  So the question is: does any non-mental thing exhibit ‘original’ intentionality? The question is made more pressing by Quine’s dilemma, according to which one must choose between Brentano’s third thesis and a physicalist ontology. So-called ‘eliminative materialists’ (see Churchland 1989) resolutely opt for the second horn of Quine’s dilemma and deny purely and simply the reality of human beliefs and desires. As a consequence of their denial of the reality of beliefs and desires, the eliminative materialists must face the challenge raised by the existence of physical objects whose existence depends on the intentions, beliefs and desires of their designers, i.e., human artifacts. Others, like Daniel Dennett (1971, 1978, 1987), who reject the distinction between original and derived intentionality, take a so-called ‘instrumentalist’ position. On their view, the intentional idiom fails to describe or explain any real phenomenon. However, in the absence of detailed knowledge of the physical laws that govern the behavior of a physical system, the intentional idiom is a useful stance for predicting a system’s behavior. Among philosophers attracted to a physicalist ontology, few have accepted the outright eliminativist materialist denial of the reality of beliefs and desires. Nor have many of them found it easy to answer the puzzling question raised by the instrumentalist position: how can the intentional idiom make useful predictions if it fails to describe and explain anything real?