Over the past year or so, two very interesting books in the philosophy of nature have attracted attention outside of the ultra-rarefied world of academic discourse: Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions and Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Both of these works have been extensively discussed in popular magazines, radio shows, blogs, and esp. at Uncommon Descent. Here, I want to briefly describe what I see going on here and open up the topic for critical discussion.
Rosenberg’s central claim is that “the physical facts fix all the facts” — all the sociological, psychological, biological, and chemical facts that there are, are determined by the facts about fermions and bosons. Anything that cannot be explained in terms of bosons and fermions just is not the case. This means that there is no such thing as intentionality, teleology (purposiveness), or meaning — not really. These notions turn out to be nothing more than cognitive short-cuts that our distant ancestors evolved in order to survive on the African savannah of the lower-to-mid Pleistocene. Intentionality is no obstacle for Rosenberg’s naturalism, because there’s just no such thing. (Interestingly, he does concede that mathematics is a problem for naturalism — why he makes the concession for mathematics, but not for intentionality, puzzles me greatly.)
Nagel, by contrast, takes the opposite view: that the unquestionable reality of intentionality and consciousness strongly suggests that disenchanted naturalism — Rosenberg-style naturalism — simply cannot be the whole story. What he proposes instead is what he wants to call “natural teleology”: that there is a basic tendency at work in the cosmos towards living things with intentionality and consciousness.
Rosenberg insists that intentionality teleology cannot be naturalized; Nagel insists that they must be. But it is not really clear what “natural teleology” might mean, or whether intentionality could be naturalized. So that’s what I want to explore a bit further.
On one common interpretation, intentionality and teleology require that there be “final causes”. And final causes seem to be the sort of thing that the scientific revolution dispensed with — that’s what it means to say that the modern conception of nature is “disenchanted”. But while it’s certainly true that the scientific revolution showed the uselessness of final causation for doing physics (and maybe chemistry), I submit that the scientific revolution did not show the uselessness of final causes for biology (let alone psychology. etc.) So there’s one way of understanding the irreducibility of biology to physics: biology requires final causes, and physics does not.
However, that seems inadequate, because we still want to know where final causation, or purposiveness, comes from. (This is the ‘hard problem’ that makes the problem of the origin of life seem so intractable.) How can we naturalize final causes without reducing final causes to efficient causes? (I’m open to different ways of framing the problem than this one, of course.)
A provisional solution: final causes can be explained in terms of efficient causes. “Wait a minute!”, one might say, “doesn’t that just reduce them to efficient causes, in that case?” And to that my answer is “no.” We would be reducing final causes to efficient causes if we showed that we could replace all talk of final causes with talk of efficient causes, without suffering any loss of predictive success or explanatory power. But that’s a kind of conceptual analysis — whereas what I’m talking about is explaining final causes in terms of efficient causes, which is not a matter of rejecting final causes or eliminating them from our scientific world-view, but a matter of showing how to make sense of final causes — which are, I submit, indeed indispensable for biological and psychological explanations — within the modern scientific world-view.
Nature can be, perhaps, partially re-enchanted after all.
I’m glad you started this. I’ve had a half-written post on Nagel’s book for so long, I’ve forgotten the book by now!
That’s ironic, considering that it was your desire to start a conversation about it that motivated me to join TSZ!
Whatever all there is is, it’s all there is; we just don’t know all there is and never will.
Next problem. 😉
I’m hopeless.
petrushka,
I didn’t realize metaphysics was so easy!
Somewhere Quine writes (paraphrasing), “the problem of metaphysics can be posed in three monosyllabic English words — ‘what is there?’ — and answered in one trisyllabic English word — ‘everything’/
I enjoyed the book, actually. I thought he made a nice case at the beginning about why we shouldn’t dismiss alternatives to a materialist account for life, just because we had the glimmerings of a materialist account. Unfortunately, he totally underestimate the size of the glimmerings.
And I like the idea of a fifth force that tends to pull particles in the direction that will lead to consciousness.
If I thought consciousness really was a Hard Problem, I’d be quite taken with it.
Also “teleonomy” is a word that deserves wider use.
My main complaint about Nagel is similar to my main complaint about Plantinga, which is why I was motivated to start this post — since we were talking about Plantinga in the other thread.
Plantinga and Nagel both think that, when our intuitions conflict with our theories, we have good reason to prefer our intuitions over our theories. (Nagel says as much in the introduction to Mortal Questions.) And, since Plantinga and Nagel are extraordinarily bright, they are able to cast their intuitions in a seemingly irrefutable form.
Rosenberg is the other extreme: he thinks that when our theories conflict with our intuitions, we should always prefer our theories. He’s one step more extreme than Dennett and Churchland, who have a similar stance.
Whereas I, being the good little pragmatist that I am, think that whether we endorse our intuitions or our theories, whenever they conflict, depends on a whole host of considerations that can’t be determined in advance one way or the other.
Yes, I would need to look back at Monod and Mayr to see where this term comes from and how it is figuring in the history of the discussion. I don’t work in philosophy of biology, and I really wish I did.
I was somewhat puzzled by your statment that “intentionality” implies final causes. I wouldn’t have said that about “Brentano’s intentionality” (intentionality in the sense of “aboutness.”) Nor, really about “intentions” in the more ordinary sense, which I would describe as a particular class of representation.
Could you elaborate a bit?
BTW, I’ve really enjoyed your contributions to the conversation in recent months.
Reciprocating Bill 2,
I like the question! Conceivably, I’m conflating “intentionality” in the Brentanoian sense — intentions as representations — with intentionally-mediated actions. Those clearly do involve final causes — a for-the-sake-of-which. (But maybe that have that character because they are actions?)
My hunch is that it’s not just possible to separate intentions from their role in intentionally-mediated actions, but I don’t think I have a really good argument to vindicate that hunch.
P.S.: Thank you! It’s nice to be recognized!
I also was confused by intentionality and teleology in your title, as there is a Teleological Theory of Mental Content which can be brought into play against the EAAN, and I thought you were going to expand on that based on your last post!
But this is an interesting post anyway.
I’ve read Rosenburg but not Nagel. I got frustrated by what I recall as his refusal to accept explanations at different levels, ie the difference between agreeing that everything is physics and agreeing that everything is best explained by physics. I’m going by memory on that and I may be a mistaken about his views.
This can only be a recommendation of the work as fiction. Not to say that such a force can’t exist, but it’s an empirical question, and Nagel isn’t a physicist.
I like the idea of an undiscovered force that tends to pull particles in the direction that will lead to cheesecake. And another force that tends to pull particles in the direction that will lead to Socialism. Why not a force that tends to pull particles in the direction that will lead to Woody Allen?
Both intuitions and theories have a lousy track record. Even scientific theories are almost always wrong, but at least they do sometimes turn out to be
rightvalid within a limited domain of applicability. However, given a choice between Evolutionary Psychology and intuition, I would choose neither.IIRC, the first half of Ruth Millikan’s Language, Thought and other Biological Categories speaks to teleonomy (function in biology) in the context of selection (What other efficient cause could account for it?), yet leaves “function” intact. It’s a tough slog, but very interesting.
I don’t think it’s a teleology that would satisfy the denizens of UD, however. In fact, they should find it threatening.
KN,
In your opinion, what phenomena cannot be explained in terms of efficient causes, even in principle? And why?
I disagree with Rosenberg already.
Here’s my alternative, which nobody will like:
There are no physical facts.
Yes, for sure, there are facts about fermions and bosons. But facts themselves are intentional objects, and there is no physical account of intentionality. So facts themselves are not physical, which is why I conclude that there are no physical facts.
You can probably see why I say that I am not a materialist.
Here’s another place for me to be contrary.
We have put a man on the moon (several of them, actually). Is that even possible without first making it a final cause?
So here we have our scientists and engineers working at engineering final causes, while our philosophers are telling us that science has abolished final causes.
It looks to me as if you are conflating “facts about the physical world” and “facts that are physical”.
I don’t like the word “facts” at all. We have models and we have data, and even our data are just models at a lower level of analysis.
It’s models all the way down.
Speaking for myself (and I hope Dennett) it’s not about preferring theories over intuition. It’s about taking the lessons of science seriously. Drawing the distinction between theories and intuition partly obscures this, since theories are not limited to science, and intuition isn’t absent from science. But one of the lessons of science is to be suspicious of our intuitions and to subject them to as much skeptical, evidence-based scrutiny as we reasonably can.
Another lesson of science is that we can model reality at several levels of abstraction, and that we should take models seriously if they’re useful for explaining and predicting reality. Our talk about beliefs and desires constitutes such a useful model, which is why we should not be eliminativists about beliefs and desires, as Rosenberg apparently wants us to be.
As for “intentionality” I find the word too unclear to be useful. It’s sometimes said to mean “aboutness”, the ability of things (thoughts, beliefs, language, symbols) to be “about” other things. If that’s all it means, then it certainly does exist. It’s certainly true and useful to say that the novel Moby Dick is about a whale (among other things). There’s no great difficulty in explaining such facts naturalistically. However proponents of the idea that there’s some deep problem of “intentionality” seem to have in mind something more than this. They sometimes talk about “original intentionality”. This is one of those philosophical terms of art which it seems impossible to make sense of. I’m unsure whether to say that there’s no such thing, or just to say that the term is useless.
” final causes seem to be the sort of thing that the scientific revolution dispensed with — that’s what it means to say that the modern conception of nature is “disenchanted”.”
It would be nice if Kantian Naturalist/Emergentist included something about the person who popularised the discussion of ‘disenchantment (of the world)’, i.e. Max Weber and what he meant by it instead of what Rosenberg means by it. http://www.maxweberstudies.org/MWSJournal/1.1pdfs/1.1%2011-32.pdf
As a critical aside, it is quite astonishing how badly ‘western’ philosophers in the analytic tradition mistake ‘final causes’ (or want to ‘explain’ them with ‘efficient causes’) given that the western ‘philosophy of science’ (PoS) is pretty much only ‘philosophy of natural sciences.’ Nevertheless, one cannot escape ‘final causes’ or ‘means-end rationality,’ goals, purpose, plans, i.e. teleology in human-social sciences, though many ‘disenchanted’ (mainly read: atheist, agnostic, skeptic) social scientists have tried time and again and failed. But again, just as he has not read Bhaskar’s formidable critical realism (which does indeed overlap with other critical realisms, e.g. Margaret Archer’s) on the topic of ‘naturalism,’ the philosophy of human-social sciences, iow, neither recognising nor discussing a broader PoS than his American tradition offers seems to be another of KN/E’s shortcomings.
I’ll be curious to hear KN/E’s proposals for ‘re-enchantment,’ not only (naturalistically) of ‘nature’ with magic, but of humanity, in case he has something inspiring to offer here. So far, ’emergentism’ doesn’t cut it.
Iow, to the OP’s first question – “Naturalising Teleology and Intentionality?” – my answer is: not worth it. To the second question – “Must Nature Be “Disenchanted”?” – my answer is: not if you are a pan(en)theist, animist or theist who articulates a careful ‘natural theology.’
However, those are 3 -ists with which I don’t think the author of this thread is (yet) willing to label himself.
It seems to me that this discussion underscores the difficulty many have accepting the conclusions to which science seems inexorably to be trending: that life has origins in processes that are not alive, that intelligence has origins in processes that are not intelligent, that consciousness and intentionality have origins in processes that are themselves not characterized by consciousness and intentionality, and that the human capacity for “purposing” itself was never “purposed.”
I expected that objection. But I don’t think your objection works. Those at the extremes of materialism, such as Rosenberg, really are making strong use of what they claim does not even exist.
Analytic philosophy, for the most part, seems to be a study of abstract propositions. It claims to be a study of the world and of our engagement with the world. But it cannot be more than a study of the mindless manipulation of meaningless symbols, unless it can connect its abstract propositions to reality. Without that connection, it can at most be describing a solipsist’s made up world.
Rosenberg admits that he has a problem with mathematics. But mathematics is the least of his problems, since mathematics is about a made up reality and does not pretend to be about the world (about reality).
People have attempted to come up with completely logical languages. That actually works reasonably well in mathematics, with formal languages. But, as far as I know, it has never worked for talking about reality. The best they have been able to do for discussing reality, is create languages such as esperanto which are loosely based on natural languages. We really do need that intentional vocabulary. Likewise, we really do need intentionality in the sense of aboutness, and I doubt that we will ever come up with a satisfactory materialist account of that.
What is this “it” that is models all the way down? I agree that our descriptions of reality (including theories) are models all the way down. But sometimes we want to refer to how things really are, and not just to our best models of how they are. That’s when the word “facts” can come in useful, despite its vagueness.
When Rosenberg says that “the physical facts fix all the facts” he seems to be expressing some sort of physicalist view. I haven’t read his book, so I won’t try to work out just what he means. But I call myself a physicalist, and I think there is something of this sort worth expressing. It’s difficult to find just the right words. I usually use the word “supervene”, as in: the higher-level facts supervene on the facts of physics. I could avoid the word “facts” and just say that everything above the level of physics supervenes on physics. But I think that amounts to the same thing. Both are rather fuzzy, but I think some degree of fuzziness is inevitable.
I want to say that there is just one reality, modelled at several levels. But I also want to say something about the relationship between the levels. The lowest level models are the most complete and precise. I want to say that everything in our high-level models must map (in some sense) to the lowest levels. (People are often tempted to use the word “explain”: there’s nothing at the higher levels that can’t be explained at the lowest levels. But that causes problems.) There are no macroscopic entities (e.g. cups) or mental entities (e.g. beliefs) that are not instantiated in bits of reality that can be modelled at the lowest levels of physics.
At the same time, we shouldn’t expect the same type of direct mapping between beliefs and atoms that we see between cups and atoms. Cups and atoms have a constituent relationship: cups are constituted of atoms. The relationship between beliefs and atoms is more fuzzy. My beliefs are what they are by virtue of the arrangement of atoms in my brain. But there isn’t a neat correspondence between particular beliefs and particular atoms.
A quick addendum.
I want to be clear that although I say I am not a materialist, I am also not a theist. I’m a “take the world as it come”-ist, if there is such a thing. I don’t much go for those “ism” labels.
In my book, Rosenberg isn’t really a materialist. More accurately, he is a reductionist. He expects a reductionist account of everything in terms of some basic propositions about matter. But his starting point is not matter. His starting point is abstract propositions (which are, themselves, immaterial objects) that purport to be about matter.
I am not a reductionist. I mostly agree with Mike’s criticisms of reductionism. It is not clear to me that non-reductive materialism has any important implications, so I find it less confusing to stick with a simple “non-reductionist”.
One materialist account of aboutness coming up… (copied from my recent comment in another discussion)
Consider a simple robotic vaccuum cleaner, one that moves around the floor and maintains a database of the locations of objects it’s bumped into, so it can avoid bumping into them again. The robot acquires data about the objects in its environment. The data is about the objects by virtue of the fact that it resulted from the right sort of causal process, a process of modelling the objects.
I’m not persuaded that’s an account of intentionality (aboutness). It is subject to the criticism that it is only using derived intentionality, and not original intentionality. In this case, we would look to the robot’s designers for the original intentionality.
Dennett would possibly agree with you. His view seems to be that there is only derived intentionality, and that there isn’t such a thing as original intentionality. Perhaps Rosenberg shares that view, in which case my prior comment on Rosenberg might be off-target.
Would you be willing to elaborate a bit more on why the UD crowd would find Millikan’s views threatening?
I haven’t read Millikan, sad to say — though I have a copy of LTBC on my shelf and have been planning to get to it for some time now.
I agree that this kind of modelling of an environment is part is usually meant by ‘intentionality’, but I’m far more inclined to say that while this is a useful analogy for how how animals represent their environments, it’s not intentionality because one important feature of intentionality is linguistic.
I would defend the idea of “original intentionality”. The arguments that Dennett gives for dismissing the very distinction between “original” and “derived” intentionality end up with an instrumentalist philosophy of science, which I find implausible in light of the arguments for scientific realism. However, I do think that Dennett is right in arguing, against Searle in particular, that the brain cannot be the site of original intentionality — the brain is just a syntactic engine, not a semantic one.
So, where is original intentionality located? I think that there are (at least) two different kinds of intentionality, and problems arise because we want to construe intentionality as being of a single kind. One kind of intentionality, the intentionality of propositional attitudes, is what I call discursive intentionality, and it is “at home” in the linguistic community as a whole. The other kind of intentionality, the intentionality of perception and action, is what I call somatic intentionality, and it is “at home” in the lived body. (So I appeal to Robert Brandom for the first kind, and Merleau-Ponty for the second.)
As for this:
I would like to bring to your attention one of my favorite remarks by Nietzsche:
It is this “belief in opposites” that metaphysicians, especially theistic metaphysicians, find impossible to doubt — and from that perspective, it will seem simply unintelligible how purposiveness could emerge from non-purposive dynamical patterns, how consciousness and intentionality could emerge from creatures that lack them, and how rationality could have emerged from non-rational social behavior.
Do you mean to say that you do think there are physical facts but there can be none in Rosenberg’s philosophy?
It seemed to me that you were outright claiming there are no physical facts because facts are not physical. The implication is that you are perhaps even a more strict materialist than an eliminative materialist.
Thank you for the link to Weber’s article. I hadn’t mentioned it explicitly in the OP because I was only trying to set up the conversation. I’m quite aware of it.
That seems a bit unfair. Just because I haven’t read Bhaskar, doesn’t mean I’m unaware of the philosophy of social sciences. In fact, I know quite a bit about the debates within 19th and 20th century German philosophy concerning the distinction between the Naturwissenshaften and Geisteswissenschaften. I’ve read a good bit of Hegel, and a fair amount of Cassirer, Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas — including the Adorno-Popper debate about the methodology of sociology. Although I’ve been working lately in “analytic philosophy,” actually my background is in “Continental philosophy”. My dissertation was on Nietzsche, strongly influenced by Foucault and Deleuze, and I’ve published on Kant, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Levinas. Lately I’ve been working on the development of similar themes in Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell.
In any event: I don’t see how explaining final causes in terms of efficient causes undermines the methodological autonomy of the social sciences or the reality of the phenomena disclosed by those methods.
Why doesn’t emergentism cut it?
I’m not entirely averse to “animism” — actually, David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, in which he relates ‘animism’ to eco-phenomenology, has had a huge impact on me.
However, I’m more interested in the critique of the disenchantment of nature in Theodor Adorno, who thinks that the domination of nature for human purposes has been massively destructive for both human and non-human potentiality. His view is hard to classify, though it clearly leans heavily towards the rehabilitation of teleology of the German Romantics.
I wonder what you all think of the following line of thought: “the physical facts” are facts about the physical world. Thus, facts have an intentional structure — they are assertions that refer to or are about states of affairs. But, ex hypothesi, intentionality has no place within a physicalist ontology. Therefore, according to physicalism, there are no facts (since there is no ‘aboutness’), and so there are no physical facts.
Yes, that’s a fair way of putting it.
Thanks. You explained that better than I did.
I’m sympathetic to Nagel about that, though not about much else. But I also have a problem with Nagel on that. If he expects a natural teleology, why isn’t he busy identifying it? This isn’t something that he can leave to scientists. “Teleology”, “intentionality” are most philosophers words. They are not anything that science is concerned about. So an account of teleology and intentionality as part of nature should come from philosophers.
Having some knowledge of both science and philosophy, I have given my own account of teleology. I don’t see much there that would require a scientist’s research lab. It looks to me as if it is mostly philosophy.
That looks really interesting! Have you read anything by Varela, by any chance? He has a fantastic essay called “Life After Kant” (PDF) that I recommend really highly.
Thanks for the link.
I did read Varela & Maturana book. Well, perhaps that overstates it. I borrowed the book from the library, and at least skimmed through it. But that was a while ago, and I wasn’t ready to read it thoroughly. The general idea seemed right, but its approach was a bit too hand-wavy for me.
I do think biology requires something along the lines of teleology. What I discussed in my series of blog post seemed likely to be sufficient.
Neil Rickert,
Yeah, “Tree of Knowledge” was pretty hand-wavy — I wasn’t crazy about it. But I thought “The Embodied Mind” was fantastic, and I’ve been following Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life, Kauffman’s stuff on autocatalytic sets, and Bob Hanna’s work on embodiment. Somewhere in there, I’m pretty sure, are the ingredients for the right view. I’ll take a look at your posts in the next few days, and I hope others here do as well!
KN,
It’s a version of the mereological fallacy: the idea that the whole can’t possess attributes that the parts in isolation don’t also possess.
Which is silly, of course. It would be like arguing that computers can’t add because individual transistors don’t have that ability.
Right!
Has anyone here read Neuroscience and Philosophy? The authors, Bennett and Hacker, claim that neuroscience is prone to a “mereological fallacy,” in the sense that neuroscientists and philosophers of neuroscience often ascribe to the brain (or its parts) properties of the whole organism/person. (Such as having propositional attitudes.) There are criticisms by Dennett and by Searle. I found Searle so-so, but thought Dennett had some good insights into concept-formation in the sciences.
KN, responding to Richard Wein’s robotic vacuum example:
But then later in the same comment:
In what sense is perception an example of intentionality if a robot’s representation of its environment is not?
It’s sitting unread on my bookshelf. 🙁 My eyes are bigger than my stomach, reading-wise.
Alva Noë makes a similar argument about consciousness in his book Out of Our Heads.
I’m not persuaded. I think consciousness would persist in a brain that was cut off from all sensory input (though it would quickly become disordered, as it does in other experiments with sensory deprivation).
To be honest, that is the Really Big Question that I don’t have a really good answer to. But I need to have an answer to it for the book I’m working on. So let me take a day or two to repeatedly slam my head against the wall, and I’ll get back to it — hopefully sooner rather than later.
It is clear that at a certain level of description facts plainly exist. I certainly don’t think this leaves dualism as the only alternative! So it is, to me, a question of what is meant by “exist”, or to quote Lizzie, it depends what the meaning of is is.
If mind doesn’t exist, as some physicalists assert, then obviously intentionality doesn’t exist. However, I think it is better to say that mind exists at a certain level of description and that it cannot exist absent the physical. Mind supervenes on the physical, but whether this means I must be labelled as a supervenience physicalist or can call myself something else I don’t know, and leave to your expertise.
The robot’s representations are at most derived intentionality, while perception by humans (and other mammals) is an example of original intentionality. At least that would be a standard view.
Here’s an example of the distinction (personal opinion, of course)
When I feel pain, that represents some internal problem such as excessive pressure. I take that to be derived intentionality (derived from the “design” or genetic inheritance). Similarly, pangs of hunger might represent low blood sugar – again, derived intentionality.
When I sit on a chair and find it comfortable, and when I pick up a peach to eat, that is mostly original intentionality. The distinction here are that these involve concepts that I learned, while the ones that I said were derived came as part of our genetic heritage. Those cases of derived intentionality might be very important as part of the reward system that allowed me to acquire the original intentionality.
An important difference here is that for the concepts where I am ascribing original intentionality, we know the meanings quite well. We know it because the concepts originated from our learning. For the examples I gave as derived, we don’t really know what they represent. We just try to make inferences about that from our knowledge of anatomy and physiology.
That’s my attempt to make the distinctions you asked about.
Advocates of ID want to cite function in biology (as in, “it is the function of the heart to pump blood”) as evidence of a designer – you can’t have purpose without a purposer.
Millikan argues that the biological function of an organ is that feature that accounts for it’s having been selected. Hearts both pump blood and go lub-dub; the first is the function of the heart and the second not because efficiency in circulating blood is that characteristic that accounts for the selection history of hearts.
She therefore presents an account of function that doesn’t require purposing, and therefore does not entail teleology and designers, vitiating the ID argument in that regard.
Neil,
It isn’t a question of original vs derived intentionality. KN claims that the robot’s representation isn’t an example of intentionality at all, because it lacks a linguistic aspect:
Yet he’s willing to ascribe intentionality to perceptual states:
Taken together, those statements imply that there is a linguistic aspect to perception that is missing from the robot’s representation of its environment. I can’t see what that might be.
But perception happens even in newborn children. They are “pre-wired” to see, for example, and they prefer to focus on faces rather than other arrangements of similar shapes.
By your criterion, their vision would be an example of derived intentionality, not original intentionality, since it is unlearned.
I disagree with KN on that. Perception isn’t linguistic, yet is widely regarded as intentional and so regarded even by KN.
I’m not so sure about what a newborn infant can be said to perceive. Reacting is not the same as perceiving. Focusing on faces is probably a part of learning, and that would be where they develop the original intentionality that we ascribe to visual perception.
The miming of an assembly procedure doesn’t exhibit intentionality? A cartoon caricature doesn’t exhibit (derived) intentionality? A circuit diagram?