Types of intentionality

4 types of intentionality, in order of phylogeny and ontogeny

1. IntentionalityA (action affordance) - abstract, program level, goal directed action based, shared content with multiple agents. (As we find in monkeys and apes). 6 months to 1 year of age.

2. IntentionalityO (particulars/object based) - concrete, indexical, particular, cause-effect, predicative, with multiple knowing agents who may be motivated to share information. Developmental stage of 'shared attention' at around 14 months and later pre-linguistic 'false belief' understanding at around 2 years of age (Southgate et al. 2007). Here we perhaps have unified 'access consciousness' and a shared, public world of particulars and states of affairs in a space-time continuum. Also the idea of the 'narrative self'. Here we have the right cognitive equipment and the right sort of cognitive ontology for language learning to take off. We also have notions of possession/ownership as well as sharing at this stage.

3. IntentionalityN (normative standards based) - actions, behaviour, practices, objects, etc, meaningful in terms of 'correctness' criteria operating in a social self-regulating way. Here we find an understanding of adopting norms or correct rules in a game, etc. Starting around 3 years of age.

4. IntentionalityI (intepretative/aspectual) - here, through more sophisticated language use and a meta-representational ability, there is an understanding of different senses or interpretations of the same objective state of affairs., mediated through language Here there is ability in language mediated false belief tasks, opacity tasks, and meta-cognitive tasks. 4-7 years of age. These abilities- one might argue - are all language mediated. Here we begin to grasp full 'folk psychology' to predict and understand others.