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A proliferation of fine mentalistic distinctions with little functional basis can be a burden for both sides of the question of whether or not cognition is computation:

Intentionality is sometimes defined as the property of mental states to be about things...[or] the property of a system to understand its own representations... [or] consciously understanding the world around it. [Yet] intentionality is supposed to be different from consciousness or conscious understanding...

If intentionality were just another word for consciousness, most of us could at least agree that it exists, though we still would not know what it is, or what it is for... [I]t seems as if consciousness, not a separate notion of intentionality, is doing the real work in [the objection that computers don't have intentionality].

All the more reason for not making distinctions that over-reach our grasp. Until there is evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to believe that being able to think and being able to feel are separable. In fact, the former may well be grounded in the latter (Harnad 1987). Hence there seems little justification for assuming that there can be "intentionality" independent of consciousness. Computationalism has in any case not shown this, but simply assumed it, and in a particularly weak form, with "intentionality" reduced to mere "interpretability." The "mental" seems to have been left behind long ago.

Yet it won't do to reply:

no one has shown that intentionality is crucial for cognition... Searle has succeeded in showing that it is useless... I can assure you that I do not understand my own symbols... [and that] computers can introspect.

Searle hasn't shown that intentionality is useless, just that it isn't computation. I don't understand what it means to say that one doesn't understand one's own symbols (except when one is doing, say, mathematics mindlessly); I think there is some confusion here with the fact that there are a lot of unconscious processes going on in my head to which I do not have introspective access. It does not follow from the fact that my thinking has a huge unconscious substrate that thinking is therefore unconscious, or independent of my capacity for consciousness. And I certainly can't imagine what it means to say that computers can introspect.

Dietrich rightly points out that

computationalism is incompatible with the notion that humans have any special semantic properties in virtue of which their thoughts are about things in their environment [or that] humans make willful decisions... Humans do not choose, they merely compute.

As to the former, one must alas reply: so much the worse for computationalism. As to the latter, one can agree that humans do not choose (1982a) without agreeing that therefore they only compute (Harnad 1982b).

And the obvious answer to the observation that

If intentionality is only a semantic property, it is virtually ubiquitous. If intentionality is variable binding and lookup, then it is quite common. If intentionality is consciousness, etc. then it is quite rare.

Is that it would appear that it's quite rare, then; and that it isn't computation.

If not computation, then what?

[A] computational explanation differs from a causal law which describes the causal state changes of a system... Computers are as "causally embedded" in the world as humans are [but] the causal connections of referring terms have no role in the computational strategy... which function a system is computing is the only matter of importance...

Since the computer's causal embedding in the world is irrelevant to the interpretation that ``SSSS'' refers to, say, a bird, and since there seems to be nothing in symbol manipulation itself to ground that connection, this again sounds like evidenceagainst the thesis that thinking is computation. There are, after all, functional alternatives. Some processes just aren't computational: Heating isn't; flying isn't; transduction isn't. Why should thinking be? All four will certainly be computationally simulable in a way that can be systematically interpreted as heating, flying, transducing and thinking, but if that's clearly not the real thing in the first three cases, why should it be in the fourth? Perhaps the way to break out of the hermeneutic circle in which pure computation is trapped is to ground some of the "SSSS" 's bottom-up in the functional capacity of a hybrid nonsymbolic/symbolic system (Harnad 1987, 1989) to pick out the things in the world that the "SSSS" 's stand for. Cognition could well turn out to be more like transduction than like computation. This would certainly go some way toward distinguishing between what can be described or interpreted as meaning X and what really is meaning X.

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