Intentional Objects

An intentional object is, by definition, the object of an intentional state: what it is that is thought about, wished for, feared etc. This short paper explains why a theory of intentionality should not dispense with the concept of an intentional object, and why the category of intentional object is not an ontological category.Articl

What is distinctive about human thought?

Descartes famously argued that animals were mere machines, without thought or consciousness. Few would now share this view. But if other animals have conscious lives, what are they like, how do they differ from ours, and how would we ever know anything about them? This lecture will address this question by looking at the kinds of thoughts we might share with animals, and looking at philosophical and empirical arguments for how our thoughts might differ from theirs

"The Mind's Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism" by Vincent Descombes

The grand opposition between theories of the mind which is presented in this book will be familiar, in its broad outlines, to many readers. On the one side we have the Cartesians, who understand the mind in terms of representation, causation and the inner life; on the other we have the Wittgensteinians, who understand the mind in terms of activity, normativity and its external embedding in its bodily and social environment. In this book—one of a pair, the second of which has yet to be translated—Vincent Descombes puts up a spirited defence of the Wittgensteinian approach. The Cartesian approach, which he calls ‘mental philosophy’, and which is exemplified most typically in the ‘cognitivism’ of Jerry Fodor, is fundamentally mistaken, he argues, since it underestimates, neglects or ignores both the active and external characteristics of the mind.1 Instead we should2 understand the mind in terms of a human being’s participation in a culture or a ‘form of life’, a form of engagement which is structured by norms rather than causal laws. This ‘anthropological holism’ draws not only upon the work of Wittgenstein, but also on Le´vi-Strauss, Lacan and, among other things, on the role of fiction in shaping our selfunderstanding

Concepts in Perception

I can agree with much of what D.H. Mellor says in his response to my paper ('Crane's Waterfall Illusion'). I can agree that perception in some sense 'aims' at truth, that its function 'is to tell us how the world truly is'..

"The Paradox of Self-Consciousness" by José Luis Burmùdez

What José Luis Bermúdez calls the paradox of self-consciousness is essentially the conflict between two claims: (1) The capacity to use first-personal referential devices like “I” must be explained in terms of the capacity to think first-person thoughts. (2) The only way to explain the capacity for having a certain kind of thought is by explaining the capacity for the canonical linguistic expression of thoughts of that kind. (Bermúdez calls this the “Thought-Language Principle”.) The conflict between (1) and (2) is obvious enough. However, if a paradox is an unacceptable conclusion drawn from apparently valid reasoning from apparently true premises, then Bermúdez’s conflict is no paradox. It is rather a conflict between the view that thought must be explained in terms of language, and the view that first person linguistic reference must be explained in terms of first-person thought. Neither view is immediately obvious, and nor is it obvious that the arguments for either are equally compelling. What we have here is a difference of philosophical opinion, not a paradox

Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental

‘It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘and a consciousness that ceases to be a consciousness of something wouldipso factocease to exist.’ Sartre here endorses the central doctrine of Husserl's phenomenology, itself inspired by a famous idea of Brentano's: that intentionality, the mind's ‘direction upon its objects’, is what is distinctive of mental phenomena. Brentano's originality does not lie in pointing out the existence of intentionality, or in inventing the terminology, which derives from scholastic discussions of concepts orintentiones. Rather, his originality consists in his claim that the concept of intentionality marks out the subject matter of psychology: the mental. His view was that intentionality ‘is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon manifests anything like it.’ This isBrentano's thesisthat intentionality is the mark of the mental.</jats:p

Brentano’s Concept of Intentional Inexistence

What Brentano meant by ‘intentional inexistence’ is explained, as is Brentano’s change of mind about this notion. It is only when we understand the metaphysical and methodological assumptions lying behind Brentano’s original doctrine that we can understand why we have a problem of intentionality in a way Brentano does not.Articl

Sainsbury on Thinking about an Object

R.M. Sainsbury's account of reference has many compelling and attractive features. But it has the undesirable consequence that sentences of the form "x is thinking about y" can never be true when y is replaced by a non-referring term. Of the two obvious ways to deal with this problem within Sainsbury's framework, I reject one and endorse the other. This endorsement is also within the spirit of Sainsbury's account of reference. /// La explicación que ofrece R.M. Sainsbury de la referencia tiene muchas características convincentes y atractivas, pero tiene la consecuencia indeseable de que oraciones de la forma "x está pensando acerca de y" nunca pueden ser verdaderas cuando se reemplaza y con un término no referencial. De las dos maneras obvias de tratar este problema dentro del marco teórico de Sainsbury, rechazo una y acepto la otra. Aceptar esta última también cae dentro del espíritu de la explicación de la referencia ofrecida por Sainsbury

The Knowledge Argument is an Argument about Knowledge

The knowledge argument is something that is both an ideal for philosophy and yet surprisingly rare: a simple, valid argument for an interesting and important conclusion, with plausible premises. From a compelling thought-experiment and a few apparently innocuous assumptions, the argument seems to give us the conclusion, a priori, that physicalism is false. Given the apparent power of this apparently simple argument, it is not surprising that philosophers have worried over the argument and its proper diagnosis: physicalists have disputed its validity, or soundness or both; in response, non-physicalists have attempted to reformulate the argument to show its real anti-physicalist lesson

The Mind-Body Problem

The mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how our mental states, events and processes—like beliefs, actions and thinking—are related to the physical states, events and processes in our bodies. A question of the form, ‘how is A related to B?’ does not by itself pose a philosophical problem. To pose such a problem, there has to be something about A and B which makes the relation between them seem problematic. Many features of mind and body have been cited as responsible for our sense of the problem. Here I will concentrate on two: the fact that mind and body seem to interact causally, and the distinctive features of consciousness. A long tradition in philosophy has held, with René Descartes, that the mind must be a non-bodily entity: a soul or mental substance. This thesis is called ‘substance dualism’ (or ‘Cartesian dualism’) because it says that there are two kinds of substance in the world, mental and physical or material. One reason for believing this is the belief that the soul, unlike the body, is immortal. Another reason for believing it is that we have free will, and this seems to require that the mind is a non-physical thing, since all physical things are subject to the laws of nature