply describes intentionality as it appears and the conditions that allow it to be expressed, but it does not interpret it as necessary and meaningful conditions for the subject to survive and develop toward higher complexity

• 3. I would be interested to read the whole article and more of VA’s work. For the record, biological regulation HAS TO BE Holistic because, (1) all functions must be coordinated, so regulation must be structured to coordinate ALL functions in the whole, and (2) to be optimized and to optimize function, all regulatory functions must have Loci of Control at Criticaltiy, which is itself a locally holistic state owing to the highly unusual (but well accepted) level of its internal correlations.

• 4. I think the intentional object is miscast here in terms of something that is required for it to exist for a sign for an organism.

• 5. This is mine, so I agree with the author completely. But if I were asked to define “intentionality” for a glossary, I would not put it this way. This quote concerns itself with an attempt to reconcile emergence theory with biosemiotics, so it’s doing a lot more than is needed for a simple, clear definition.

• 6. Doesn’t seem to include the property of ‘aboutness’

• 7. The statement, unlike other statements above refers to systemic intentionality. It should be completed by reference to intentionality in the case of animate organisms concerning their relationships within the system..

• 8. Alexander is reflecting another ecological view, and putting effort into making the view sound... biomechanical. Her view pairs well with others.

• 9. I like the Alexander quote because it reminds me of Anthony Wilden’s "System and Structure: Essays in communication and exchange". ---the book and its ideas seem to have disappeared from discourse. But I would have to do a lot of work to get from there to “intentional object”. Undoubtedly, Alexander provides those missing steps in his book. Final comment: So many of these quotes provide something important, often even necessary, but never sufficient for a biosemiotic redefinition of “intentionality”.

• 10. not fully understandable without the basic models put forth by the author and the context

• 11. Again, too broad in scope.

• 12. I’m not quite sure of this quotation; my focus is on self-organized systems, or CAS [complex adaptive systems] - and I’m not sure about the analogy with the above quote. Is something that is self-organized as a CAS - is it WHOLE?

• 13. This is a recast of autopoietics of Maturana-Varela. As usual, it’s entirely subject-centered. It sounds like a very American understanding of intentionality: "That thing about others, well it's actually about me me me me". Sorry, but no. Also, too many buzzwords.

• 14. comes closest although “auto-poesis” serves better than self-organized because it is species /system neutral and conceptually more inclusive

• 15. Not clear how abiotic form can become a holistic self-organized system? Does she mean the origin of life or something else?