Intentionality, Network, Background: is the Background formalizable, or does representation depend on nonrepresentational know-how?

John Searle, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Intentional states have conditions of satisfaction (what would make them true, fulfilled, or accurate) and a direction of fit (mind-to-world for belief and perception, world-to-mind for desire and intention).¹²³ Intentionality is intrinsic to organisms; the intentionality of language is derived from the intentionality of speakers. Representation intention is prior to communication intention; meaning is mental, and one can mean without intending to communicate.

Intentional states do not function in isolation: they require a Network of further intentional states that give them their content, and the Network itself rests on a Background of nonrepresentational mental capacities, practices, and know-how.⁴⁵ The Background is not itself intentional, not formalizable into rules, and not reducible to further beliefs. It is the precondition of intentional content, not a species of it.

Sources

1. But they do not function in an independent or atomistic fashion, for each Intentional state has its content and determines its conditions of satisfaction only in relation to numerous other Intentional states. We saw this in the case of the man who forms the intention to run for the Presidency of the United States.

   Intentionality, pp. 141–142

2. Anything that has conditions of satisfaction, that can succeed or fail in a way that is characteristic of intentionality, is by definition a representation of its ions of satisfaction. So far I have been concerned to lay out certain fundamental distinctions.

   Making the Social World, pp. 30–31

3. So far, we have two features in our general account of the structure of intentional states—the distinction between propositional content and type of intentional state, and the notion of direction of fit, together with the idea of different directions of fit. We can now introduce some complexities to each of these two features.

   Mind, Language and Society, p. 116

4. I hold the controversial thesis that intentional states in general require a background of nonintentional capacities in order to function all. I have given a very brief sketch of the formal structure of intentionality. We can summarize it as follows. For any intentional state, there is a distinction between the type of state it is, and its content.

   Mind - A Brief Introduction, pp. 184–185

5. The thesis of the Background is simply this: Intentional phenomena such as meanings, understandings, interpretations, beliefs, desires, and experiences only function within a set of Background capacities that are not themselves intentional.

   The Rediscovery of the Mind, pp. 179–180

Where the argument is made

• Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Chapters 1-5 and Chapter 5 on the Background
• The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), Chapter 8 on the Background
• "The Background of Meaning" (1980, reprinted in various collections)
• Consciousness and Language (2002), essays on intentionality, conversation, and rule-following

How the argument was received

Held continuously since Intentionality (1983). The Background is the corner of the system most often pressed by opponents who want it formalized into a deeper layer of rules; this would be a category mistake. The representation-before-communication claim is the central dispute with Grice and the post-Gricean tradition, and the example of the private diary or the statement made to a comatose person settles it. The Quine-Davidson indeterminacy project, which presupposes that meaning must be fixed from behavioral evidence alone, gets the order wrong; meaning is mental first, behavioral second.