Defining Knowledge - About Intentionality

by Maria Odete Madeira

Aristotle introduced the concept of intentionality, when he worked in the problem "relation/knowing", having concluded that the mode of reference of a particular individual's idea to the object constituted the intentionality of the individual's idea.

The medieval scholastics returned to the concept proposing, for it, the expression "intendere arcum in" (the act of pointing an arrow towards something). Intentionality, in the philosophical sense of the term, simply means an aboutness, that should be interpreted as a directedness towards something.

The mechanism of intentionality applies to any entity that may be considered as an agent dispositionally gifted of a strategically operative internal structure. The origins of life can be traced to the origins of agency, the biological activity possesses, foundationally, in its adaptive nature an intentional drive, as the organism actively addresses (is directed towards) the environment and its own survival.

The self-replicating macromolecules, the thermostats, the amoebas, the mice, the bats, people and, even, chess playing computers are intentional systems (Dennett). In a more general sense any complex adaptive system is an intentional system (Holland; Gell-Mann; Damásio).

All living organisms, both those that are made up of a single cell, as well as those that are made up of billions of cells are systematically formed by spatialized intentional structures, temporally permanent, strategically committed to their survival, limited by borders, in permanent interface with the environment, depending, the individuality of each organism, upon the existence of that border.

A living organism such as an amoeba, being alive, it is strongly committed to keep on living. Being a creature with no brain, certainly it is not aware of the intentions of its organism in the same way that an organism with a brain may know its organism's intentions, nonetheless, the tiny creature exhibits in a very dynamic and effective form of intentionality in the way it is able to maintain the chemical profile of its internal milieu, while, around it, in the external environment, everything changes quickly. As Lewontin stressed, all living organisms have the ability to act in function of time and of regulating biological rates which, in mathematical discourse, is equivalent to stating that they also make integral and differential calculations.