Erkenntnis (2024) 89:705–721

[Link]

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Intelligent Behaviour

Dimitri Coelho Mollo1,2

Received: 29 April 2021 / Accepted: 19 March 2022 / Published online: 6 May 2022
© The Author(s) 2022, corrected publication 2022

Abstract
The notion of intelligence is relevant to several fields of research, including cogni-
tive and comparative psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and philosophy,
among others. However, there is little agreement within and across these fields on
how to characterise and explain intelligence. I put forward a behavioural, operational
characterisation of intelligence that can play an integrative role in the sciences of
intelligence, as well as preserve the distinctive explanatory value of the notion, setting
it apart from the related concepts of cognition and rationality. Finally, I examine a
popular hypothesis about the underpinnings of intelligence: the capacity to manip-
ulate internal representations of the environment. I argue that the hypothesis needs
refinement, and that so refined, it applies only to some forms of intelligence.

1 Introduction

The notion of intelligence is notoriously difficult to characterise precisely. Part of

the reason for this is that the concept of intelligence lives many different lives, some
pretheoretical, some within a variety of scientific disciplines. In psychology, the per-
haps dominant approach has been to come up with ways to measure human intelligence,
mostly by means of various types of tests, and then try to explain individual variation
in the scores obtained by appeal to differences in underlying capacities (Ne˛cka and
Orzechowski 2004; Sternberg and Pretz 2004). Intelligence tests often include tasks
that concern linguistic and mathematical capacities, excluding thereby from consider-
ation nonhuman forms of intelligence that do not employ external symbolic systems.
Furthermore, a consensus about what it is that such tests measure is lacking.

B Dimitri Coelho Mollo

[Link]@[Link]

1 Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
2 Cluster Science of Intelligence, Berlin, Germany

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 706 D. Coelho Mollo

Human intelligence is also the benchmark in Artificial Intelligence, which relies on

rarely articulated common-sense understandings of intelligence—an approach inher-
ited, perhaps, from the influential but problematic Turing Test (Turing 1950). In
comparative psychology and ethology, different degrees of intelligence are ascribed to
different animals in light of the capacities they display, although clear criteria are typi-
cally lacking, or are overly anthropocentric (see Hurley and Nudds 2006b). Moreover,
in animal cognition research, as in philosophy, intelligence is commonly conflated
with the related notions of cognition and rationality, with a few notable exceptions
(Hurley and Nudds 2006a; Fridland 2015).
This rather confusing situation, in which intelligence is characterised differently
within and across scientific fields, let alone in everyday usage, calls for a close exam-
ination of the notion of intelligence. One way to go is to argue that, for the reasons
just mentioned, intelligence is too vague and diverse a notion to really find a home in
science. We should rather eliminate or replace it with something better, clearer and
more tractable. I cannot help but feel the lure of such a position, especially once one
is reminded that intelligence research is a relatively old field, going at least a century
back, and still struggling to understand what it is supposed to be about. Eliminativism’s
allure notwithstanding, I will argue that the notion of intelligence is scientifically and
philosophically fruitful, and that there are promising ways to circumscribe it so as to
make it explanatorily and theoretically useful.
I propose five basic desiderata that a notion of intelligence should meet if it is
to play valuable epistemic and pragmatic roles in the sciences that make use of the
notion. In light of these desiderata, I provide a substantive, practice-oriented view
of intelligence that can be shared among the many sciences of intelligence, paving
the way for cross-disciplinary interaction and integration. Interaction and integration
which, I take, are crucial to make progress in shedding light on the nature, roles, and
varieties of intelligence in the biological and artificial realms.
Here is how I will proceed in what follows. In Sect. 2 I present and defend five
desiderata for a satisfying characterisation of intelligence, and I briefly delve into the
limited, but substantial agreement on some core features of intelligence that can be
gleaned from existing work on intelligence. I put forward my operational, behavioural
characterisation of intelligence in Sect. 3. I expand this defence in Sect. 4, proposing a
distinction between intelligence, cognition, and rationality. Finally, in Sect. 5 I argue
that the influential hypothesis that intelligent behaviour is explained by computational
processing of internal representations needs further refinement, and applies only to
some forms of intelligence.

2 Delineating Intelligence: Some desiderata, and some agreement

In order to try and shed light on the distinctive features of intelligence, as well as on its
explanatory role in the relevant sciences, it is important to look at the characterisations
of intelligence offered by scientists working in those fields. This does not mean that
we need to take their word as writ in stone—a doomed stance to take, given the many
extant disagreements. Looking for a fruitful, cross-disciplinary characterisation of
intelligence—or anything more ambitious than that—is not a matter of accommodating

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 Intelligent Behaviour 707

intuitions or pretheoretic assumptions, not even experts’ intuitions and assumptions.

It is rather a matter of identifying a notion of intelligence that can play a distinctive
theoretical and explanatory role—both as explanans and as explanandum—in the
relevant sciences. Examining the characterisations suggested by practitioners of those
sciences offers a promising way to understand what roles the notion of intelligence is
supposed to play in them. It remains however an open possibility that closer analysis
may reveal that no such theoretically satisfying notion is available, or that there are a
plurality of different notions in different fields, with no unification possible. Intuitions
in one direction or another may thus be flouted, and bear very little, if any, epistemic
weight.
Before we take a closer look at extant characterisations of intelligence, it is worth-
while to get a better grip on what we should be looking for, if our aim is to identify
a basic, shared, scientifically fruitful understanding of the notion that can make space
for integration between the different relevant fields of research. These aims suggest
the following desiderata for a notion of intelligence:

• Species-neutrality An adequate notion of intelligence should not be characterised

in such a way as to a priori privilege one species over others. This can also be called
the non-anthropocentrism desideratum, since the tendency has historically been
that of giving pride of place to what prima facie only humans can do as the criterion
for intelligence, such as language comprehension, playing chess, and doing pred-
icate logic. Anthropocentrism about intelligence is problematic on several counts.
First, it constrains without justification the realm of what is intelligent to the spe-
cific cognitive and motor abilities, needs, interests, and ecological embeddedness
of a single biological species. Second, and most centrally for my purposes, anthro-
pocentrism denies that there can be a cross-disciplinary notion of intelligence
covering also the behaviours and abilities of nonhuman systems—biological and
artificial—that ethologists, animal cognition researchers, comparative psycholo-
gists, and AI researchers are interested in. If humans are taken as the standard, we
may end up failing to properly study and understand the varieties of intelligent
behaviour, if any, that follow from cognitive and bodily make-ups that are radi-
cally different from the human one, or to do so only by means of comparisons to
a standard that has little to do with the needs, goals and ecologies of nonhuman
systems.
• Origin-neutrality Analogously to species-neutrality, an adequate notion of intelli-
gence should not be characterised in such a way as to a priori privilege systems with
one type of origin. This is crucial to avoid excluding non-biological systems, such
as potential future artificial systems, from counting as intelligent, or downplaying
their intelligence. Moreover, a notion of intelligence that applies exclusively to
biological systems, or that takes them as standard, risks failing to make space for
alternative forms of intelligence that may be proprietary to non-biological sys-
tems, given their possibly very different abilities, goals and aetiology (i.e. natural
selection vs. design). Such a biology-centred notion of intelligence would ignore
or downplay potentially rewarding avenues of research into forms of artificial
intelligence possibly very unlike biological ones.

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 708 D. Coelho Mollo

• Multiple realisability An adequate notion of intelligence should not be charac-

terised in such a way as to a priori privilege one kind of implementing mechanism.
It is possible, and given current knowledge very plausible, that intelligence is
multiply realised: that is, brought forth by a diversity of different underlying mech-
anisms. The case is clearer when reading ‘mechanism’ structurally: we have good
reason to think that different physical structures, biological and artificial, individ-
ual and collective, can underlie intelligence. This is likely also true on a more
abstract, functional reading of mechanism: there may be different organisations of
internal (or collective) functions, however implemented, that can give rise to intel-
ligence. While there is a chance that this may prove false, for instance if it turns
out that having a certain functional organisation or implementing a certain set of
computations is necessary and sufficient for intelligence, it certainly should not be
assumed from the get-go. Thus multiple realisability should remain as a desider-
atum, which may though be rejected in light of future empirical and theoretical
work.
• Epistemic distinctiveness An adequate notion of intelligence should be such that
it plays a distinctive theoretical and explanatory role in the relevant sciences.
That means that the notion must add something of epistemic value to scientific
theories and explanations. It should not be merely a terminological variant of
other useful notions, such as cognition and rationality. It should thus be useful for
categorising a distinctive set of phenomena of interest, which call for distinctive
theories and explanations. This does not mean that we need commit to the idea that
intelligence corresponds to a natural kind in the world, or to any neatly delimited
type of phenomenon. In order to satisfy this desideratum, a notion of intelligence
must organise scientific theorisation and experimentation in fruitful ways, open up
promising paths of research, and offer useful tools for explaining, measuring, and
modelling the phenomena of interest. None of this entails realism about intelligence
as a natural kind, let alone any type of essentialism. It does not entail their falsity
either.
• Responsiveness to scientific practice An adequate notion of intelligence should be
such that it is not overly revisionary, that is to say, it should respond to and refine the
use already made of the notion in the relevant sciences. As mentioned above, this
does not mean just accepting the extant characterisations of intelligence offered
by practitioners, as they may flout some or all of the above desiderata, and their
simple combination, given the existing disagreements, would lead to incoherence.
This desideratum does require, however, that extant characterisations and the use
they are put to should inform an adequate notion of intelligence. They are good
points of departure for an adequate notion of intelligence, but not the point of
arrival.

In sum, a notion of intelligence that can be a plausible candidate for allowing cross-
disciplinary integration of the relevant sciences, and for being scientifically fruitful
should, as a minimum, be species- and origin-neutral, allow multiple realisability, be
epistemically distinctive, and responsive to scientific practice. In the next section, I will
propose a characterisation of intelligence that meets these desiderata. First, however,

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 Intelligent Behaviour 709

I will take the cue from the last desideratum, and look at extant characterisations of
intelligence, so as to use them as stepping stones to my own proposal.
A variety of definitions and informal characterisations of intelligence have been
provided throughout the hundred years or so of dedicated scientific work on intelli-
gence across different fields, several of which collected in Legg and Hutter (2007a).1
I will leave it to the reader to peruse those definitions. For my purposes, it suffices to
point out that while it is often noted that a shared, accepted characterisation of intelli-
gence is lacking within and across the various fields that study biological and artificial
intelligence, it is less often recognised that there is a considerable degree of agreement
across the board on several features taken to be central to intelligence. A large number
of proposed definitions of intelligence make explicit or implicit reference to at least
one, and often several of the following factors:
Generality, or displaying appropriate behaviour in a wide range of different tasks
and circumstances;
Flexibility, or adjusting behaviour in light of changing and/or uncertain circum-
stances;
Goal-directedness, or forming and pursuing goals appropriate to the circum-
stances;
Adaptivity (adaptive learning), or informing current and future behaviour in light
of past interactions with the world.2
So as to respect the responsiveness to scientific practice desideratum, these largely
agreed-upon core features of intelligence should inform attempts to come up with a
scientifically fruitful cross-disciplinary characterisation of intelligence. The stage is
now set for my positive proposal.

3 An Operational, Behavioural Characterisation of Intelligence

Before I go on, it is important to keep in mind that my aims are partially but crucially
different from those that spurred several of the extant definitions of intelligence. I
am not looking for a definition in any strict sense of the word: no set of necessary
and sufficient conditions that capture the ‘essence’ of intelligence, nor conditions the
fulfilment of which is criterial for something to count as intelligent. In part this is
due to the fact that I am deeply sceptical of the existence of strict definitions and
criteria for most interesting, not merely stipulated scientific concepts, especially in
the special sciences. Most importantly, the phenomena that the notion of intelligence

1 See also Legg and Hutter (2007b), Fridland (2015), Lake et al. (2016), Hurley and Nudds (2006a), Shevlin
et al. (2019), Marcus (2020).
2 Other factors that are less often mentioned include: metacognitive abilities (Sternberg and Pretz 2004;
Ne˛cka and Orzechowski 2004), neural efficiency (Schulz 2010), and environmental and symbolic scaffolding
(Dennett 1996; Deacon 1997). For a similar breakdown of the core features of intelligence, see Fridland
(2015). She identifies adaptive learning in particular as crucial, the other three features being explainable
in terms of it. I will remain neutral on this question, although I believe that none of those four features
are conceptually or explanatorily more central than the others. I take them rather to form an interdefinable
cluster of concepts, with goal-directedness being the most primitive and least specific. At any rate, none of
what follows hinges on this.

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 710 D. Coelho Mollo

tries to capture appear to be too fuzzy, diverse, and variable for them to be non-trivially
accommodated by a definitional or criterial straitjacket.
My ambitions are much more modest, but also, I take, more fruitful. I aim at an
operational, minimal characterisation of intelligence that fulfils the five desiderata set
out above, each of which has independent justification, as we have seen. The desiderata
on species- and origin-neutrality and multiple realisability, in particular, forbid any
characterisation that privileges one or a few species, biological over artificial systems
(or vice-versa), or specific kinds of mechanistic or functional realisations. They invite
a characterisation that is purely behavioural, and thus neutral on all those respects.3
A behavioural characterisation has moreover the extra, pragmatic bonus of relative
simplicity of detection: behaviour, after all, is relatively easy to observe and test.
It is not as easy to categorise, however, and thus a behavioural characterisation of
intelligence should help to individuate some sorts of behaviour as the ones that are
indicative of intelligence—providing, as it were, a behavioural symptomatology of
intelligence.
Paying heed to the considerations above about the core features of intelligence
typically mentioned in existing research, I venture the following operational, purely
behavioural characterisation of intelligence:
An intelligent system S is a system that manifests behaviours4 that are often
enough
• general, i.e. that are appropriate in a variety of different circumstances;
• flexible, i.e. that change appropriately in light of changed, novel, or uncertain
circumstances;
• goal-directed, i.e. that are appropriate in light of goals S plausibly possesses;
• adaptive, i.e. that change appropriately in light of previous interactions with
the world.
Being purely behavioural, and embodying the four core features of intelligence that
play a central role in most existing definitions of intelligence—in their behavioural
translations, as it were—the foregoing characterisation clearly fulfils four out of the five
desiderata it was meant to satisfy, namely species-neutrality, origin-neutrality, mul-
tiple realisability, and responsiveness to scientific practice. Manifesting behaviours
that have those four features fits well with the apparent target of the notion of
intelligence in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, ethology and comparative psy-
chology (and possibly also folk intuitions).
The characterisation above does not involve any direct or indirect requirement that
intelligent systems be biological or artificial, that they belong to specific species, or
that they possess a specific kind of mechanistic or functional organisation—thereby
leaving open the possibility that intelligence is multiply realised both structurally and
3 Hernández-Orallo (2017) also focuses, for similar reasons, on behavioural factors as central to charac-
terising intelligence, especially when it comes to psychometrics. However, he employs a broader notion of
behaviour, which for him includes personality traits and cognitive processing, than the one operative here,
which makes reference exclusively to overt behaviour.
4 It is also possible to cash out this characterisation in terms of dispositions to behave, at least under
Vetter’s (2014) possibility conception of dispositions, which individuates dispositions purely in terms of
their manifestations, rather than of stimulus-manifestation pairs, as per the traditional view.

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 Intelligent Behaviour 711

functionally. Moreover, it suggests relatively straightforward ‘tests’ for the presence of

intelligence: systems that manifest often enough behaviours with those characteristics
in their habitats, under experimental conditions, or perhaps in simulated environments,
are to be operationally characterised as intelligent.
The proposed characterisation has two further features worth mentioning. It is
somewhat fuzzy, insofar as what counts as ‘often enough’, and what counts as similar
or different circumstances cannot be determined precisely, and certainly not a priori.
Such judgements depend on case-by-case assessment of the epistemic value and rea-
sonableness of ascriptions of intelligence. Systems that rarely display behaviours with
the relevant features are plausibly to be placed outside the fuzzy boundaries of the
domain of intelligence. Clearly to be excluded are one- or few-shot cases in which
those features of behaviour are manifested, but for which there are better explanations
in terms of coincidence or luck. Similarly, systems that behave appropriately only in a
certain kind of task—e.g. recognising objects in different scenes—do not display the
form of generality in behaviour required by the operational characterisation. However,
borderline and unclear cases are to be expected, given the fuzzy nature of the proposed
characterisation, and of the phenomena it tries to capture.
The foregoing characterisation is fuzzy along another dimension, insofar as the
symptoms of intelligence it individuates are themselves a matter of degree. In particu-
lar, patterns of behaviour may be more or less general, and more or less flexible. This
fact indicates two paths worth treading.
A conservative option is to hold that there is a threshold, albeit vague, under which
the degrees of generality and flexibility in behaviour become such as not to count as
symptoms of intelligence any more. Above this threshold we find different degrees of
intelligent behaviour. The threshold should be set in light of pragmatic and epistemic
considerations; in terms, that is, of the pragmatic and epistemic fruitfulness, or lack
thereof, of ascribing intelligence, and different degrees of intelligence, to systems in
different locations in this graded space.
An alternative option is to reject the idea of a threshold, and embrace a liberal view
of intelligence, according to which most or all biological and artificial systems are
intelligent, albeit most to a relatively lower degree, and few to a higher degree. This, I
believe, might be the strategy preferred by those philosophers and scientists that have
recently been exploring the idea that intelligence can be found in relatively simple
systems, such as bacteria, fungi, and plants.
I will argue for the first, conservative view in the next section. After all, it will
not have escaped the reader’s attention that I have been silent so far on one of the
desiderata, namely epistemic distinctiveness. Respecting this desideratum, I will
show, puts quite some strain on the liberal option.
Before going further, however, an important aside is in order: it is worthwhile to set
aside a classical objection to behaviour-based definitions of intelligence, put forward
by Block (1981). Block famously criticised behaviour-based definitions of intelligence
by imagining what came to be called Blockheads: systems comprising giant look-up
tables or tree structures that include all possible sensible behaviours given any possible
input, in addition to a brute force string or tree search computational procedure to find
the appropriate output for each input. Block argues that it is clear that such systems are

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 712 D. Coelho Mollo

not intelligent, even though their behaviour would be indistinguishable from a human’s,
concluding that behaviour-based definitions of intelligence are thereby misguided.
While Blockheads may be conceivable, they are nomologically impossible, as
Block himself (mostly) recognises. It is also debatable whether intuitions about such
outlandish cases should be given much weight. At any rate, the sort of behavioural char-
acterisation I am suggesting here is neither definitional nor criterial: it is operational,
motivated mostly by epistemic and pragmatic considerations. Whether Blockheads
are conceivable, nomologically possible or else is thereby irrelevant to the forego-
ing proposal. Operational characterisations should be expected to fail in some cases,
especially in highly contrived or atypical ones, such as Blockheads.5 This does not
jeopardise the epistemic and pragmatic value of the characterisation, provided that it
proves to be fruitful in its application to actual biological and artificial systems, as
well as to realistic potential future systems.

4 The Distinctive Role of Intelligence

The notion of intelligence is typically, and justifiably, used in conjunction with the
notions of cognition and rationality. The boundaries between the notions are often
unclear. There is little agreement within and across fields about whether these notions
capture different phenomena at all, intelligence being sometimes conflated with cog-
nition, sometimes with rationality. The lack of terminological agreement is in itself
unhelpful, as it may hinder cross-disciplinary exchange in an area of research that is
by its very nature interdisciplinary. Regimenting terminology is thereby valuable and
important. But I believe that there is more to the issue than mere terminology.
These three notions, I hold, play distinctive explanatory roles in our sciences of
cognition and behaviour. For when properly constrained, they capture specific sets of
phenomena that pose different questions, call for different methods of investigation,
and play different explanatory roles. In sum, in order to respect the epistemic dis-
tinctiveness desideratum, a characterisation of intelligence should be non-trivial, and
such that it sets intelligence apart from the notions of cognition and rationality.
Let us start with the notion of cognition. As Fridland (2015) points out, in the
cognitive sciences cognition is applied quite broadly, encompassing most or all of the
internal processes in the nervous systems of organisms that help to inform behaviour,
including thereby sensation, perception, various forms of learning, memory, among
many others. In mainstream cognitive science, these processes are typically taken to
consist of computations being performed over internal representations (Godfrey-Smith
1996; Dennett 1996; Penn et al. 2008; Schulz 2010; Marcus 2020).
Internal representations are states of a system that carry information about or stand
in for external states—such as the presence of food or predators in the environment—
and are used by the system or its subsystems in virtue of that, so as to guide appropriate

5 Similarly for cases in which intelligent systems are permanently prevented from behaving (e.g. due to
locked-in syndrome). Ascription of intelligence to such systems must rely on additional considerations,
having to do, for instance, with whether the system is a token of a type that typically displays intelligent
behaviour, whether we have grounds to believe that the dispositions to behave are still present but cannot
be manifested, etc.

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 Intelligent Behaviour 713

behaviour. The conditions of adequacy of representations—that is, the conditions that

determine whether a representation is true or false, satisfied or else—are representa-
tional contents. The content of a representation is what the representation is about,
or, more intuitively, what it means. Often an additional requirement is added: only
representational contents that depend on the history, interactions, and workings of the
system itself are taken to be relevant to characterising cognition—representational
contents that depend on the intentions and purposes of other systems are excluded
(Adams and Aizawa 2008 phrase this requirement in terms of non-derived content,
see also Rowlands 2009).6
Alternative accounts deny that cognition need involve computations over represen-
tations (Varela et al. 1991; Hurley 1998; Noe 2004; Thompson 2007; Lyon 2017).7
Such approaches see cognition as involving, minimally, processes of self-maintenance
and self-organisation that are the bread and butter of life: maintaining the internal
organisation and boundaries of the organism, preserving its unity in its dealings with
its environment, and partly thanks to such dealings. Cognition, on this picture, is
widespread in the biological realm, from bacteria to plants to mammals—albeit com-
ing in many gradations, from less (bacteria) to more complex (humans). On this view,
there are forms of cognition that may not involve computations and representations,
while it remains a possibility that some forms of cognition do.
It is well beyond the scope of this paper to settle this debate, which came to be
known as the quest for ‘the mark of the cognitive’ (Adams and Aizawa 2008; Adams
2010; Rowlands 2009; Lyon 2017; Sims 2021). What should be rejected, I take, are
overly demanding, narrower characterisations of cognition, which have been common
especially in philosophy of mind. According to such views, cognition comprises only
processes involving conceptual thinking, reasoning, planning, and other capacities that
humans typically excel at (Fodor 1975; Adams 2010). This has led to what Hurley
(1998) has dubbed the ‘sandwich picture’ of the mind. Perception and action are the
two loaves of bread, between which lies the cognitive filling: the central executive
processes that truly constitute cognition. Cognition, on this understanding, largely
corresponds to intelligence (Fridland 2015).
As Sims (2021) argues, such narrow views of cognition fail to capture the prac-
tices of cognitive science. Indeed, the domain of phenomena that cognitive scientists
investigate includes capacities very unlike the ones delineated by such narrow views,
such as non-flexible, automatic, and stereotypical behaviours (e.g. perceptual biases,
behavioural routines); innate, non-learned capacities and behaviours (e.g. innate learn-
ing biases and conceptual structures8 ); domain-specific capacities and behaviours (e.g.
cognitive modules and behavioural habits9 ); non-conceptual and subpersonal states

6 In consequence, this additional requirement is incompatible with pragmatist and fictionalist theories of
representation (Egan 2014; Sprevak 2013; Coelho Mollo 2020), while it is arguably compatible with views
that are realist about representations but not about representational vehicles (Dennett 1981, 1991), as well
as with forms of semirealism about representation (Coelho Mollo, forthcoming).
7 Some of these philosophers also defend the more radical claim that the body and sometimes the environ-
ment are themselves part of cognitive states and processes. These more radical approaches typically adopt
the label ‘4E cognition’, which stands for embedded, embodied, enacted, and extended cognition.
8 See e.g. Mandler (2004) and Carey (2009).
9 See e.g. Carruthers (2006) and Fridland (2019).

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 714 D. Coelho Mollo

and processes (Shea 2018); associative and reinforcement learning; in addition to the
more complex capacities involved in reasoning, language, and planning that narrow
views privilege (Lyon 2017).
A broader understanding of cognition is thereby to be preferred. Importantly for
my purposes, a broad notion of cognition, motivated by the foregoing considerations,
allows us to carve up smaller domains of cognitive phenomena that have distinctive
features. Intelligence, I hold, is one such domain.
Therefore, cognition is best understood broadly, capturing capacities that are com-
mon in phylogeny and ontogeny. I will here remain neutral on which specific view of
the mark of the cognitive is to be preferred among the broad ones.10 In either case,
cognition is a process-based notion: it refers to capacities of biological and artificial
systems that involve certain kinds of processes, be them computational processes over
representations, or processes of self-maintenance and self-organisation. Cognition is
thereby an undemanding notion, which might be applicable to plants, fungi, bacteria,
should ongoing empirical research provide compelling evidence that they undergo the
appropriate kinds of processes picked out by the preferred mark of the cognitive.
In consequence, the notion of cognition includes those systems to which a liberal
view of intelligence may want to ascribe low levels of intelligence. This indicates that
using the notion of intelligence in this liberal way has little epistemic value, insofar
as claiming that such systems have low levels of intelligence does not add much of
epistemic and pragmatic value over and beyond the claim that they are cognitive.
For this reason, I prefer the more conservative view of intelligence mentioned in
the previous section. If the proponent of the liberal view should introduce additional
distinctions to capture the relevant quantitative and qualitative differences between
what, by their lights, would all be instances of intelligent phenomena, then the liberal
view would amount to little else than a terminological variant of the conservative view.
Importantly, the conservative view does not exclude by fiat the possibility that
plants, fungi, bacteria, and other similar systems might be intelligent. It just requires
them to meet more demanding standards—manifesting general, flexible, goal-directed,
adaptive behaviour often enough—than the ones to be met to count as cognitive.
Whether such systems meet those standards or not is of course an empirical question.
Rationality, in contrast, captures a much narrower domain of phenomena. As
Kacelnik (2006) points out, there is considerable variation over how to characterise
rationality across different fields—all of them narrower than the characterisations of
cognition (and intelligence). In philosophy and psychology, he argues, rationality is a
process-based notion involving deliberation and reasoning in the formation of beliefs
and belief-like states. In other fields, such as economics and evolutionary biology,
rationality is, on the contrary, purely or mostly an outcome-based notion, focused
on the extent to which systems’ behaviours respect or approximate optimality con-
straints fixed by a normative model, typically involving reward or fitness maximisation
(Kacelnik 2006). Even in its process-based characterisation, the normativity involved
in judgements of optimality is central to the notion of rationality, for which metacog-
10 Even though I think that the representational view is more promising, insofar as views based on self-
maintenance and self-organisation risk failing to accurately capture cognitive scientific practices by going
to the other extreme in comparison to narrow views: they make cognitive science encompass an overly rich
domain of phenomena, including most of biology.

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 Intelligent Behaviour 715

Fig. 1 Relationships between cognitive, intelligent, and rational biological/artificial systems. Question
marks indicate areas that may not be occupied

nitive processes of error detection and confidence estimation may be required (Hurley
and Nudds 2006a; Stanovich 2012). In addition, the normativity of rationality may
come from many different sources, several of which tied to anthropocentric economic,
social, and moral values (Pepperberg 2006).
My contention is that intelligence lies somewhere in between cognition and
rationality. Some intelligent systems are cognitive systems, and some intelligent
systems—those that respect normative and/or optimality constraints and involve
additional error-sensitive processes—are rational. I remain neutral on whether all
intelligent systems are cognitive. While the claim seems plausible, a definite answer
depends on the open question of the mark of the cognitive. Should we take processes
of self-maintenance and self-organisation to be characteristic of the cognitive, there
might be computational-representational systems that are general, flexible, adaptive,
and goal-directed but that lack those processes—they would thereby be intelligent,
but not cognitive. On the other hand, should we take the presence of computations
over representations as central to cognition, then it becomes more likely that all intel-
ligent systems are also cognitive, since the core features that characterise intelligence
arguably require such processes (see Sect. 5).
Rational systems, in their turn, may not be all located within the set of intelligent
systems, at least if we accept pointillist rationality, that is, narrow domain-specific
rationality: think of DeepBlue or AlphaGo and their rational choices of winning moves
in chess and Go. In consequence, while there are some intelligent systems that are
rational, there are (pointillist) rational systems that are not intelligent.11
The relationships between cognition, intelligence, and rationality are illustrated in
Fig. 1.

11 And not even cognitive, if such systems, as seems plausible, fail to compute over non-derived represen-
tations, or fail to feature processes of self-organisation and self-maintenance.

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 716 D. Coelho Mollo

If these considerations are on the right track, intelligence turns out to have its own
distinctive theoretical and explanatory identity, occupying a specific place in the con-
ceptual repertoire of the relevant sciences. Its being more demanding than the notion
of cognition, furthermore, indicates that the characterisation of intelligence provided
is not trivial. It seems thus that we have good grounds to claim that the foregoing
behavioural characterisation of intelligence meets epistemic distinctiveness as well.

5 Looking Under the Hood

I have defended a behavioural, operational characterisation of intelligence that, I have

argued, meets the five desiderata aimed at unifying and organising cross-disciplinary
research on intelligence. An intelligent system, I have claimed, is one that manifests,
often enough, behaviour that is general, flexible, goal-directed, and adaptive. Before
closing, I would like to examine a popular hypothesis about the underpinnings of
intelligence in mainstream cognitive science, according to which intelligent behaviour
is produced by computational processes over internal representations (Godfrey-Smith
1996; Lake et al. 2016; Garson 2019). I will try to show that this hypothesis, if it is to
be fruitful and informative, needs to be further refined; and that so refined, it provides
at best partial explanations of certain forms of intelligence.
Importantly, the question at hand is different from the one that occupied me in
previous sections, namely that of providing an operational characterisation of intelli-
gence that can be fruitful across the sciences interested in intelligent phenomena.12
Here, instead, my aim is to evaluate a claim about how the behaviours that charac-
terise intelligence may be realised in intelligent systems. In other words, while the
characterisation of intelligence is purely behavioural, in order to satisfy the multiple
realisability desideratum, once we determine that a system or a family of systems
fulfils the characterisation, we can then ask by what means they are able to display
intelligent behaviour. Such an explanation will typically involve specific kinds of
processes, among which a prominent candidate is the computational processing of
representations.
The idea that intelligence involves representations is very influential, being part and
parcel of the mainstream commitment in cognitive science to representational accounts
of cognition, whereby internal representations are appealed to in explaining cognition
as a whole, as we have seen above. In light of the considerations in Sect. 4, however,
appealing to the use of representations tout court as distinctive to explanations of
intelligence would be problematic.
If we accept the mainstream view that cognition is characterised by the perfor-
mance of computational processing over (non-derived) representations, appealing to
representation in explaining intelligence would not be distinctive of intelligence, since
such an appeal is also called for in explaining cognition. If we endorse alternative,
non-representational views of cognition instead, the situation does not improve. While
such views arguably put a lower bound to cognition than representational views, they
are compatible with the claim that many paradigmatic cognitive phenomena involve

12 I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for urging me to clarify this point.

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 Intelligent Behaviour 717

representations, such as the ones listed in the previous section. Those phenomena,
however, include non-flexible, non-general, non-learned behaviours. In consequence,
once again, appeal to representations tout court would not add anything distinctive
to an explanation of intelligence, since representations are already appealed to in
explaining some forms of non-intelligent cognition.
A more promising suggestion regarding the relationship between representation and
intelligence, I take, is to appeal to demanding kinds of representational processing in
explaining certain kinds of intelligence. The modified hypothesis thus becomes the
following: representational processing of certain kinds provides a plausible, partial
explanation for certain kinds of intelligence, in particular at the high flexibility, high
generality end of the spectrum. This does not preclude that there may be a plurality of
different explanations that apply to different families of intelligent systems, and/or to
different forms and degrees of intelligence.13 What kind of representational processing
might be the relevant one?
Let us go back to the four core features of behaviour that characterise intelligence,
namely generality, flexibility, goal-directedness and adaptivity. Let us see which prop-
erties representational processing must have, such that it can help generate behaviour
with high degrees of those features.
The relevant computational processing of representations must be such that it
exploits information about the environment stored in representations, putting that
information to use, if need be, in different circumstances (generality). In addition, it
must be such that the stored representations are modified in light of experience in such
a way as to make future behaviour more appropriate and/or more likely to be suc-
cessful (adaptivity). The relevant representational processing must also be such that it
appropriately combines stored representations in novel ways, employing them to deal
with new, changing and/or uncertain circumstances (flexibility). Finally, the relevant
processes must be such that they can produce and use directive representations, that is
to say, representations that represent goals to be achieved; or more weakly, that they
help guide behaviour toward achieving the system’s goals—regardless of whether the
goals are explicitly represented (goal-directedness).14,15
In order to fulfil these requirements, the representations produced and used must be
storable, reusable and combinable at least to some degree. One way in which represen-
tational systems can have these features to a high degree is by having or approximating
compositional structure, which allows productivity and systematicity. That is to say,
the representational system must produce and use representations that are approxi-
mately discrete, that are to some degree context-insensitive, and that can be combined
following principles of composition, such that together they can produce an indefinite
number of composite representations whose contents are a function of the contents
of the component representations. Natural languages are paradigmatic examples of
13 Thus the multiple realisability desideratum is not jeopardised.
14 I thank an anonymous review for bringing this point to my attention.
15 Another motivation often adduced for appealing to internal representations is that they increase the
efficiency of information storage and decrease computational load. Representations allow systems to
use compressed versions of the rich information gathered from the environment, selected in terms of
its behavioural relevance, thus helping tackle what is known in Artificial Intelligence as the ‘curse of
dimensionality’ (Lake et al. 2016; Poldrack 2021).

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 718 D. Coelho Mollo

such compositional, productive representational systems, motivating Fodor (1975) to

posit a Language of Thought (LOT), or Mentalese, a proposal closely related to the
traditional symbolic approach to Artificial Intelligence (Newell 1980).
I am not arguing for LOT specifically. It does fit the bill at hand, but it is likely not
the only option do to so. After all, as I pointed out above, approximating compositional
structure may well be enough. The representations may have fuzzy boundaries and
overlapping parts, thus not being fully discrete. They might also be context-insensitive
only relative to a more or less wide range of contexts, and their combination principles
may take the shape of soft constraints, rather than rigid logical rules (Smolensky 1988).
Sub-symbolic architectures, such as connectionist networks, can thereby possess the
relevant representational features as well.
I have been qualifying my claims about computational processes over representa-
tions being explanatory of intelligence by saying that they are at best partial. Why so?
There are two main reasons.
First, rich representational structures as the ones involved in quasi-compositional
representational systems may not be needed for many sorts of moderately general
and flexible intelligent behaviour. Map-like or tree-like representational structures,
which fall short of the representational power and productivity of language-like
representations, may suffice for flexible, adaptive, goal-directed behaviour with lim-
ited generality—for instance, behaviour that concerns only limited, albeit broad task
domains, such as spatial and social navigation (Camp 2007, 2009; Boyle 2019). Forms
of intelligent behaviour that involve even less generality and flexibility can plausibly be
underpinned by yet simpler structures. In consequence, appeal to quasi-compositional
representational processes contributes to plausible explanations of some sorts of intel-
ligent behaviour only.
Second, and more generally, explanations that appeal to representational processing
tend to abstract away from the roles played by external factors in bringing about
and making possible intelligent behaviour. Representational structures can be, and
often are, augmented by external objects and practices, such as language, maps, social
conventions, items and landmarks in the environment. Representational storage can be
offloaded onto environmental arrangements and external media, including other living
beings. Moreover, what counts as general, flexible and adaptive behaviour hinges on
the bodily capacities of systems, on the ways in which they can or cannot intervene on
their surroundings (Clark 1998; Barsalou 2008; Brooks 2018). Similarly, generality,
flexibility and adaptivity can only be evaluated in light of the needs and goals of
systems, as well as of the possibilities they have for satisfying those needs and fulfilling
those goals given their representational and bodily capacities, and the structure and
state of the environment. In this sense, appeal to representational processing only
provides part of the explanation for most, if not all, instances of intelligent behaviour.
What I have offered in this section, therefore, is just a small part of the puzzle.
A puzzle that, in order to be properly solved, will require overcoming deep-seated
divisions in the sciences of intelligence, such as those that oppose representationalism
and embodiment; symbolic, connectionist, and embodied AI; and human and nonhu-
man biological intelligence. I hope, at any rate, that the operational characterisation of
intelligence that I defended in the previous sections can help transcend these unhelp-

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 Intelligent Behaviour 719

ful divisions, thus contributing to a more integrated, cross-disciplinary approach to

intelligence research.

6 Concluding Remarks

I have argued in favour of two main claims. First, I have proposed and defended a
purely behavioural characterisation of intelligence, aimed at providing a notion of
intelligence that is scientifically fruitful, explanatorily distinctive, and that provides a
shared basis for cross-disciplinary interaction and integration across the sciences of
intelligence. Second, I have suggested that producing and using representations that
approximate compositional structure is one plausible candidate for a partial explana-
tion of intelligence, especially for what regards behaviours that score high in generality
and flexibility.
While most of the ideas presented here have in one form or another been circulat-
ing in the philosophical and scientific literature for some time, they typically lacked
careful and detailed philosophical examination and development, and were often not
concerned specifically with intelligence (exceptions include Hurley and Nudds 2006a;
Fridland 2015; Hernández-Orallo 2017). I tried to fill a bit of that gap in this paper.
I have also attempted to point out the much work yet to be done in this relatively
underexplored, but particularly important, area of philosophical research.
Acknowledgements I am indebted to Michael Pauen, Alex Kacelnik, Margherita Arcangeli, José
Hernández-Orallo, Oisin Deery, Fabian Hundertmark, Caroline Stankozi, two anonymous referees, as well
as to audiences at the 2nd International Conference in Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (Rio de Janeiro,
2020), at the Workshop Intelligent Abilities (Berlin, 2021), at the CEPE/IACAP Joint 2021 Conference
(Hamburg), and at the Morning Talks Series at the Science of Intelligence Cluster (Berlin, 2020) for valu-
able feedback on earlier versions of this material.

Funding Research funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)
under Germany’s Excellence Strategy-EXC 2002/1 “Science of Intelligence”-project number 390523135.
Open access funding provided by Umeå University.

Declarations
Conflict of interest There are no conflict of interest to report.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which
permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give
appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence,
and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included
in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If
material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted
by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the
copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit [Link]

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