Anthony Waterman wrote:  
"How can an abstraction (a 'football team') have an 'intent' (which  
implies intentionality, and can therefore be properly attributed only to a  
rational agent)?"  
  
I am intrigued by the connection Anthony Waterman makes between   
intentionality and rationality in relation to individual agency. There   
is indeed quite some recent literature in analytical philosophy making   
this same connection (one of the most recent being John Searle's   
Rationality in Action), and this same connection also figured   
prominently in Rosenberg's 1992 book on economics as a science of   
diminishing returns.  
  
Historically, intentionality was 'invented' by Franz Brentano, if I am   
correct the brother of Lujo Brentano, the German liberal historical   
economist, and Max Weber importantly used the term in his criticism of   
Roscher and Knies. To my knowledge only with Weber become rationality   
and intentionality important terms to characterize economic behaviour.   
Both concepts can be traced back, if one likes, to the firm struggles of   
19th century Germans with Kant and German Idealism.  
  
One will not find the term intentionality, and I would claim neither the   
concept, in the work of any Victorian economist that I know of.   
Victorians explained economic behaviour from motives of action -   
pleasure and pain in the work of early marginalists, but these motives   
were causes of action, that were thought of as forces, not as anything   
intentional. Also self-interest was considered a cause of action, rather   
than something individuals acted on intentionally, let even rationally -   
there is of course nothing rational in self-interest per se. The only   
Victorian economist who talks about rationality in relation to economic   
behaviour that I know of was not an economist, but an engineer: Fleeming   
Jenkins.  
  
The link between intentionality and rationality is the more interesting,   
because of concerns of population biologists in the sixties with the use   
of game theory that some of them considered too intentionally loaden in   
its terminology, and therefore inapplicable to biological species. It is   
also interesting because some neuroscientists (like Glimcher) nowadays   
ascribe rationality to neurons, something severy criticised by  a   
philosopher like Hacker. My question to Antony Waterman would be: do   
neurons have intentions? And why would we need intentionality to say   
anything about economic behaviour?  
  
Harro Maas