On Wed, 25 Jan 2006, 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)? Even if we are to adopt a psychologistic understanding of the denotation of 'intent', and it is far from obvious that we should, I wager Anthony will have to count dogs and cats among his "rational" agents. (I.e., I wager that his explanations of e.g. dog behavior rely on attributions of intentionality.) If we go beyond a simple psychologistic understanding of intent to less "soul-full" stories about actors, then we can begin to understand the attribution of intent as a useful strategy in circumstances beyond those in which we might suspect a ghost in the machine. Alan Isaac