Standard objections to dualism focus on problems of individuation: what, in the absence of matter, serves to diversify immaterial items? and interaction: how can material and immaterial elements causally affect one another? Given certain ways of conceiving mental phenomena and causation, it is not obvious that one cannot reply to these objections. However, a different kind of difficulty comes into view when one considers the question of the origin of the mental. Here attention is directed upon the case of intentionality. (...) It might seem that the transition between non-intentional and intentional phenomena could be dealt with by adopting a version of Dennett's discharging strategy, but this is argued against. Several responses to the origination problem are identified, including a creationist one. (shrink)

The structuralist heritage in linguistics continues to obscure the essential properties of natural language as an empirical phenomenon. It is argued that the new framework of autopoiesis possesses a greater explanatory power, as it assumes the connotational na-ture of language. The key notions of representation, sign and signification, interpreta-tion, intentionality and communication, and reciprocal causality, approached from the autopoietic angle, allow for deeper insights into the essence of language which is as a kind of adaptive behavior of an organism involving (...) a system constituted by signs of signs. (shrink)