My Ideal Reader

A lover of language, precise in its use, respectful of its mothership* of our thoughts, analytic but not conceptually myopic, out for the Sellarsian big picture, non-dogmatic and therefore skeptical in the best sense, which is to say, an inquirer, but not a worldling mesmerized by the sublunary, and therefore spiritually oriented. And his attitude toward academic or professional philosophy? At once both respectful and critical.  And similarly with respect to every institution and everything institutionalized:  respectful but critical.

Where would we be without institutions? And yet they are like the houses around here: they either have termites or will get them.  The right attitude: we fumigate, not demolish, edifices infested with termites.  The Roman Catholic Church, for example, and the universities. And others as well. 

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*A neologism, apparently, one that just occurred to me, crafted in parallel to 'fathership,' a word recognized by Merriam-Webster.  And you call me a sexist? And you think conservatives are stick-in-the-muds opposed to everything new?

How Should We Use ‘Intentional Object’? Is the IO the Thing Itself?

Dr. Buckner comments,

. . . we still need to agree on a clear definition of ‘Intentional Object’. Here are two other definitions I found.

Tim Crane: what an intentional state is about.
Merriam Webster: something whether actually existing or not that the mind thinks about.

These are both very clear, and I suggest we adopt them. That is, if BV is thinking about (or ‘of’) the Washington Monument, then the Intentional Object of his thinking is the Washington Monument itself. If the Washington Monument is then blown into a billion pieces by high explosive and the remains scattered to the four points of the US, and it no longer exists, and if we agree that BV is still thinking about the WM, then the Intentional Object is still the WM.

Do you agree? 

No.

If we adopt both of  the definitions cited, Crane and Webster, then the intentional object (IO) of a mental act or intentional state is the item to which the act is directed, an item which may or may not exist without prejudice to the existence and specific directedness of the act. That is: the specific directedness of the act (which is phenomenologically accessible to the subject of the act via reflection*) is what it is whether or not the IO exists. So Buckner is telling us that if I am thinking of or about the WM over an interval of time during which, unbeknownst to me, the WM goes from existing to not existing, then the  WM itself is the IO both when it exists and after it ceases to exist.

But this implies that my thinking becomes objectless when the WM ceases to exist. And that contradicts the thesis of intentionality according to which, necessarily, to think is to think of something.  In the form of a reductio ad absurdum:

a) The intentional object = the thing itself, not some epistemic deputy or intermediary in the mind or between mind and thing.  In our example the IO = the WM , a massive marble obelisk that exists extramentally if it exists at all. (Bucknerian assumption for reductio)

b) No mental act exists without an intentional object. (Thesis of Intentionality)

Therefore

c) No mental act exists if the thing itself to which the act is directed does not exist.  (From (a) and (b))

Therefore

d) My mental act of thinking of the WM does not exist if the WM does not exist. (From (c))

But

e) My mental act of thinking  of the WM continues to exist after the WM ceases to exist. (Phenomenological datum)

Therefore

f) (d) contradicts (e).

Therefore

g) (a) is false: the IO is not identical to the thing itself. (By reductio ad absurdum)

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*In other words, I know, with certainty, both that I am thinking about something when I am thinking about something, and what I am thinking about when I think about it.  Husserl's phenomenology is committed to this thesis (cf. Ideas I, sec. 36) but it is notoriously denied by Ruth Garrett Millikan whose theory of intentionality is radically externalist. Cf. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, p. 92 ff.

The Platonist and the Hedonist

I am a Platonist (broadly speaking), but here I give the floor to the hedonist. The true philosopher aims to examine every side of every issue. He is, qua philosopher, no ideologue and no dogmatist. 

Platonist: You pursue paltry pleasures that cannot last and cannot ultimately satisfy. 

Hedonist: You  pursue objects lofty and lasting, but with no assurance that they exist. I have all the assurance I need, that of the senses.  The sensuous pleasures I attain I can repeat, and in that repetition I have the sign and seal of their reality. The real is repeatable.

You claim to have been vouchsafed intimations of the  Absolute and glimpses behind the veil, but can you repeat those experiences? Do others have them? If few have had them, and those few only a few times in their lives, does that not support the view that those experiences, real as experiences, yet lack reality-reference? No experience proves anything. One man's revelation is another's random neuronal swerve or brain fart.

I grant you that the pleasure of orgasm, the keenest of the fleshly pleasures, is fleeting and that no instance of such pleasure is equipped to put an end to sexual desire. No orgasm is finally satisfactory. One is left hankering for a repeat performance.  One literally itches for more. And what is true of orgasm is true of the less commanding allurements of the flesh.  I will also grant you that no series of repetitions, no matter how  protracted, can render us satisfied in full.  I am even inclined to grant you that one is seduced into an infinite process, a sort of Hegelian bad infinity, that could be called addiction.

Why waste your life on illusions like a monk in a monastery when you could live life to the full, a life that is as real as it gets? Why do you suppose impermanence is an index of unreality and lack of value?

Guest Post: On the Fallacy of Intentionalism

ON THE FALLACY OF INTENTIONALISM

D.E. Buckner, July 2021

Bill Vallicella critiques a short passage in my recent book (Reference and Identity in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Scriptures: The Same God? Rowman and Littlefield, 2020, p. 195) and he levels the following four charges.

1. Buckner has wrongly characterised intentionality as object-dependence.

2. Buckner has wrongly interpreted intentionality along the lines of an externalist model.

3. Buckner has wrongly claimed that the intentional nexus is unmediated or direct.

4. Buckner has wrongly characterised intentionality as a relation.

Here is the case for the defence.

Preliminaries

Some preliminaries. I shall distinguish Intentionality, properly so-called, from Intentionalism. Intentionality is a mental phenomenon which we cannot report without using some relational expression – an intentional verb phrase. For example “Jake is thinking about Zeus”, which predicates the mental state ‘thinking about Zeus’ of Jake using the intentional verb phrase ‘is thinking about’.

Intentionalism, by contrast, I call the philosophical doctrine about intentionality which involves the implicit assumption that statements using intentional verb phrases imply statements which use non-intentional verb phrases. For example, Brentano gets his classic (but false) statement “Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself”, using the non-intentional verb ‘includes’ (enthält), from the perfectly true claim that “In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on”, which involves intentional verbs like ‘love’ and ‘desire’.

As I argue in Reference and Identity (chapter 7) that there is no such implication. It is illicit to infer statements using non-intentional (I call these ‘logically transitive’) verbs from statements using intentional (or ‘logically intransitive’) verbs. A verb phrase R is intentional if “a R b” is consistent with there being no such thing as b, otherwise it is non-intentional. An intentional verb phrase Ri takes a grammatical accusative, but no logical accusative, that is, there doesn’t have to be an object corresponding to the accusative. Thus, if Ri is intentional and Rt is non-intentional, “a Ri b” does not imply “a Rt b,” since the former is consistent with there being no such thing as b, whereas the latter is not, that is, the former can be true when the latter is not. For example, “Tobit refers to Asmodeus” does not imply “Tobit is related to Asmodeus,” for ‘refers to’ is intentional whereas “is related to” is not. (R&I p.124)

There are two forms of the Fallacy. The first is the move from a construction which is intentional to one which is non-intentional. The second form is the move to a subject-predicate construction where the subject corresponds to the grammatical accusative of the intentional construction.

As an example of the first form of the fallacy, we have Brentano’s move from “Jake desires something”, “Jake loves something” and so on, to “Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself”. But “Jake desires a happy life” is an intentional construction, from which we cannot validly infer the statements “Jake’s mental state (of desire) includes something”, or “Jake’s mental state is directed at something”, for these statements use non-intentional verbs. If A includes or contains B, it follows that something, namely B, is included or contained in A. But no such thing follows from “Jake desires a happy life”. Nothing has to be included or contained or directed at in Jake’s mental state on account of his desiring a happy life. Such a life may be beyond him for now.

Other examples of the first form are:

“Mental states and events are directed at objects” (Searle).

If A is directed at or points at B, there is something that is pointed at.

“Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist” (Vallicella, link).

“Refer beyond … to” is a non-intentional construction, implying that there is something that is referred to.

“… my thinking of Max ‘reaches’ beyond my mind and targets — not some cat or other, but a particular cat.” (Vallicella, link).

“the [mental] act has an intentional object” (Vallicella, link).

‘Targets’ is non-intentional, as is ‘has’.

The second form of the fallacy is the move from a non-intentional construction to a subject-predicate sentence where the subject is a noun phrase signifying the Intentional Object, and the predicate a noun phrase qualifying the ‘Object’ in some way. Examples:

“Jupiter is before my mind as the intentional object of my act.”

“Jupiter, as the object of my act, does not exist in my act as a real constituent thereof.”

“If an I[ntentional]O[bject] is nonexistent, then we say it is merely intentional.”

“The intentional object is Jupiter himself”

“Jupiter is the intentional object of my act.”

Pretty much any paragraph by Vallicella will contain at least one instance of the Fallacy. He will likely complain that my point is a nicety of language, and not a genuine metaphysical one. I reply, my point is a logical one, not merely linguistic, and concerns the statements that we can validly derive from ascriptions of mental states like “Jake is thinking of a unicorn”. Whether we can validly derive one statement from another, even if it is a ‘metaphysical’ statement, is a question of logic, not linguistic usage, and Continental philosophers should pay more attention to logic.

In summary, to move from “Jake is thinking of Lucifer” to “Jake’s mental state includes (or contains, or is directed to or targeted at) something” is to commit the fallacy of Intentionalism.

In the next post, I shall reply to the four ‘charges’ above.

No Resolution Here Below

It is a mistake to think that we can resolve in this life the questions pertaining to it and the question of what, if anything, is beyond it. It is a passing scene, a moving image, a chiaroscuro of light and dark, a land of shadows and seemings, a twilit scene of confusion in which the ground shifts and oblivion consumes memory.

Any dogmatic resolution will share in the insubstantiality of this world of shadows and adumbrations. There is no security hereabouts, doxastic or otherwise. Get used to it.

Some Questions about Thinking, Relations, and Relational Expressions

Bill, you said by email earlier that the sentence “Jake is thinking of Zeus” would be true if Jake was indeed thinking of Zeus.

BV: That's what I said, although I would put 'is' where you have 'was.' Is what I said  a shocking thing to say?

I have questions for you about the terms ‘obtains’ and ‘satisfies’.

(1) If “Jake is thinking of Zeus” is true, and assuming there is no such thing as Zeus, then does the relation “– is thinking of –” obtain? According to what you said earlier, a relation cannot obtain if any its relata do not exist. But we normally think of a relation obtaining precisely in the case where the sentence which asserts the relation is true. What do you think?

BV: We cannot assume that thinking-of  is a relation if every relation is such that its obtaining entails the existence of all its relata.   For in the case of Jake and Zeus only one of the relata exists, and it's not Zeus. And yet it is true that Jake is thinking of Zeus. I conclude that the sentence 'Jake is thinking of Zeus,' although grammatically relational, does not express a relational proposition.  The sentence needs a truth-preserving analysis that does not commit one to the existence of nonexistent things.  

Here are two different candidate analysantia. 'Jake is thinking Zeus-ly.' 'Jake is a Zeus-entertainer.' Neither of these sentences is grammatically relational, and both seem to preserve the truth of the analysandum without commitment to nonexistent things. I do not endorse either analysans.

(2) Is the relational expression “– is thinking of –” satisfied when “Jake is thinking of Zeus” is true? For example, is it satisfied by the two things Jake and Zeus respectively? If not, why not?

BV: No. Why not? Because Zeus does not exist.