Kelle Dhein (Arizona State University)
Philosophers working on the problem of intentionality in non-linguistic contexts often invoke the historical process of natural selection as the objective grounds for attributing intentionality to living systems. Ruth Millikan’s (1984) influential teleosemantic account of intentionality, for example, holds that intentionality supervenes on evolutionary history such that the intentional content of a sign is the product of the biological functions that sign has mediated in the past.
However, such etiological theories of intentionality don’t square with the way ethologists searching for causal explanations of animal behavior attribute intentional concepts to the systems they study. To support that claim, I analyze the norms governing ethologists’ attributions of intentional information concepts to eusocial insects, like ants and honeybees, in academic animal behavior journals. Ethologists have a long-standing practice of organizing behavior types by their causal contribution to a fitness-enhancing goal type (Tinbergen 1962, 414), and within that theoretical context, I argue that ethologists hang the concept of intentionality on goal-directed function, not the deep history of natural selection.
More specifically, I argue that ethologists attribute intentional information concepts to behavioral processes when those processes play a special kind of role in achieving a goal-directed function. Namely, ethologists attribute intentional information concepts to behavioral processes that robustly achieve a difficult goal. Importantly, my account is objective in that it defines key notions like “robustness” “difficulty” and “goal” in a way that is independent of researchers’ interests. Instead, my account takes relationships between an organismal system, that system’s fitness, and that system’s environment to be the objective grounds for attributing intentionality to behaviors in ethology.
Finally, I argue that ethologists’ attributions of intentional information concepts are scientifically fruitful in that they enable researchers to abstract from the causal details of behavioral systems and make useful generalizations about how those behaviors contribute to adaptive goals. In debates over the utility of biological information concepts, Sahotra Sarkar (1996, 2000) has argued that the concept of information failed to gain a substantive role in 1960’s molecular genetics because informational approaches to genetics failed and informational theories about genetics turned out to be false. I conclude by arguing that unlike in molecular genetics, intentional information concepts play a substantive role in ethology.
