Abstract

Intentionality occurs in connectionist nets among those traits of the nets that scientists call flaws. This label has obscured for philosophers the fact that the naturalistic basis of intentionality has been discovered. I show this while staying on our profession's common ground of discourse about ancient philosophy. In the "Theaetetus", Plato invokes a homunculus to explain perceptual misrecognition, and in "On Memory and Recollection", Aristotle invokes a mental operation of disregarding in order to overcome the extraneous determinateness of mental images. I develop a connectionist alternative to images that does not invoke a homunculus or spurious mental operations. I describe in detail an ultra-simple Hopfield net that provides an inus (indispensable part of a sufficient) condition for misrecognition. In addition, it exhibits properties that make it an inus condition for two marks of the intentionality of singular terms, namely, failures of existential generalization and of intersubstitutability of names. I also define the sense of a singular term.