"akrasia" [weakness Of Will] In Rational Beings

It Seems To Me Obvious That Infants And Many Animals That Do Not In Any Ordinary Sense Have A Language Or Perform Speech Acts Nonetheless Have Intentional States. Only Someone In The Grip Of A Philosophical Theory Would Deny That Small Babies Can Literally Be Said To Want Milk And That Dogs Want To Be Let Out Or Believe That Their Master Is At The Door.

In The Performance Of An Illocutionary Act In The Literal Utterance Of A Sentence, The Speaker Intends To Produce A Certain Effect By Means Of Getting The Hearer To Recognize His Intention To Produce That Effect; And Furthermore, If He Is Using The Words Literally, He Intends This Recognition To Be Achieved In Virtue Of The Fact That The Rules For Using The Expressions He Utters Associate The Expression With The Production Of That Effect.

I Will Argue That In The Literal Sense The Programmed Computer Understands What The Car And The Adding Machine Understand, Namely, Exactly Nothing.

We Often Attribute 'understanding' And Other Cognitive Predicates By Metaphor And Analogy To Cars, Adding Machines, And Other Artifacts, But Nothing Is Proved By Such Attributions.

You Can't *discover* That The Brain Is A Digital Computer. You Can Only *interpret* The Brain As A Digital Computer.