Intentionality, Language Education and Complex Dynamic Systems

One idea that comes up often in my thinking about language education is intentionality. This is a fairly intuitive construct, but it is also technically loaded and therefore requires some unpacking. The aim of this post is to do this unpacking: explain what intentionality means and how it connects to language and language learning.

Before I go on, I’d just like to make a suggestion about how to read this. Much of what will follow draws on work by philosophers, such as Brentano, Searle, and Wittgenstein, so it operates at a certain degree of abstraction. There are differences in the ways these thinkers conceptualised intentionality, and it is not my intention to take sides, resolve them, or even explain in detail where they differ. What I will do is apply this, through my own lens of Complex Dynamic Systems thinking, to language education. Ultimately, I want to use this apparatus to rethink what a complex system is.

What Intentionality is
(Simply Put)

Let’s start by dispelling the most basic source of confusion. ‘Intentionality’ is not a synonym for ‘intention’ (although there is some overlap). In philosophical terms, when I say that something tends to something else (e.g., ‘the word blue, in this utterance, tends to the colour blue’), I mean that it points towards it, it is directed at it.  

At its core, intentionality is the idea that mental states (e.g., thinking, feeling, believing) are about something. When you think, you always think about something. Similarly, when you believe, you believe something. When you fear, you fear something. This “aboutness”, i.e., the fact that minds point toward things in the world, is what philosophers call intentionality.

Franz Brentano, writing in the 19th century,² described intentionality in the following terms:

Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, and so on.

(Brentano, 1874/2015, pp. 92–93)

For Brentano, intentionality is what distinguishes mental states from purely physical ones. A rock doesn’t point at anything. Someone’s thought of a rock does.

Another useful definition comes from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:³

As indicated by the meaning of the Latin word tendere, which is the etymology of ‘intentionality,’ the relevant idea behind intentionality is that of mental directedness towards (or attending to) objects, as if the mind were construed as a mental bow whose arrows could be properly aimed at different targets.

Jacob (2023)

What does Intentionality Have to Do with Language?

There are two loosely related ways in which intentionality becomes relevant to our thinking about language.

The first one is that language expresses mental states. For example, when I say “I want a coffee” or “I believe it will rain,” I am projecting outwards an intentional mental state (in these examples, a want and a belief, respectively). This state, Brentano tells us, is directed at something. The words give shape to the “aboutness” that was already there.

The second connection between intentionality and language is that words themselves are “about” things. The word cat refers to cats. The sentence “The door is open” is about a state of affairs in the world.

Words, to be clear, don’t point at things on their own; they do so because speakers use them in this way. This is a point the philosopher Paul Grice⁴ developed considerably when he discussed how language connects with deeds or actions in the real world (pragmata, in Greek, hence pragmatics). Grice argued that meaning is grounded in speaker intention. For him, the meaning of an utterance is fundamentally bound to what the speaker wants the hearer to recognise and understand. This is easier to see when there are multiple competing readings of an utterance. For instance, when a teacher responds to a student’s utterance with ‘how clever!’, that could be praise or irony, depending on their intention.

Intentionality and Meaning-Making

If you have reservations about just how universal Grice’s interpretation is, and whether it conflates deliberate intention with abstract intentionality, I suggest you hold on to them for a moment; we will revisit this point soon. What Grice’s thinking usefully provides us with is a distinction between two levels of meaning: natural meaning and non-natural meaning. Language is in the domain of non-natural meaning-making: If you remember your Saussure readings on the arbitrary nature of the sign, there is no natural connection between our mental image of a tree and the word ‘tree’ (or ‘arbre’, ‘arbor’, and so on). Linguistic meaning is, in other words, a product of intentionality.

Level	What it means
Natural meaning	Smoke means fire. Spots mean measles. No intention involved.
Non-natural meaning	“Fire!” means danger. What creates meaning here is the fact that the speaker wants the word ‘fire’ to mean ‘danger’.

Why it Matters for Language Education and Linguistics

If meaning is grounded in intention, then understanding language is never just decoding symbols. It involves reconstructing what the speaker meant to do (their pragmatic intention).

This has consequences for how we think about language teaching, and why it is problematic to reify grammar rules and word meanings. It also helps us understand what is fundamentally wrong with defining grammar without reference to actual speaking practices, or even against them.

You may also want to think about how it connects to debates about whether AI systems, which process language without mental states, mean anything at all, or whether they merely produce well-formed outputs that appear intentional.

Derived Intentionality

Let’s now come back to the complication I flagged earlier. Humpty Dumpty may have been adamant that “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” But, just like Alice, we need to wonder whether a word can mean anything. Or, to connect this to our previous discussion on intentionality: is the intentionality associated with a word completely unconstrained in the speakers’ mind?

To answer this question, we will draw on a different philosopher, John Searle. Searle argued that intentionality is not always a live, active, deliberate mental event.⁵ Rather, repetition and habituation can sediment intentional states. When that happens, what was once a deliberate decision sinks into the background, it gets absorbed into dispositions and practices, and it no longer requires conscious activation each time.

If you are of a philosophical disposition, you will notice the affinity to how Ludwig Wittgenstein approaches rule and rule-following. He reminds us that when speaking, we do not generally consult rules when we speak; we have been trained into techniques. “When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly” he writes,⁶ anticipating Searle’s Background.

Sedimentation and the Intentional Background

I’d like to invite you to think about your first teaching experiences. Your first lesson was probably a stream of conscious deliberate decisions: Where should I stand? How loudly should I project my voice? Should I use the board? How should I sequence the questions? If you are more experienced now, you just teach, and much of this decision-making has collapsed into the background.⁷

Searle actually uses the term Background to describe this set of pre-intentional capacities, habits, and know-how that makes deliberate acts possible without itself being deliberate in the full, directed sense. The important contribution he makes is that the background accumulates through intentionality that is sedimented over time.

In language, we see this everywhere. Fluent speakers of a target language do not consciously apply grammatical rules, because they have sedimented into automatic competence. When someone chooses to say “Could you pass the fire poker?” rather than “give me the fire poker”, this is probably not because they deliberated about face-threatening acts, but because a certain communicative habit has sedimented. And when someone other than Humpty Dumpty uses the word dog, they do not consciously activate a definition. The meaning has sedimented into immediate, unreflective use.

From Individual to Collective Backgrounds

For Searle, the background is individual, but sedimenting and depositing⁸ intentionality applies equally to constructs, texts, artifacts, words that are collectively available. When I write a multiple-choice exercise for a textbook, I am building on intentionality that has accumulated over time across the profession – and this is what allows teachers and learners to use it, even without reading instructions. When several cohorts of students giggle at every mention of page 67 of their textbook, new intentionality gets sedimented into the number, and this shapes my behaviour (prompting me to avoid the passage in question or, at times, to deliberately mention it). This kind of sedimentation is how images become signs, how routines emerge, and how words get their meaning.

Alice, it turns out, was right to be sceptical. Words cannot mean whatever we choose, because the choosing has largely already been done for us, sedimented into the Background by generations of prior use.

Comparing Grice’s and Searle’s Perspectives: How this Complicates the Earlier Picture

The Gricean account that I outlined in the previous section treats meaning as grounded in active, conscious speaker intention. To some extent, this is true (think again about ambiguous utterances). But Searle’s idea of sedimented intentionality qualifies this claim. Much of what makes language work exists as Background competence, not as intention-in-the-moment. You can mean something, and mean it fully, without a conscious intention to mean it.

This opens an important tension, shown in the table below:

View	Claim
Grice	Meaning requires a fully formed, reflexive communicative intention
Searle (with sedimentation)	Much of what we mean is constrained by habits that were once intentional but no longer surface as such

These two views are not actually incompatible: sedimented intentionality was originally intentional, and one can always bring it back to conscious attention. But it shifts the emphasis from intention as an active mental event to intention as something more like an acquired orientation or disposition.

What this Means for Language Learners

Language learners are, in a sense, doing what sedimentation describes. When we learn a language, we often begin with effortful, explicit intentional acts: we consciously select words and monitor our grammar. Eventually, through practice, those acts sediment into fluency. The goal of language learning, on this view, is not just to acquire knowledge but to acquire a Background: a set of sedimented competences that allow meaning to happen without constant deliberate effort.

Expanding the Model: Four Levels of Intentionality

If you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. Searle’s thinking has helped us to establish that intentionality is not a purely intra-personal construct: that means it does not exist entirely or exclusively inside an individual mind. But once we open up the possibility that sedimented intentionality can constrain individual intentionality, then this affords us the opportunity to think about intentionality in even more nuanced ways.

In the Intentional Dynamics of TESOL (Stelma & Kostoulas, 2021),⁹ Juup Stelma and I suggest that intentionality is not even primarily an individual phenomenon. We describe it as distributed across levels of social organisation, with the individual being the smallest and most locally visible unit in a much larger structure. We operationalise this in a model with four aspects of intentionality nested into each other. Here’s how we describe them:

Individual intentionality is the “aboutness of the ideas or psychological states; shared intentionality arises in situations and represents the aboutness of ideas that two or more individual share; derived intentionality is a form of ideational¹⁰ intentionality that has been assigned to (more deliberately) or sedimented into (less deliberately), speech, texts or objects; sociocultural aspects of intentionality include traditions, conventions and normative assumptions and hence are temporally and socially distributed aspects of ideational intentionality.

Stelma & Kostoulas (2021, p. 67)

Two aspects of the model, individual and derived intentionality, are already familiar, so I will not reiterate these. I will focus, instead, on what might be the two levels that add nuance.

Shared Intentionality

We follow an intellectual tradition that was articulated in philosophy by Wittgenstein and given empirical form in developmental psychology by Tomasello and Carpenter (2007).¹¹ The latter draw on Vygotsky to claim that what distinguishes human cognition from other primates is the capacity to transform individualistic behaviours into shared ones. For instance, individual gaze is easily transformed into joint attention, social manipulation can readily follow into cooperative communication and so on. They argue that

what makes human cognition different [from that of other primates] is not more individual brainpower, but rather the ability of humans to learn through other persons and their artifacts, and to collaborate with others in collective activities.

Tomasello & Carpenter (2007, p. 121)

This suggests an aspect of intentionality, shared intentionality, that does not reside exclusively inside the individual mind, but it is also different from the derived intentionality that we find sedimented into text and artefacts as a result of repeated use over time.

Language games, in Wittgenstein’s sense, presuppose this kind of shared intentionality. Think of the exemplary case he offers in the opening of the Philosophical Investigations (§2):

Let us imagine a language […] meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass him the stones and to do so in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose, they make use of a language consisting of the words “block”, “pillar”, “slab” and “beam”. A calls them out and B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call.

Wittgenstein (1953/2009, §2)

What we have here is two builders, a shared task, and an utterance whose meaning is exhausted by the part it plays in their joint activity. What makes this set of discrete components work together is the shared intentionality, i.e., an understanding of the game, its rules and the joint work that emerged through interaction. A move in a language game means what it does only within the game, where the shared intentionality is present. Outside it (if I shout “Slab!” in a faculty meeting), the move is meaningless.

Sociocultural Intentionality

The final aspects of intentionality, which we position at the top of the intentionality hierarchy, comprise the beliefs, norms and ideologies that constrain action at the sociocultural level. Thinking specifically about language education, Juup and I write:

This may include educational policies that determine what schools can or cannot do, school rules and expectations that shape teachers’ and learners’ views and activity, or teaching approaches that enable and constrain teaching and learning. […] In all parts of our lives, including within TESOL, we align ourselves to a range of traditions, rules, and expectations that we perceive to apply to us. We refer to these more permanent features of contexts as sociocultural aspects of intentionality.

Stelma & Kostoulas (2021, p. 62)

Sociocultural aspects of intentionality essentially define the horizon of what counts as meaningful, appropriate, or even conceivable in their context. These are different from shared intentionality in the sense that the latter are more constrained in scope, time, and space. The routines and inside jokes of a language class are only relevant to that class and are no longer relevant when the class ceases to exist. The larger-scale educational policies that fall under the sociocultural intentionality label change more slowly in this sense.

Putting it All Together

In the table that follows, I have put the four aspects of intentionality together, along with an example from a language classroom which shows how they interact.

Level	How it works	An example in a language class
Individual intentionality	Active mental states directed at something (Brentano, Searle)	A teacher forms an intention to respond to a learner error.
Shared intentionality	Procedures that emerge from joint activity	The classroom group has developed norms that constrain the interaction, such as what kind of correction is expected, how learners typically respond etc.
Derived intentionality	Once-active intentions absorbed into dispositions and habits over time (Searle)	Their habitual style of feedback (gentle, direct, implicit) operates without deliberation.
Sociocultural intentionality	Beliefs, norms, and ideologies that shape what is thinkable and doable	Broader ideologies about error, correctness, and the teacher’s role shape what correction even means in that context.

In the model, each aspect of intentionality is nested inside the next. This means that higher levels constrain what is possible at lower ones, although they do not fully determine them. Each aspect is, essentially, the intentional background for the ones that it constrains.

There is also a temporal dimension to the hierarchy: habits and routines take time to coalesce into the background. This can mean that each lower-level aspect of intentionality can be more dynamic than the ones that constrain it. The latter change more slowly, forming a relatively stable backdrop against which the former can vary. Think of the classroom example: a teacher’s moment-to-moment intentions can shift from one lesson to the next while the sociocultural assumptions that frame them stay fixed for years.

Complex Dynamic Systems as Intentional Constructs

Let’s now take our thinking in a different direction. A lot of recent literature, including my own writing, has attempted to explain language teaching and learning through a complex dynamic systems perspective.

An Ontological Problem in CDST in Language Education

Often, and especially in accounts that are too close to the natural sciences, we find descriptions of complex systems as something out there: networks of elements interacting in non-linear ways, producing emergent phenomena. If we think of systems in this way, then the analyst’s job is to discover them, which would involve things like mapping their components and tracing their boundaries.

For example, if I want to describe a school as a complex dynamical system, I will need to make an inventory of items, consult the student register and faculty list, consider the layout of the school and classes, and take into account the timetable. I have written about this, elsewhere, as describing the system’s structure.

There is a danger, in doing so, in assuming that, because the system components have some kind of objective existence independent of the observer, so does the system. But this is philosophically naïve, or at least under-examined. Students exist; teachers exist; timetables exist. They exist whether I want to study the school or not, and whether I decide to use complexity as an informing theory or not. But the system does not exist independently from me as an analyst. Which elements I include, where I draw the boundaries, what counts as interaction are all examples of analytical decisions that define the system; they are not facts of nature.

The Intentionality Move

What I am arguing is that the complex systems that interest us in language education (schools, classes, the students’ motivation etc.) are constructs. This means that they are assembled by a mind (or a collective mind) in order to explain something. And, if we go back to Brentano and his definition of mental phenomena, they are –by definition– about something: a complex dynamical system exists on account of its intentionality, i.e., its directedness toward the objects or phenomena it exists to explain.

There are several implications from this:

1. The system doesn’t pre-exist the act of construing it;
2. Different observers, with different purposes and from different sociocultural positions, may construe different systems from the same phenomena;
3. The system boundary is not a discovery but an intentional act.

How this Connects to the Four-level Model

This is where the more nuanced understanding of intentionality that I am proposing becomes particularly coherent. The intentional construal of a complex system can itself operate at all four levels:

Level	What it looks like in systems thinking
Individual	A researcher decides what to include in their model
Shared	A research group or community of practice shares a construal of what the system is
Derived	Disciplinary habits shape what kinds of systems feel natural to construct
Sociocultural	Ideological and institutional frameworks determine which systems are worth explaining at all

In other words, the system is not just something that we study within a context. It is constituted by intentionality operating across multiple levels. This is not, in itself, a very controversial position: Foucault made a similar point in The Order of Things,¹² where he examined the historical conditions that make it possible for a culture to organise words, things and knowledge in particular ways. What this model offers, I suggest, is a vocabulary and a structure to make this examination more systematic.

The Deeper Implication

This is a move toward what Edgar Morin would call general complexity,¹³ which is, I have argued elsewhere, the more generative way to approach complex dynamic systems theory. In this approach to complexity, the observer is part of the system they describe, rather than standing outside it. The intentionality framework makes this philosophically precise: the system exists as a system because minds are directed toward it at multiple levels simultaneously.

There is a particularly productive consequence of this for language education research in particular: when we model a classroom, a learner, or a language policy environment as a complex system, we are not neutrally describing something. We are performing an intentional act, one shaped by our habits, our collaborations, and the sociocultural ideologies we inhabit. The model is always, in part, a portrait of the modeller.

Where Does this Leave Us?

I began this post by suggesting that intentionality might help us rethink what a complex system is. We can now make that claim more precisely. A complex system is not simply a collection of interacting elements waiting to be discovered. It is also a way of directing attention: toward some entities rather than others, some relationships rather than others, and some questions rather than others. In this sense, complexity is never entirely separate from the purposes, histories and assumptions of the people who invoke it.

A complex system is a way of directing attention towards something we want to understand

This does not mean that complex systems are arbitrary. Some construals will be more coherent, more empirically productive and more useful than others. But it does mean that we should resist treating the boundaries of a system as if they were simply given by the world. Part of the work of complexity-informed research should therefore be to ask not only what is happening in this system?, but also why have we construed this as the system in the first place?

For language education, I think this matters particularly because so many of the things we study (languages, learners, classrooms, identities, policies, even language learning itself) are already saturated with intentionality before the researcher arrives. Seeing them as complex systems therefore requires reflexivity about both the phenomenon and the analytical apparatus through which we make it visible.

Perhaps that is the larger point. Complexity thinking becomes most interesting not when it gives us increasingly elaborate maps of the world, but when it makes us more attentive to how we come to draw these maps.

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Notes

1. To help with this, I propose a heuristic revolving around the idea of coherence. How well does this thinking align with what you have read elsewhere (theoretical coherence)? How well do the various components align with each other? Are there overlaps or contradictions (internal coherence)? And how well does it align with your own experience of language teaching and learning (practical coherence)? ↩︎
2. Brentano, F. (2015). Psychology from an empirical standpoint. Routledge. Original work published in 1874 as Psychologie vom empirishen Standpunkte. ↩︎
3. Jacob, P. (2023). Intentionality. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2023 Edn). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2023/entries/intentionality/. ↩︎
4. Grice, H. P. (1957). Meaning. The Philosophical Review, 66(3), 377–388. https://doi.org/10.2307/2182440 ↩︎
5. Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge University Press. ↩︎
6. [§217] Wie kann ich einer Regel folgen? […] Habe ich die Begründungen erschöpft , so bin ich nun auf den harten Felsen angelangt, und mein Spaten biegt sich zurück. [§219] Wenn ich der Regel folge, wähle ich nicht. Ich folge der Regel blind. (PU, original emphasis)
   I have provided some co-text, to help prevent a possible misunderstanding here. Wittgenstein is not advocating passive, blind obedience to rules. What he is saying is that once my exercise of free will has committed me to a course of action governed by a rule, then the rule takes over. If I want to talk in English about an action happening now, then I will use the appropriate form of the auxiliary verb ‘to be’  and a continuous aspect. That is dictated by a rule outside the realm of free will, one that operates automatically and is inaccessible to the conscious mind (‘blindly’). ↩︎
7. Edd Aspbury-Miyanishi has studied this process (becoming what he calls ‘a skilled teacher’), and has connected it to Heideggerian thinking. That’s an entirely different rabbit hole, however. If you want to enter it, here’s a good starting point:
   Aspbury-Miyanishi, E. (2021). The skilled teacher: A Heideggerian approach to teacher practical knowledge. Curriculum Inquiry, 51(5), 479–495. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2021.1973336 ↩︎
8. I use ‘sedimented’ to refer to the unconscious accumulation of meaning, which I contrast to more deliberate ‘depositing’. ↩︎
9. Stelma, J. & Kostoulas, A. (2021). The intentional dynamics of TESOL. De Gruyter. ↩︎
10. In the book, we distinguish ‘ordinary intentionality’ (i.e., purpose, intention) from ‘ideational intentionality’, which is how I use ‘intentionality’ in this post. When reading this post, feel free to ignore the word entirely. ↩︎
11. Tomasello, M., & Carpenter, M. (2007). Shared intentionality. Developmental Science, 10(1), 121–125. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2007.00573.x ↩︎
12. Foucault, M. (2002). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (2nd Edn.). Routledge. Originally published in 1966 as Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Gallimard). ↩︎
13. Morin, E. (2007). Restricted complexity, general complexity. In C. Gershenson, D. Aerts, & B. Edmonds (Eds.), Worldviews, science and us: Philosophy and complexity (pp. 5–29). World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812707420_0002
    Confusingly, you might come across references to Morin (2005). It is the same paper essentially, as originally presented (in French) at the colloquium « Intelligence de la complexité: épistémologie et pragmatique » , Cerisy-La-Salle, 26 June 2005. ↩︎

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