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