Modality, Normativity, and Intentionality *

A striking feature of the contemporary philosophical scene is the flourishing of a number of research programs aimed in one way or another at (as Dretske puts it) making intentional soup out of nonintentional bones-more carefully, specifying in a resolutely nonintentional, nonsemantic vocabulary, sufficient conditions for states of an organism or other system to qualify as contentful representations. This is a movement with a number of players, but for my purposes here, the work of Dretske, Fodor, and Millikan can serve as paradigms. The enterprise in which they are jointly engaged is not so much one of conceptual analysis as it has been traditionally understood as one of conceptual engineering. That is, instead of thinking about what ordinary people or even sophisticated philosophers already mean by terms such as 'representation', they appeal to the tools of the special sciences (for instance, information theory and evolutionary biology) to describe abstractly, but in criticizable detail, how one might craft a situation in which some state arguably deserves to be characterized as 'representationally contentful' in various important senses. Insofar as the theories are good ones, they may shed light on how human knowers actually work. But their immediate aim is a broader one: to say what would count as doing the trick, rather than how we manage to do it. It is not hard to get into a position from which intentionality1 can seem philosophically puzzling. One need not, for instance, be an atoms-in-the-void physicalist in order to want to understand better the nature of the transition from a world devoid of semantic properties to one in which they are at least locally rife. One way of dispelling the sense of mystery that threatens to surround such a transition (indeed, where such a story is possible, the very