{"id":10999,"date":"2011-01-19T15:53:18","date_gmt":"2011-01-19T15:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/01\/19\/posits-or-inventions\/"},"modified":"2011-01-19T15:53:18","modified_gmt":"2011-01-19T15:53:18","slug":"posits-or-inventions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/01\/19\/posits-or-inventions\/","title":{"rendered":"Posits or Inventions? Geach and Butchvarov on Intentionality"},"content":{"rendered":"

One philosopher's necessary explanatory posit is another's mere invention.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy<\/em>, 1994), Panayot Butchvarov rejects  epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects  sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like. (1)  Curiously enough, however, Butch goes on to posit nonexistent or unreal objects very much in the manner of Meinong!  Actually, 'posit'  is not a word he would use since Butch claims that we are directly acquainted with unreal objects.  (13) Either way, unreal objects such as the proverbial hallucinated pink rat  are not, on Butchvarov's view, philosophical inventions.<\/span><\/p>\n

But now consider the following  1961 passage from Anscombe and Geach's Three Philosophers<\/em>, a passage that is as if directed against the Butchvarovian view:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

But saying this  has obvious difficulties. [Saying that all there is to a sensation or thought of X is its being of X.] It seems to make the whole being of a sensation or thought consist in a relation to something else:  it is as if someone said he had a picture of a cat that was not painted on any background or in any medium, there being nothing to it except that it was a picture of a cat.  This is hard enough: to make matters worse, the terminus of the supposed relation may not exist — a drunkard's 'seeing' snakes is not related to any real snake, nor my thought of a phoenix to any real phoenix.  Philosophers have sought a way out of this difficulty by inventing chimerical entities <\/strong>like 'snakish sense-data' or 'real but nonexistent phoenixes' as termini of the cognitive relation. (95, emphasis added)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Butchvarov would not call a nonexistent phoenix or nonexistent pink rat real, but that it just a matter of terminology.  What is striking here is that the items Geach considers chimerical inventions Butchvarov considers not only reasonably posited, but phenomenologically evident!<\/span><\/p>\n

Ain't philosophy grand?  One philosopher's chimerical invention is another's phenomenological given.  <\/span><\/p>\n

What is also striking about the above  passage is that the position that Geach rejects via the 'picture of a cat' analogy is almost exactly the position that Butch maintains. Let's think about this a bit.<\/span><\/p>\n

Surely Anscombe and Geach are right when it comes to pictures and other physical representations.  There is a clear sense in which a picture (whether painting, photograph, etc.) of a cat is of a cat. <\/em>The intentionality here cannot however be original; it must be derivative, derivative from the original intentionality of one who takes the picture to be of a cat.   Surely no physical representation represents anything on its own, by its own power.  <\/em>And it is also quite clear that a picture of X is not exhausted by its being of X.  <\/em>There is more to a picture than its depicting something; the depicting function needs realization in some medium.<\/span><\/p>\n

The question, however, is whether original<\/em> intentionality also needs  realization in some medium.  It is not obvious that it does need such realization, whether in brain-stuff or in mind-stuff.  Why can't consciousness of a cat  be nothing more than consciousness of a cat<\/em>?  Why can't consciousness be exhausted in its being by its revelation of objects?  <\/span><\/p>\n

Bewusstsein als bewusst-sein.<\/em>  Get it?<\/span><\/p>\n

But this is not the place to examine Butchvarov's direct realist conception of consciousness, a conception he finds in Moore, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Sartre, and contrasts with a mental- contents conception.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One philosopher's necessary explanatory posit is another's mere invention. In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1994), Panayot Butchvarov rejects  epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects  sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances, and the like. … Continue reading “Posits or Inventions? Geach and Butchvarov on Intentionality”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,78,96,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aquinas-and-thomism","category-butchvarov","category-consciousness-and-qualia","category-intentionality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}