Teaching, intention based research and physicalism

Some philosophers have argued that teaching cannot be understood except in terms of human intentions. I shall argue that Quinean arguments for the externalization of empiricism undermine the value of treating teaching as an intentional act. I shall suggest firstly, that the methodology for identifying and distinguishing intentions undermines the basis of appealing to intentions to account for behaviour in the first place, and secondly, that the conjunction of one important kind of intentional explanation with physicalist causal accounts of human behaviour is incoherent.