Intentionality Without Evolution: The meaning of life and more

Normativity is certainly a central feature, if not the true hallmark, of intentional phenomena. Believers are essentially things that can be correct or mistaken with respect to the way things are. So nothing warrants being called an account of belief without an attendant account of error. Accounts of intentionality thus ought to provide stories (couched in suitably informative or “naturalistic” terms) about how creatures can become beholden to (or correct or mistaken with respect to) the way things are. This normative perspective might seem to favor so-called “teleo-biological” accounts of intentionality, insofar as they exploit the intuition that a creature makes some sort of mistake when it does something that isn’t “good” for it, where goodness is spelled out somehow in terms of a creature’s ability to survive to reproduce. Since such accounts seek to reduce our own intentional capacities to those of simpler creatures, they tend to deny that there is any intelligible notion of “original” intentionality above and beyond the “second-class” or “derived” intentionality commonly attributed to simpler intentional systems. In the face of persistent criticism to the effect that these theories leave the attribution of intentional states too indeterminate, too ad hoc, or too historically contingent to count as a story about bona-fide mental capacities, advocates have countered: “Well, how else could it go?” What, other than evolution by natural selection, could possibly provide us with the requisite normative oomph, for an account to be recognizable as an account of intentionality? My aim in this paper is to respond directly to this challenge by profiling a type of beholdenness to the way things are that is intelligible as such without any blatant appeals to biological norms or to what Dennett calls “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.”