First, Jim, thank you very much for providing such a thorough review of our paper. I hope this lengthy reply can be a part of an ongoing dialogue about these ideas.
I’ve written this the same way I did the one for Sergio Graziosi (here) – replying to each point you make without reading ahead.
Quotations are text taken directly from Hamlyn’s critique and are presented in the order in which they appear in his blog post.
“Hopefully they can be persuaded that this is only true if the required representations are of the fully public and intentional sort and not the neural and non-intentional sort that they seem to have embraced.”
As this sentence comes at the very beginning of your critique, let me take a second to say that I think what we propose here is consistent with a conception of public and intentional representations. The notion of informational representations is both public (in that they are external physical structures) and inherently intentional (in that they specify biologically relevant and, frequently, dispositional properties and, as such, coordinating with respect to this information is fundamentally FOR or ABOUT something, which satisfies most people’s construal of intentionality).
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