Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Intentionality

  • Are Propositions Counterexamples to Brentano’s Thesis?

    Franz Brentano, for whom intentionality is the mark of the mental, is committed to the thesis that all instances of (intrinsic) intentionality are instances of mentality.  Propositions and dispositions are apparent counterexamples. For they are nonmental yet intrinsically object-directed. Whether they are also real counterexamples is something we should discuss. This post discusses (Fregean) propositions. Later,…

  • More on the Status of Thomistic Common Natures

    This is proving to be a fascinating topic.  Let's push on a bit further. Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either mode of…

  • Differences Between Wishing and Hoping

    I wish, I wish, I wish in vainThat we could sit simply in that room againTen thousand dollars at the drop of a hatI'd give it all gladlyIf our lives could be like that. Bob Dylan's Dream Wishing and hoping are both intentional attitudes: they take an object.  One cannot just wish, or just hope,…

  • Geach on the Real Distinction II: The Argument from Intentionality

    See Geach on the Real Distinction I for some background on the distinctio realis.  This post lays out the argument from intentionality to the real distinction. A theory of intentionality ought to explain how the objective reference or object-directedness of our thoughts and perceptions is possible. Suppose I am thinking about a cat, a particular…

  • Jaegwon Kim on Reductionism and Eliminativism

    I've been studying Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton UP, 2005).  Here are some notes and questions. 1. It's clear that mental causation must be saved.  If Kim is right that nonreductive physicalism is not viable, then by his lights our only hope of saving mental causation is via "physical reductionism." (159).  It…

  • The Irreducibility of Intentionality: An Argument From the Indeterminacy of the Physical

    If it could be made to work, materialism would be attractive simply on grounds of parsimony. We all agree that entities, or rather categories of entity, ought not be multiplied beyond necessity.  There are those who will intone this Ockhamite principle with great earnestness as if they are advancing the discussion when of course they are…

  • Could Intentionality be an Illusion? A Note on Rosenberg

    Could intentonality be an illusion?  Of course not.  But seemingly intelligent people think otherwise: A single still photograph doesn't convey movement the way a motion picture does. Watching a sequence of slightly different photos one photo per hour, or per minute, or even one every 6 seconds won't do it either. But looking at the…

  • Memory, Memory Traces, and Causation

    Passing a lady in the supermarket I catch a whiff of patchouli.  Her scent puts me in mind of hippy-trippy Pamela from the summer of '69.  An olfactory stimulus in the present causes a memory, also in the present, of an event long past, a tête-à-tête with a certain girl.  How ordinary, but how strange! Suddenly…

  • More on Intentionality as a Problem for Functionalism

    1. Even if every mental state is a brain state, it is quite clear that  not every brain state is a mental state: not everything going on in the brain manifests mentality. So what distinguishes the brain states that are mental states from the brain states that are not? This question cannot be evaded. The…

  • Intentionality Not a ‘Hard Problem’ for Physicalists?

    The qualia-based objections are supposed to pose a 'hard' problem for defenders of physicalism.  The implication is that the problems posed by intentionality are, if not exactly 'easy,' then at least tractable.  An earlier post discussed a version of the knowledge argument, which is one of the qualia-based objections.  (Two others are the absent qualia…

  • Sentences as Names of Facts: An Aporetic Triad

    There are good reasons to introduce facts as truth-makers for contingently true atomic sentences.  (Some supporting reasoning here.)  But if there are facts, and they make-true contingent atomic sentences, then what is the semantic relation between these declarative sentences and their truth-makers?  It seems we should say that such sentences name facts.  But some remarks…

  • How Many are the Ways of Denying that Intentionality is a Two-Term Relation?

    How shall I deny thee? Let me count the ways. I need an exhaustive classification of all the ways of denying that intentionality is a two-term relation. (Since one cannot think without thinking of something, one might suppose that intentionality is a dyadic relation connecting a thinker or one of his mental contents to an object.) …

  • Singular Meaning

    Edward Ockham of Beyond Necessity is back from his Turkish holiday and reports that, besides lazing on the beach at Bodrum, he . . . spent some time thinking about singular concepts. Do you accept singular meaning? Either you hold that a proper name has a meaning, or not (Aquinas held that it does not,…

  • Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Transcendental Idealism

    This entry extends and clarifies my post, Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence.  Preliminaries For Butchvarov, all consciousness is intentional. (There are no non-intentional consciousnesses.)  And all intentionality is conscious intentionality. (There is no "physical intentionality" to use George Molnar's term.)  So, for Butchvarov, 'consciousness' and 'intentionality' are equivalent terms.  Consciousness, by…

  • Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence

    (UPDATE: 23 March.  Butchvarov sent me some comments via e-mail the main ones of  which I insert in the text in red.) This post assumes familiarity with Panayot Butchvarov's "protometaphysics," as he calls it.  But I will begin by sketching the distinction between objects and entities.  Then I will present an objection that occurred to…