Chapter 17: Disclosing the World: Intentionality and 4E

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Welcome back to The Deep Dive.

If you, like us, sometimes find the foundational texts of cognitive science, well, a little dense and challenging, then you've absolutely come to the right place.

I think that's putting it mildly sometimes.

Right.

Today, we are undertaking a bit of a philosophical marathon.

We're tackling a truly foundational question.

What defines thinking, and maybe more importantly, where physically does the boundary of that thinking process actually lie?

It's really the central debate of the whole 4E movement that's extended, embodied, enacted and embedded cognition.

But, you know, a lot of theories in that movement, they offer really compelling evidence, but they can still struggle with a rigorous philosophical justification.

And that's where our source comes in.

Exactly.

Our source material today is a chapter titled, Disclosing the World, Intentionality and 4E Cognition by Mark Rollins, and it provides exactly that kind of systematic philosophical defense.

And for you, the learner, who requested a complete structured walkthrough of this challenging material, we are going to dissect this argument meticulously.

We're going to build this up piece by piece, exactly as Rollins does in the chapter.

And our central mission today is to follow his systematic proof.

He argues that the fundamental nature of the mind's directedness toward the world, what philosophers call intentionality, is not some passive state, but an active dynamic form of what he calls disclosing activity.

Disclosing activity.

And because this disclosing activity inherently requires resources and operations that often extend beyond the brain, cognition must, by necessity,

be functionally and constitutively extended.

Okay, let's unpack this with the groundwork then.

Rollins begins not with intentionality itself, but with a really clear statement of his long -held view on what cognitive processes are.

This, I guess, sets the stage for why external resources are even relevant in the first place.

Precisely.

He introduces three related claims that define a very specific, and I should say a very strong view of cognition.

A constitutive view.

And that word is crucial, right?

Constitutive.

Because it's stronger than a mere causal view.

Much stronger.

So let's start with his first claim.

Some cognitive processes are partly made up of operations performed on structures in the environment.

And I notice he's very careful with his modifiers there.

Partly, and some.

He's not saying all thinking is external, or that, you know, a notebook is the whole show.

Absolutely not.

The key is the operation itself.

The act of manipulating, transforming, or exploiting that external structure.

That's what he claims is a component piece of the cognitive process.

Can you give us an analogy for that?

Sure.

Think of it like a car engine.

You could say the spark plugs are partly made up of metal electrodes.

You wouldn't say the electrode is the whole engine, of course, but you can't have the working engine without that specific part being integrated into the process.

Okay, that makes sense.

So claim number two follows on from that pretty logically.

These environmental structures carry information relevant to the cognitive task.

Right.

If I'm doing arithmetic,

the calculator screen carries the information about the number I just entered.

Simple as that.

And claim three is the punchline.

It is.

The function of these extended processes is to make information available, either to you, the subject, or to the next steps in the processing chain.

And this concept, this making information available, is what Rollins really nominates as the core essence of cognition itself.

Okay, to bring this definition to life, he uses a classic example, epistemic action, from the work of Kirsch and Maglio.

We've heard this term before, but maybe we should define it carefully.

We should.

An epistemic action is an action whose function is solely to change the nature of the cognitive task itself, usually to make it simpler, faster, or just easier to solve.

And the jigsaw puzzle is the best illustration here.

It really is.

So imagine you're holding two pieces.

They contain information about their fit.

That information is present in their shapes, their geometry, the colors on them.

But they're oriented in a way that it's not immediately obvious if they connect.

The information is physically there, but it's not available to you.

So I perform an operation.

I rotate one piece.

I physically bring them close together.

That physical action, which is happening outside my brain,

it transforms the information.

Exactly.

It moves from being merely present in the physical structures to being instantaneously available for your judgment.

Yes, they fit.

Or no, they don't.

So the action of my hands isn't just a precursor to thinking.

The action is the cognitive process that makes the informational status change.

This making available is the whole essence.

Sometimes, like in the jigsaw case, the available information is identical to the present information.

It's just a simple transformation.

And other times?

Other times the operation might be more complex.

It might augment or embellish the information, which we'll see when we look at Mars model later on.

But the function, the core job, it remains the same availability.

I think we really need to linger here on this distinction between the constitutive view and the embedded view, because that's a huge sticking point for a lot of these theories.

It is.

If I'm an internalist, I could just argue that my hands are tools.

They're just helping my internal core thinking brain do its job.

And that's the perfect way to frame the difference between embeddedness and Roland's stronger constitutive claim.

Embeddedness is a purely causal claim.

It says external structures facilitate a task.

So like a GPS in a car.

Exactly like that.

The GPS is an external structure that facilitates the internal cognitive task of navigation.

If the GPS breaks, you still have the internal mechanism for navigating.

It's just a lot harder.

Right.

The tool is helpful, but the real thinking is still happening only inside my skull.

Precisely.

But Roland's constitutive view says the external structure isn't just a helpful input.

The operation you perform on it is a necessary part of the process itself.

It's the spark plug again.

It's the spark plug.

It is a necessary component of the running engine.

If you remove that external operation, the cognitive process is incomplete, maybe even impossible.

It's not just that the external element causes thinking.

It partly constitutes it.

And this stronger stance is what lets him immediately connect his three claims to the whole 4E framework.

Yeah, you can map it out very clearly.

First, the processes are extended because the necessary manipulative operations are happening outside the body.

It's an extra bodily extension of the processes.

And we should emphasize that again.

He's talking about processes, not states.

Very important distinction.

He's not trying to claim that the jigsaw piece is a belief.

He's claiming the action of turning the piece is a part of the solving process.

And second, if the environment includes our own non -neural body, our hands, our eyes, our muscles, then the processes that use those are embodied.

Right.

And third, this framework is entirely consonant with an activism, which views mental processes as these continuous dynamic transactions between an individual and their world.

Action is knowledge.

Action is constitutive of perception.

So Rollins establishes the existence of these extended processes through a kind of functional definition, but now he needs the philosophical ammunition to defend it.

He does.

He needs to defend it against a core internalist objection.

That true intentionality, the real aboutness of the mind, must be internal.

And that's where we go next.

Right.

So this is where we need to anchor this constitutive view to a deep understanding of intentionality, which is, I mean, arguably the most fundamental property of mental world.

Absolutely.

And just to be clear for everyone, when we say intentionality, we're not talking about intentions like, you know, planning to go to the grocery store.

No, we are talking about the mind's directedness toward an object.

The basic fact that thoughts are always about something.

My thought is about my cat.

My belief is about the weather.

And if we want to understand that directedness, we have to look beyond just the object itself.

We need to understand the medium.

What makes something an intentional object?

What is it that allows an item to become an object of our mental directedness?

To explore this, Rollins brings in what's called the standard model of intentionality.

It's a three -part structure that helps us analyze any mental act.

It consists of the intentional act.

So the thinking, the believing, the perceiving.

Then there's the object, which is the thing the act is directed at.

And that can be anything, a physical thing like a tree, a mathematical concept, a state of affairs.

And finally, the third part, the mode of presentation.

Which is the crucial link.

It's the way the object is given to you, the subject.

If I'm looking at the planet Venus, the planet is the object.

But the mode of presentation could be the brightest celestial body after the moon.

Or it could be the second planet from the sun.

So different ways of presenting the exact same object.

Right.

And here's where the philosophical leverage comes from.

It's rooted in an ambiguity found in the philosopher Gottlob Friedrich's concept of sense, or gedanken.

And this ambiguity forces us to distinguish two types of sense, or two types of modes of presentation.

Okay, so what are they?

Let's call them the empirical and the transcendental sense.

First, the empirical sense.

This views the mode of presentation, the description, the content, as itself an intentional object of apprehension.

I can focus on the description, the morning star.

And I can contemplate that description itself.

So I'm thinking about the phrase, the morning star.

Exactly.

And Rollins borrows this really evocative metaphor.

The empirical sense is like an object held in the hand.

It's the content you are consciously aware of, that you're manipulating, that you're holding in your mental grasp.

You can attend to its characteristics, its structure, its logical form.

Okay, I think I get that.

But now, what about the second type, the transcendental sense?

This is where I start to get a bit confused.

Because if the empirical sense is what I'm focused on, what is the transcendental sense even doing?

Well, the transcendental sense is the determinant of reference.

Its function is to direct your thinking not toward the sense itself, but toward the physical or abstract object that's picked out by that sense.

It is the necessary background mechanism, the component in virtue of which the mental act has an object in the first place.

Okay, so using the metaphor again, this is the bones and muscle that allow the object to be held.

Perfect.

It's the enabling structure.

I don't typically look at my bones and muscle while I'm holding a cup of coffee, but without them, the act of holding is completely impossible.

Exactly.

It operates in the background, serving a purely functional role of direction and reference fixing.

And this leads to the critical insight,

the non -eliminability of transcendental sense.

Wait, I need to understand why it's non -eliminable.

If I can contemplate the description, the morning star, the empirical sense, why does there have to be a transcendental sense underlying that specific act?

Think about the structure of intentionality.

When you contemplate the empirical sense, that description becomes the object of your new act of contemplation.

But for that new act to be directed toward that description, it must have its own mode of presentation.

And if that second mode of presentation was also something you could consciously contemplate, in other words, another empirical sense, well, we'd be in an infinite regress.

I see.

So if I grasp the object, which is description A, I need an internal mechanism, sense B, to do the grasping.

If I then want to focus on that mechanism, sense B, I need a third, even deeper mechanism, sense C, to fix my reference to sense B.

And that just can't go on forever.

Precisely.

So Rollins argues in any intentional act, there is always a transcendental mode of presentation, PMP, that is not, and in that specific act, cannot be an intentional object itself.

It is the non -eliminable core of the act of directedness.

It's the ultimate functional reference fixer.

Okay.

This is a major philosophical hinge point.

So Rollins then generalizes this idea, beyond just Frege's linguistic sense, and applies it to all intentionality.

He does.

And we can now distinguish between two things.

First,

empirical modes of presentation, EMPs, or you can just call them aspects.

These are the concrete ways objects appear to us.

The greenness of an apple, the shininess, the volume of a sound, these are intentional objects of our awareness.

We were attending to the object by means of attending to its aspects.

Okay.

And the second?

Second,

transcendental modes of presentation, TMPs.

This is the non -eliminable, non -conscious core that permits the object to appear under those aspects in the first place.

This is the underlying intentional activity itself.

It's pure directedness.

So the directedness of our mind isn't passive at all.

It consists in the activity of the TMP, which is that thing in virtue of which objects even come into our awareness under specific aspects.

It's like the machine running the whole show from behind the curtain.

That's a great way to put it.

So if intentional directedness is this core functional activity, the TMP, that lets objects appear under these observable aspects, the EMPs, then calling it sense feels a bit too passive.

And this is where Rollins pivots to a more dynamic term, disclosure.

Yes, this is the critical shift.

It's moving from a static structure to an action verb.

And disclosure is defined very precisely.

A TMP discloses an object O to a subject S if the TMP is that in virtue of which O falls under an empirical mode of presentation EMP for S.

I appreciate that the definition is precise, but let's just pause on that phrase in virtue of which.

In plain language, this just means the TMP is what makes it possible for the object to show up in our consciousness in a specific way.

Is that right?

That's exactly right.

And because that phrase in virtue of which expresses a kind of sufficiency claim, we end up with two types of disclosure based on what type of sufficiency we're talking about.

OK, so the first is constitutive disclosure, and that's based on logical sufficiency.

This is disclosure by way of content.

Right, so if you have an experience characterized by a certain what -it -is -likeness, a subjective quality like the feeling of localized shiny green, that experience itself is the TMP.

It is logically sufficient for the world to appear shiny and green, regardless of whether a physical apple is actually there.

OK, so this is useful for understanding things like hallucinations.

Exactly.

If I'm hallucinating a shiny green apple, the hallucination still discloses an object, the appearance, because the content of my experience logically guarantees that appearance.

The experience and the appearance are one and the same.

And what's the second form?

Second form is the one that's most relevant to the 4E debate.

Causal disclosure, which is based on physical or causal sufficiency.

This is disclosure by way of the vehicles of content, the physical mechanisms like neural activity or computation.

Ah, so if specific neural activity in my visual cortex is physically sufficient to cause the experience of greenness, then that neural activity is causally disclosing the world under the aspect of greenness.

Now, an internalist might immediately jump in here and cite the explanatory gap intuition.

That's the philosophical idea that physical processes might never be logically sufficient to explain subjective conscious experience.

Right, the hard problem of consciousness.

Precisely.

And Rowlands very wisely just sidesteps this whole debate.

He doesn't need to close the gap.

Wait, if he can't close the gap, how can he use physical processes to defend 4E cognition?

That seems like a problem.

Because his argument focuses entirely on the vehicles of content, the underlying physical and computational mechanisms, not the subjective what it is likeness.

For the purpose of establishing that cognition is extended, he only needs to show that the physical operations that cause disclosure can be found outside the brain.

I see.

So he's not trying to explain consciousness itself.

Not at all.

He's focused on the machinery.

Therefore, causal disclosure instantiated by physical vehicles is the key focus for the rest of the argument.

So if we can show that the physical mechanism that causes the world to appear in a certain way is itself extended, we have our proof.

Precisely.

And now we can assemble the final syllogism, which is incredibly elegant and relies entirely on our new definition of intentionality as disclosure.

And the three steps are, one, intentional directedness is disclosing activity.

We just established that.

Right, that's our philosophical foundation.

Two, disclosing activity often straddles neural, bodily, and environmental processes.

And that's the premise we need to prove.

The entire weight of the argument rests on proving that the physical activity required for disclosure is not confined to the skull.

And then the conclusion, three,

therefore intentional processes often straddle these boundaries.

In other words, they are for each.

Exactly.

So let's prove premise two.

Rollins begins with a classic example from the philosopher Merleau -Ponty, the blind person's cane.

Yes,

we need to elaborate on the phenomenology of this, the experience of it, to prove that this external tool becomes part of the internal process.

That's the key.

Typically, when a blind person is walking, the cane becomes integrated into their bodily schema.

They are not consciously attending to its weight, its texture, or its material.

The cane is not an empirical object of awareness, an EMP.

Instead, it's serving a purely transcendental role.

Yes, it is the means and virtue of which the world is disclosed to them.

The cane allows the person to experience objects as near or far, or the ground texture as pavement or gravel.

And what's so fascinating here is the phenomenology of it.

The blind person experiences the texture and the location of the object in the world at the tip of the cane.

Right.

The sensation doesn't stop at their hand or their wrist.

The intentional consciousness,

phenomenologically,

passes all the way through the cane to the external object.

So the cane isn't just a tool providing input.

It's functioning as a vehicle of disclosure.

It's transforming information about the environment into available information about distance and texture.

And this only happens because the underlying disclosing activity,

the intentional directedness, must straddle the whole system.

The brain processes the extra -neuro bodily processes like the hand's proprioception and the actions performed on the environment, like the tapping motion.

The intentional process does not stop short of the world.

So the cane operation is constitutively part of the process of disclosing the world as navigable.

OK, let's move to a visual example.

Psychatic eye movements

from Yarbus's classic studies on eye tracking.

This is a brilliant example because it involves an external physical action that, well,

everyone performs constantly without thinking about it.

It is.

Yarbus showed that the physical movement of the eyes, the external action, is radically different depending on the specific cognitive task you give to a subject.

If you look at a painting and are asked to determine the age of the people in it, your eye movements will focus primarily on faces and figures.

But if I give you a different task, like determine what they were doing just before the scene took place, your physical eye movements, your external actions,

immediately shift their scan path.

They do.

They'll start to focus on background objects, what's in their hands, their postures, other contextual clues.

The physical saccades, the rapid jerky movements of the eye, are part of the causal disclosure of the world.

They are the operations performed on the visual field that transform that static light pattern into available information about age or prior activity.

So the saccade itself is the vehicle of intentional directedness that reveals objects under different empirical modes of presentation.

Right.

The action itself is what makes the information available.

If the physical movement of the eyes is a necessary component of the disclosing activity, and that movement occurs outside the brain, then the intentional process is extended.

And we can apply this same structure to the most famous case in all of 4E cognition, Clark and Chalmers' Otto.

Yes, Otto, who suffers from Alzheimer's and uses a notebook to store information.

When he needs to remember where the Museum of Modern Art is, he flips pages and reads the entry.

And the internalists always claim the notebook is just data storage, and the real thinking only happens when Otto reads the word MOMA inside his brain.

But Rawlins rejects the idea of treating the sentence in the notebook as a cognitive state, like a belief.

Instead, he focuses on the process of remembering, or in his terms, the activity of disclosure.

So Otto's physical manipulation of the notebook, the fingers rifling through the pages, the scanning of the text, the whole external process of locating the information, that is the disclosing activity.

And that activity discloses the museum object to Otto as falling under a specific empirical aspect.

Being located on East 53rd Street.

The reading of the sentence makes the location available.

So the conclusion holds up.

Otto's intentional directedness, the process of remembering, straddles his brain, his extracranial body, like his hands and eyes, and the external structure, the notebook.

The intentional process is demonstrably extended by this definition.

Yes, so we've established that this disclosing activity happens both inside and outside the head, using these phenomenal examples.

But we still have to tackle the internalist counterclaim.

Which is?

That the intracranial activity is somehow functionally unique.

That it performs a kind of processing that external action simply cannot replicate.

OK, so to refute that, Rollins has to show that the fundamental nature and function of the activity is equivalent, regardless of where it's located.

Exactly.

And to define the high level functional standard for internal cognition, he turns to a very classical and very successful model.

David Marr's 1982 Theory of Vision.

Marr's model is really the gold standard for defining internal cognitive processing.

It describes cognition as the series of staged input output transformations structured by two essential elements.

Information bearing structures and operations performed on those structures.

Right.

Let's break down the stages of Marr's visual model to see this in action.

The input structure is the retinal image.

It's sparse, ambiguous, just a collection of light intensity points.

The first operation transforms this into what's called the raw primal sketch.

The raw primal sketch.

It's still very basic, right?

It's just identifying simple features like edges, blobs and lines, usually based on changes in light intensity.

Very basic.

But even this is an operation.

It's the brain calculating the geometry of the light pattern.

This sketch then serves as the information bearing structure for the next stage of processing.

Which is the transformation from the raw primal sketch to the full primal sketch.

And this is where the brain applies really sophisticated computational principles, often based on Gestalt psychology, things like proximity, similarity,

or closure.

And this is where the internal processing augments the information.

The full sketch contains more information about the visual environment than was originally present in the raw sketch.

For example, by applying the principle of closure, the brain computationally inserts boundaries that aren't physically present in the light array to construct a coherent shape.

So the brain is performing these complex operations on its own internal structures to create new, more available information that actually exceeds the initial input.

And the overall function remains exactly what Roland's defined to make information available.

Whether the information is just transformed, like the jigsaw puzzle or augmented, like in Mars visual processing, the function is to reach a state of availability.

And availability here means the information can be detected and used by subsequent processing operations or by you, the subject, without needing any more constructive operations.

It's right there.

It's ready to be consumed and acted upon.

This definition of availability is key because it abstracts the function away from the physical machinery.

It's like a job description.

And Roland's uses this standard to connect the two concepts.

He clarifies that, you know, not every system that follows this information processing schema is cognitive.

A basic calculator follows it, too.

Cognition happens when these processes are embodied in an intentional system, a system capable of disclosure.

Mars model just provides the abstract functional description of what that intentional disclosure looks like when it's happening internally.

OK, so now we execute the comparison.

If the definition of cognition at a high level is structures plus operations leads to available information, we have to show that this schema applies just as cleanly and just as complexly outside the skull.

And to do that, we turn to James Gibson's 1979 ecological approach to visual perception.

This is the external action -oriented mirror to Mars internal computational model.

Gibson defines an external information -bearing structure that he calls the optic array.

Right.

And this is the spatial pattern of light intensity that surrounds an observer determined by the surfaces of objects.

It's the entire ambient light structure hitting your eye, and it is undeniably physically external.

OK, so that's the structure.

Next, we need the operations.

And unlike Mars computational operations inside the head, Gibson's operations are the active movement and exploration by the observer, the walking, the head turning, the overall engagement with the environment.

Perception is intertwined with action.

And the function, is it the same?

It's exactly the same, making information available.

When an observer moves, the optic array is transformed.

And these transformations aren't random.

They allow the organism to identify invariant information stable properties like the layout, the shape, or the texture of objects that remain constant even as you move.

So this invariant information was only present in the static optic array.

It was there, but hidden.

Yes, and the external action of moving and changing your perspective is what makes that invariant information available for perception.

The action transforms its status.

I see the perfect parallel now.

Marr describes the brain applying computational principles to augment internal structures, from the raw to the full primal sketch.

Gibson describes the organism applying movement operations to transform the external optic array from static to revealed invariance.

Both are complex transformations leading to information availability.

And we can apply this functional equivalence back to the simpler examples like Otto's notebook, just to make sure the definition holds up consistently.

Right, the notebook is the external structure containing merely present information.

Otto's action, the rifling, the scanning, the reading, those are the operations.

And the result is that the location of the museum becomes available for the next step of processing, like planning a route.

The conclusion then, at this level of abstraction, seems unavoidable.

The distinction between neural and extra -neural processes carries no overriding theoretical significance for defining the function of cognition.

Functional equivalence is established, but I have a feeling functional equivalence still isn't enough to satisfy the internalist who's going to maintain there's some crucial qualitative difference.

You are right.

And that brings us to the final boss.

We've established functional equivalence.

Now we have to face the final objection, the one based on original intentionality.

Internalists will claim that even if the process is extended, the truly mental part, the original intentionality, must reside exclusively inside the skull.

And this rests on a fundamental philosophical distinction.

Derived intentionality belongs to external signs, words, diagrams, symbols.

They are about something, but only because a mind interprets them.

A map means nothing until the human mind assigns meaning to the shapes made of ink.

Whereas original intentionality, in contrast, belongs to mental acts like beliefs and thoughts.

They are intrinsically about things.

Their meaning doesn't need to be interpreted by another mental act.

They just are intentional.

So the objection is pretty straightforward.

External structures like the sentences in Otto's notebook only have derived intentionality.

Therefore, the processes involving them can't be cognitive because true cognition requires original intentionality and that must always be brainbound.

So how does Rawlins respond?

And his first response is to reaffirm his focus on processes, not states.

He's happy to accept that the sentence the MoMA is on 53rd Street has derived intentionality.

But the process of manipulating and reading the notebook certainly involves internal segments, perceptual processing, linguistic recognition, which do possess original intentionality.

OK, but the internalists can refine the objection, right?

They do.

Immediately they say, OK, fine.

But if original intentionality is still confined only to the intracranial segments of that process,

then nothing outside the head is truly mental.

The extended process is just the brain interacting with a particularly useful piece of external furniture.

And this forces Rawlins' second, stronger response.

He challenges the fundamental and I guess unproven assumption that original intentionality must be neural.

I mean, why must it be?

That's the key question.

Why do we just assume that?

Neural representations are just patterns of electrical and chemical activity.

They are complex biological inscriptions.

Words on a page are just patterns of ink physical inscriptions.

The location inside versus outside the skull is not obviously the deciding factor for whether an inscription can stand in the right relations to the world to count as intentional.

So the challenge becomes, can non -neural items satisfy the non -intentional naturalistic criteria that philosophers often use to define genuine representation without presupposing any prior intentional concepts?

Exactly.

We're looking for evidence that the external world can meet the criteria for being about something intrinsically, not just derivatively.

And there are five main criteria we need to check.

Okay.

Let's go through them one by one.

Criterion one is informational.

Item R, the representation, must carry information about state S, the object being represented.

It has to track it.

Simple enough.

Criterion two is teleological.

The representation must have the proper function, usually selected by evolution or design of tracking S or enabling the system to achieve a goal by tracking S.

It has to be built for this specific job.

Criterion three is the philosophical linchpin.

Misrepresentation, R, must be capable of being wrong about S, S.

Now, why is this so critical?

Why isn't just mere correlation enough?

Because if a system simply correlates perfectly with the world, say, smoke always correlates with fire.

It's just a physical law.

It's not representation.

A representation has to be able to fail.

For there to be true intentionality, the system must be able to deploy the representation even when the represented state is absent or wrong, leading to an error.

This possibility of error is what distinguishes information tracking from simple information carrying.

So if I see smoke and I think, aha, fire, and it turns out there's no fire, it's just a smoke machine, my thought misrepresented the situation.

And that error is proof that my thought was intentional in the first place.

Precisely.

Criterion four is combinatorial.

The representation must be part of a wider representational framework.

It can't just be a one -off item.

And five, decoplability.

The representation, R, can be separated from the object S.

You have to be able to deploy the representation even if the thing being represented isn't immediately present.

You can think about a tiger when there's no tiger in the room.

So Rollins asserts that if non -neural items can satisfy all five of these constraints, the internalist objection completely collapses.

And his test case for this non -neural item is what he calls the deed.

Okay, we need to define this middle ground carefully.

A deed is an online feedback -modulated adjustment, like a subtle movement.

It's different from a reflex, which is subintentional, but it's also distinct from a full intentional action, which is strictly individuated by a single antecedent intention.

Think about the cricket -catch example he uses.

The overall goal is the intentional action, to catch the ball.

But the continuous, tiny adjustments of your hand and fingers as the ball approaches, the subtle changes in orientation,

those are the deeds.

And why are those deeds so important for the argument?

Because many different complex deeds can satisfy that single general intention.

For example, I can catch the ball with my fingers pointing up, or with my fingers pointing down.

Since the general intention can't individuate the specific deed, if the deed itself can be shown to be intentional, then that intentionality has to be original, not merely inherited from the overall goal.

Okay, I see.

So let's run the cricket -catch deed through the five naturalistic criteria and see if it holds up as having original intentionality, separate from the brain's main intention to catch the ball.

Alright.

First,

informational.

The specific positioning of the fingers and hand at any given moment carries information about the ball's current and projected trajectory.

The deed tracks the state of the world.

So check.

Second, teleological.

The deed, that precise finger configuration, has the proper function of tracking the trajectory and enabling a successful catch.

It's an evolutionarily or culturally selected way of interacting with fast -moving objects.

So check.

Third, and most crucially,

misrepresentation.

Can the deed be wrong?

Absolutely.

If the catcher misjudges the trajectory and points their fingers up when they should be down, they fail the catch and they get a very painful knock on the fingers.

So the finger position misrepresented the optimal reception point.

Yes, but wait.

Why is the painful knock philosophical evidence of misrepresentation rather than just, you know, a failure of physics?

That's a question to push on.

It's because the entire system, the arm, the fingers, the eye tracking, is operating as if the trajectory were X when the trajectory is actually Y.

The motor output, the deed, is supposed to track X, but it fails to track X.

This proves that the motor system can deploy a representation that is fundamentally wrong about the state of the world that is built to track.

That capacity for error is the marker of true intentional representation even when it's executed by the body outside the brain.

That really elevates the role of the body in thinking.

Okay, fourth, combinatorial.

The finger positioning forms part of a larger system of catching, connecting to later, even more subtle modulations.

So check.

And fifth, decouplability.

The catcher can practice the finger movements in isolation or they can flinch, performing the deed even when the ball trajectory is slightly off or missing entirely.

The action is decoupled from the actual represented state.

Check.

The conclusion here is powerful.

If a non -neural external action satisfies all the naturalistic criteria, then it possesses original intentionality.

There is no intrinsic reason to restrict original intentionality to only neural structures.

And the ultimate philosophical breakthrough here is realizing that intentionality is a relational feature, not an intrinsic one.

It is defined by the relations that items stand into the world tracking, teleology, and the capacity for misrepresentation, not by the raw material they're made of, whether that's neural chemistry or physical ink inscriptions.

Since non -neural items can enter into these critical relations, they can be originally intentional and the boundary of cognition is shattered.

Okay, let's try to bring this all together.

To briefly recap our comprehensive deep dive, Mark Rollins has successfully provided a really robust philosophical justification for fore cognition by redefining intentionality.

We established that the mind's directedness is fundamentally disclosing activity, that non -elimitable process, the TMP, that allows objects to appear to us.

And we showed that this disclosing activity follows a universal schema.

Operations on information -bearing structures to make information available.

Crucially, the physical operations necessary for disclosure, whether we look at perception with the cane, action with saccades, or memory with Otto's notebook, often require processes spanning the brain, the body, and the external world.

And finally, by dismantling that original intentionality objection, we show that the processes inside and outside the head are not only functionally equivalent, but that non -neural actions, these deeds, can satisfy the demanding naturalistic criteria for genuine non -derived intentionality.

The location of the processing carries no decisive theoretical weight.

So the ultimate takeaway is pretty clear.

Because intentionality is fundamentally disclosing activity and disclosing activity is demonstrably extended, the strong constitutive view of fore cognition is philosophically sound.

There is no non -arbitrary reason to restrict cognition based on the boundaries of our skin or our skull.

That's it in that show.

And here is a final provocative thought for you, the learner, as you reflect on this material.

Since intentionality is a relational property defined by its ability to track, and crucially, to misrepresent the world, if we accept this view, where else in the contemporary world might we discover complex non -biological systems already fulfilling the naturalistic criteria for having original intentionality?

Interesting.

Think about sophisticated AI systems or large decentralized technological frameworks.

Something to consider as you continue your own deep dives into the world.

A warm thank you for engaging with this challenging and I think truly transformative material on the philosophy of mind.

This has been the deep dive brought to you by the Last Minute Lecture Team.