Acting and Thinking Beyond Oneself

“Meanings are not in the head”, “the mind is in the world”: these slogans don’t really amount to a theory about the location of the mind. Their point is to draw our attention on the fact that it’s impossible to categorize the mental in terms of a simple opposition between the internal and the external. Now this is precisely what contemporary theories of intentionality are trying to do when they define intentionality in terms of directedness, which leads them to assimilate thinking about an object to acting in an extraordinary way on that object (i.e. aiming at it without hitting it).