Derived intentionality designates the meaning of an artifact that does not belong to it of itself, but is conferred upon it by a consciousness. A map indicates nothing if no one reads it. A text means nothing without a reader who understands the signs. A computer program has no relation to the world that does not derive from programmers and users. In Minds, Brains, and Programs (1980) and Intentionality (1983), John Searle set this form of intentionality, as derivative, against the original intentionality of a consciousness.
The Chinese Room Argument demonstrates this: a person who manipulates written characters according to a rulebook, without any knowledge of Chinese, produces correct answers — yet understands nothing. Syntax alone is not sufficient for semantics. Even the most perfect output remains parasitic so long as the putative speaker does not himself mean his words.
Current large language models such as GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4 produce assertions that are highly meaningful to human readers. Grindrod (2024), as well as Strachan et al. (Nature Human Behaviour 2024), show that the meaning of these outputs is derivative — it depends on the fact that we mean something by language. Without enactive world-grounding, the model remains a syntactic engine. It can pass the Turing Test without having genuine understanding — and precisely this is marked out by Block (Blockhead Argument) and Dreyfus as the limit of behaviorism.
From a substance-ontological standpoint, derived intentionality is not a defective mode of genuine intentionality, but structurally different: it is the trace of an enacting consciousness, not an enactment. Whoever confuses a trace with an enactor commits a category mistake. Daniel Dennett’s symmetry thesis — that both forms are equally derivative — is rejected by appeal to the principle agere sequitur esse.
The distinction has ethical consequences: an artificial intelligence is not a bearer of responsibility, because it enacts no act as its own. Truth-apt acts — rendering a judgment, taking on an assertion as one’s own, giving a promise — remain reserved for the being that is itself directed toward the true.
Ontological classification: Broader concept: Intentionality; mutually exclusive with Original Intentionality.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Searle, John R. (1980): “Minds, Brains, and Programs”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(3), pp. 417–457.
- Searle, John R. (1983): Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Grindrod, Jumbly (2024): “Large language models and linguistic intentionality”. Synthese 204:71. DOI: 10.1007/s11229-024-04723-8.
- Strachan, James W. A. et al. (2024): “Testing theory of mind in large language models and humans”. Nature Human Behaviour 8(7), pp. 1285–1295.
See also
- Original Intentionality
- Intentionality
- Chinese Room Argument
- Turing Test
- Artificial Intelligence
- Computational Conception of Intelligence
- Agere sequitur esse
- John Searle
- Hubert Dreyfus
Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.