Intentionality
Encyclopedia
The term intentionality was introduced by Jeremy Bentham
as a principle of utility in his doctrine of consciousness for the purpose of distinguishing acts that are intentional and acts that are not. The term was later used by Edmund Husserl
in his doctrine that consciousness is always intentional, a concept that he undertook in connection with theses set forth by Franz Brentano
regarding the ontological and psychological status of objects of thought. It has been defined as "aboutness
", and according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is "the distinguishing property of mental phenomena
of being necessarily directed upon an object
, whether real or imaginary". It is in this sense and the usage of Husserl that the term is primarily used in contemporary philosophy. The concept of intentionality has its foundation in scholastic philosophy
with the earliest theory being associated with St. Anselm
's ontological argument
for the existence of God
and his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in the understanding and objects that exist in reality.
by the philosopher and psychologist
Franz Brentano
in his work Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874
). Brentano described intentionality as a characteristic of all acts of consciousness, "psychical" or "mental" phenomena, by which it could be set apart from "physical" or "natural" phenomena.
Brentano coined the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the peculiar ontological status of the contents of mental phenomena. According to some interpreters the "in-" of "in-existence" is to be read as locative, i.e. as indicating that "an intended object [...] exists in or has in-existence, existing not externally but in the psychological state" (Jacquette 2004, p. 102), while others are more cautious, affirming that: "It is not clear whether in 1874 this [...] was intended to carry any ontological commitment" (Chrudzimski and Smith 2004, p. 205).
A major problem within intentionality discourse is that participants often fail to make explicit whether or not they use the term to imply concepts such as agency or desire, i.e. whether it involves teleology. Dennett (see below) explicitly invokes teleological concepts in the "intentional stance". However, most philosophers use intentionality to mean something with no teleological import. Thus, a thought of a chair can be about a chair without any implication of an intention or even a belief relating to the chair. For philosophers of language, intentionality is largely an issue of how symbols can have meaning. This lack of clarity may underpin some of the differences of view indicated below.
To bear out further the diversity of sentiment evoked from the notion of intentionality, Husserl
followed on Brentano, and gave intentionality more widespread attention, both in continental
and analytic philosophy
. In contrast to Brentano's view, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre
(Being and Nothingness) identified intentionality with consciousness
, stating that the two were indistinguishable. German philosopher Martin Heidegger
(Being and Time
), defined intentionality as "care" (Sorge), a sentient
condition where an individual's existentiality
, facticity, and forfeiture to the world identifies their ontological significance
, in contrast to that which is the mere ontic
(thinghood).
Other 20th-century philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle
and A.J. Ayer were critical of Husserl's concept of intentionality and his many layers of consciousness, Ryle insisting that perceiving is not a process and Ayer that describing one's knowledge is not to describe mental processes. The effect of these positions is that consciousness is so fully intentional that the mental act has been emptied of all content and the idea of pure consciousness is that it is nothing (Sartre also referred to "consciousness" as "nothing
").
Platonist Roderick Chisholm
has revived the Brentano thesis through linguistic analysis, distinguishing two parts to Brentano's concept, the ontological aspect and the psychological aspect. Chisholm's writings have attempted to summarize the suitable and unsuitable criteria of the concept since the Scholastics, arriving at a criterion of intentionality identified by the two aspects of Brentano's thesis and defined by the logical properties that distinguish language describing psychological phenomena from language describing non-psychological phenomena. Chisholm's criteria for the intentional use of sentences are: existence independence, truth-value indifference, and referential opacity
.
In current artificial intelligence
and philosophy of mind
intentionality is a controversial subject and sometimes claimed to be something that a machine will never achieve. John Searle
argued for this position with the Chinese room
thought experiment, according to which no syntactic operations that occurred in a computer would provide it with semantic content.
offers a taxonomy of the current theories about intentionality in Chapter 10 of his book The Intentional Stance
. Most, if not all, current theories on intentionality accept Brentano's thesis of the irreducibility of intentional idiom. From this thesis the following positions emerge:
(1956), G.E.M. Anscombe (1957), Peter Geach
(1957), and Charles Taylor
(1964) all adhere to the former position, namely that intentional idiom is problematic and cannot be integrated with the natural sciences. Members of this category also maintain realism in regard to intentional objects, which may imply some kind of dualism (though this is debatable).
The latter position, which maintains the unity of intentionality with the natural sciences, is further divided into three standpoints:
Proponents of the eliminative materialism, understand intentional idiom, such as "belief", "desire", and the like, to be replaceable either with behavioristic language (e.g. Quine) or with the language of neuroscience (e.g. Churchland).
Holders of realism argue, in contrast to those in support of C, that there is a deeper fact of the matter to both translation and belief attribution. In other words, manuals for translating one language into another cannot be set up in different yet behaviorally identical ways and ontologically there are intentional objects. Famously, Fodor has attempted to ground such realist claims about intentionality in a language of thought. Dennett comments on this issue, Fodor "attempt[s] to make these irreducible realities acceptable to the physical sciences by grounding them (somehow) in the 'syntax' of a system of physically realized mental representations" (Dennett 1987, 345).
Those who adhere to the so-called Quinean double standard (namely that ontologically there is nothing intentional, but that the language of intentionality is indispensable), accept Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation
and its implications, while the other positions so far mentioned do not. As Quine puts it, indeterminacy of radical translation is the thesis that "manuals for translating one language into another can be set up in divergent ways, all compatible with the totality of speech dispositions, yet incompatible with one another" (Quine 1960, 27). Quine (1960) and Wilfrid Sellars
(1958) both comment on this intermediary position. One such implication would be that there is, in principle, no deeper fact of the matter that could settle two interpretative strategies on what belief to attribute to a physical system. In other words, the behavior (including speech dispositions) of any physical system, in theory, could be interpreted by two different predictive strategies and both would be equally warranted in their belief attribution. This category can be seen to be a medial position between the realists and the eliminativists since it attempts to blend attributes of both into a theory of intentionality. Dennett, for example, argues in True Believers (1981) that intentional idiom (or "folk psychology
") is a predictive strategy and if such a strategy successfully and voluminously predicts the actions of a physical system, then that physical system can be said to have those beliefs attributed to it. Dennett calls this predictive strategy the intentional stance
.
They are further divided into two theses:
Advocates of the former, the Normative Principle, argue that attributions of intentional idioms to physical systems should be the propositional attitudes that the physical system ought to have in those circumstances (Dennett 1987, 342). However, exponents of this view are still further divided into those who make an Assumption of Rationality and those who adhere to the Principle of Charity. Dennett (1969, 1971, 1975), Cherniak (1981, 1986), and the more recent work of Putnam (1983) recommend the Assumption of Rationality, which unsurprisingly assumes that the physical system in question is rational. Donald Davidson
(1967, 1973, 1974, 1985) and Lewis (1974) defend the Principle of Charity.
The latter is advocated by Grandy (1973) and Stich (1980, 1981, 1983, 1984), who maintain that attributions of intentional idioms to any physical system (e.g. humans, artifacts, non-human animals, etc.) should be the propositional attitude (e.g. "belief", "desire", etc.) that one would suppose one would have in the same circumstances (Dennett 1987, 343).
and Michel Foucault
who emphasise the active role of the viewer/reader in creating meaning in visual and written texts.
A generalized semiotic view is developed in biosemiotics
, which states that intentionality is a criterial feature of life
, thus interpreting the organic needs to be the primary form of intentions.
ality, a related concept from logic and semantics
.
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...
as a principle of utility in his doctrine of consciousness for the purpose of distinguishing acts that are intentional and acts that are not. The term was later used by Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
in his doctrine that consciousness is always intentional, a concept that he undertook in connection with theses set forth by Franz Brentano
Franz Brentano
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views.-Life:Brentano was born at Marienberg am...
regarding the ontological and psychological status of objects of thought. It has been defined as "aboutness
Aboutness
Aboutness is a term used in library and information science , linguistics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. In LIS, it is often considered synonymous with subject . In philosophy it has been often considered synonymous with intentionality, perhaps since John Searle .R. A...
", and according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is "the distinguishing property of mental phenomena
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
of being necessarily directed upon an object
Object (philosophy)
An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...
, whether real or imaginary". It is in this sense and the usage of Husserl that the term is primarily used in contemporary philosophy. The concept of intentionality has its foundation in scholastic philosophy
Scholasticism
Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100–1500, and a program of employing that method in articulating and defending orthodoxy in an increasingly pluralistic context...
with the earliest theory being associated with St. Anselm
Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm of Canterbury , also called of Aosta for his birthplace, and of Bec for his home monastery, was a Benedictine monk, a philosopher, and a prelate of the church who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109...
's ontological argument
Ontological argument
The ontological argument for the existence of God is an a priori argument for the existence of God. The ontological argument was first proposed by the eleventh-century monk Anselm of Canterbury, who defined God as the greatest possible being we can conceive...
for the existence of God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
and his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in the understanding and objects that exist in reality.
The modern overview
The concept of intentionality was reintroduced in 19th-century contemporary philosophyPhilosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
by the philosopher and psychologist
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the...
Franz Brentano
Franz Brentano
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views.-Life:Brentano was born at Marienberg am...
in his work Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874
1874 in literature
The year 1874 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:*Arthur William à Beckett joins the staff of Punch.*Johan Nicolai Madvig loses his sight, forcing him to give up most of his research and writing....
). Brentano described intentionality as a characteristic of all acts of consciousness, "psychical" or "mental" phenomena, by which it could be set apart from "physical" or "natural" phenomena.
Brentano coined the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the peculiar ontological status of the contents of mental phenomena. According to some interpreters the "in-" of "in-existence" is to be read as locative, i.e. as indicating that "an intended object [...] exists in or has in-existence, existing not externally but in the psychological state" (Jacquette 2004, p. 102), while others are more cautious, affirming that: "It is not clear whether in 1874 this [...] was intended to carry any ontological commitment" (Chrudzimski and Smith 2004, p. 205).
A major problem within intentionality discourse is that participants often fail to make explicit whether or not they use the term to imply concepts such as agency or desire, i.e. whether it involves teleology. Dennett (see below) explicitly invokes teleological concepts in the "intentional stance". However, most philosophers use intentionality to mean something with no teleological import. Thus, a thought of a chair can be about a chair without any implication of an intention or even a belief relating to the chair. For philosophers of language, intentionality is largely an issue of how symbols can have meaning. This lack of clarity may underpin some of the differences of view indicated below.
To bear out further the diversity of sentiment evoked from the notion of intentionality, Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
followed on Brentano, and gave intentionality more widespread attention, both in continental
Continental philosophy
Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...
and analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
. In contrast to Brentano's view, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
(Being and Nothingness) identified intentionality with consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
, stating that the two were indistinguishable. German philosopher Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
(Being and Time
Being and Time
Being and Time is a book by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Although written quickly, and despite the fact that Heidegger never completed the project outlined in the introduction, it remains his most important work and has profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, particularly...
), defined intentionality as "care" (Sorge), a sentient
Sentience
Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences. Eighteenth century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think from the ability to feel . In modern western philosophy, sentience is the ability to have sensations or experiences...
condition where an individual's existentiality
Existentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
, facticity, and forfeiture to the world identifies their ontological significance
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
, in contrast to that which is the mere ontic
Ontic
In philosophy, ontic is physical, real or factual existence."Ontic" describes what is there, as opposed to the nature or properties of that being...
(thinghood).
Other 20th-century philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle , was a British philosopher, a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers that shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the...
and A.J. Ayer were critical of Husserl's concept of intentionality and his many layers of consciousness, Ryle insisting that perceiving is not a process and Ayer that describing one's knowledge is not to describe mental processes. The effect of these positions is that consciousness is so fully intentional that the mental act has been emptied of all content and the idea of pure consciousness is that it is nothing (Sartre also referred to "consciousness" as "nothing
Nothing
Nothing is no thing, denoting the absence of something. Nothing is a pronoun associated with nothingness, is also an adjective, and an object as a concept in the Frege-Church ontology....
").
Platonist Roderick Chisholm
Roderick Chisholm
Roderick M. Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, and the philosophy of perception. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University under Clarence Irving Lewis and Donald C. Williams, and taught at Brown University...
has revived the Brentano thesis through linguistic analysis, distinguishing two parts to Brentano's concept, the ontological aspect and the psychological aspect. Chisholm's writings have attempted to summarize the suitable and unsuitable criteria of the concept since the Scholastics, arriving at a criterion of intentionality identified by the two aspects of Brentano's thesis and defined by the logical properties that distinguish language describing psychological phenomena from language describing non-psychological phenomena. Chisholm's criteria for the intentional use of sentences are: existence independence, truth-value indifference, and referential opacity
Opaque context
An opaque context is a linguistic context in which it is not always possible to substitute co-referential expressions salva veritate. In other words, substitution of co-referential expressions into an opaque context does not always preserve truth...
.
In current artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
and philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
intentionality is a controversial subject and sometimes claimed to be something that a machine will never achieve. John Searle
John Searle
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...
argued for this position with the Chinese room
Chinese room
The Chinese room is a thought experiment by John Searle, which first appeared in his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980...
thought experiment, according to which no syntactic operations that occurred in a computer would provide it with semantic content.
Dennett's taxonomy of current theories about intentionality
Daniel DennettDaniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
offers a taxonomy of the current theories about intentionality in Chapter 10 of his book The Intentional Stance
Intentional stance
The intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of a thing in terms of mental properties...
. Most, if not all, current theories on intentionality accept Brentano's thesis of the irreducibility of intentional idiom. From this thesis the following positions emerge:
- intentional idiom is problematic for scienceNatural scienceThe natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...
; - intentional idiom is not problematic for science, which is divided into:
- Eliminative MaterialismEliminative materialismEliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...
; - RealismEpistemological realismEpistemological realism is a philosophical position, a subcategory of objectivism, holding that what you know about an object exists independently of your mind. It opposes epistemological idealism....
; - Quinean double standard (see below) which is divided into:
- adherence to Normative Principle, which is divided into:
- who makes an Assumption of Rationality;
- who follows the Principle of CharityPrinciple of charityIn philosophy and rhetoric, the principle of charity requires interpreting a speaker's statements to be rational and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation...
;
- adherence to Projective Principle.
- adherence to Normative Principle, which is divided into:
- Eliminative Materialism
Is Intentionality discourse a problem for science?
Roderick ChisholmRoderick Chisholm
Roderick M. Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, and the philosophy of perception. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University under Clarence Irving Lewis and Donald C. Williams, and taught at Brown University...
(1956), G.E.M. Anscombe (1957), Peter Geach
Peter Geach
Peter Thomas Geach is a British philosopher. His areas of interest are the history of philosophy, philosophical logic, and the theory of identity.He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford...
(1957), and Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor (philosopher)
Charles Margrave Taylor, is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec best known for his contributions in political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, and in the history of philosophy. His contributions to these fields have earned him both the prestigious Kyoto Prize and the...
(1964) all adhere to the former position, namely that intentional idiom is problematic and cannot be integrated with the natural sciences. Members of this category also maintain realism in regard to intentional objects, which may imply some kind of dualism (though this is debatable).
The latter position, which maintains the unity of intentionality with the natural sciences, is further divided into three standpoints:
- Eliminative Materialism, supported by W.V. Quine (1960) and Churchland (1981)
- Realism, advocated by Jerry FodorJerry FodorJerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
(1975), as well as Burge, Dretske, Kripke, and the early Hilary PutnamHilary PutnamHilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science... - those who adhere to the Quinean double standard.
Intentionality poses no problem for science
Proponents of the eliminative materialism, understand intentional idiom, such as "belief", "desire", and the like, to be replaceable either with behavioristic language (e.g. Quine) or with the language of neuroscience (e.g. Churchland).
Holders of realism argue, in contrast to those in support of C, that there is a deeper fact of the matter to both translation and belief attribution. In other words, manuals for translating one language into another cannot be set up in different yet behaviorally identical ways and ontologically there are intentional objects. Famously, Fodor has attempted to ground such realist claims about intentionality in a language of thought. Dennett comments on this issue, Fodor "attempt[s] to make these irreducible realities acceptable to the physical sciences by grounding them (somehow) in the 'syntax' of a system of physically realized mental representations" (Dennett 1987, 345).
Those who adhere to the so-called Quinean double standard (namely that ontologically there is nothing intentional, but that the language of intentionality is indispensable), accept Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation
Indeterminacy of translation
The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th century analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book Word and Object, which gathered together and refined much of Quine's previous work on subjects other than formal logic and set...
and its implications, while the other positions so far mentioned do not. As Quine puts it, indeterminacy of radical translation is the thesis that "manuals for translating one language into another can be set up in divergent ways, all compatible with the totality of speech dispositions, yet incompatible with one another" (Quine 1960, 27). Quine (1960) and Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher. His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century...
(1958) both comment on this intermediary position. One such implication would be that there is, in principle, no deeper fact of the matter that could settle two interpretative strategies on what belief to attribute to a physical system. In other words, the behavior (including speech dispositions) of any physical system, in theory, could be interpreted by two different predictive strategies and both would be equally warranted in their belief attribution. This category can be seen to be a medial position between the realists and the eliminativists since it attempts to blend attributes of both into a theory of intentionality. Dennett, for example, argues in True Believers (1981) that intentional idiom (or "folk psychology
Folk psychology
Folk psychology is the set of assumptions, constructs, and convictions that makes up the everyday language in which people discuss human psychology...
") is a predictive strategy and if such a strategy successfully and voluminously predicts the actions of a physical system, then that physical system can be said to have those beliefs attributed to it. Dennett calls this predictive strategy the intentional stance
Intentional stance
The intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of a thing in terms of mental properties...
.
They are further divided into two theses:
- adherence to the Normative Principle
- adherence to the Projective Principle
Advocates of the former, the Normative Principle, argue that attributions of intentional idioms to physical systems should be the propositional attitudes that the physical system ought to have in those circumstances (Dennett 1987, 342). However, exponents of this view are still further divided into those who make an Assumption of Rationality and those who adhere to the Principle of Charity. Dennett (1969, 1971, 1975), Cherniak (1981, 1986), and the more recent work of Putnam (1983) recommend the Assumption of Rationality, which unsurprisingly assumes that the physical system in question is rational. Donald Davidson
Donald Davidson (philosopher)
Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher born in Springfield, Massachusetts, who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton...
(1967, 1973, 1974, 1985) and Lewis (1974) defend the Principle of Charity.
The latter is advocated by Grandy (1973) and Stich (1980, 1981, 1983, 1984), who maintain that attributions of intentional idioms to any physical system (e.g. humans, artifacts, non-human animals, etc.) should be the propositional attitude (e.g. "belief", "desire", etc.) that one would suppose one would have in the same circumstances (Dennett 1987, 343).
Basic intentionality types in Le Morvan
Working on the intentionality of vision, belief, and knowledge, Pierre Le Morvan (2005) has distinguished between three basic kinds of intentionality that he dubs "transparent", "translucent", and "opaque" respectively. The threefold distinction may be explained as follows. Let's call the "intendum" what an intentional state is about, and the "intender" the subject who is in the intentional state. An intentional state is transparent if it satisfies the following two conditions: (i) it is genuinely relational in that it entails the existence of not just the intender but the intendum as well, and (ii) substitutivity of identicals applies to the intendum (i.e. if the intentional state is about a, and a = b, then the intentional state is about b as well). An intentional state is translucent if it satisfies (i) but not (ii). An intentional state is opaque if it satisfies neither (i) nor (ii).Intentionality, Semiotics and Art Criticism
The question of interpretation of art with regard to the producer's intentions has been the subject of much debate. The traditional, commonsense view that the key to understanding works of art can be located in the intentions of the author, has been critiqued convincingly by authors such as Roland BarthesRoland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
and Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
who emphasise the active role of the viewer/reader in creating meaning in visual and written texts.
A generalized semiotic view is developed in biosemiotics
Biosemiotics
Biosemiotics is a growing field that studies the production, action and interpretation of signs in the biological realm...
, which states that intentionality is a criterial feature of life
Life
Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased , or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate...
, thus interpreting the organic needs to be the primary form of intentions.
Intentionality vs. intensionality
Intentionality should not be confused with intensionIntension
In linguistics, logic, philosophy, and other fields, an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase or other symbol. In the case of a word, it is often implied by the word's definition...
ality, a related concept from logic and semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
.
See also
- Alexius MeinongAlexius MeinongAlexius Meinong was an Austrian philosopher, a realist known for his unique ontology...
- Franz BrentanoFranz BrentanoFranz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views.-Life:Brentano was born at Marienberg am...
- A.J. Ayer
- Albert CamusAlbert CamusAlbert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
- ConsciousnessConsciousnessConsciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
- SuperintelligenceSuperintelligenceA superintelligence, hyperintelligence or superhuman intelligence is a hypothetical entity which possesses intelligence surpassing that of any existing human being...
- Daniel DennettDaniel DennettDaniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
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Further reading
- Davidson, Donald. "Truth and Meaning". Synthese, XVII, pp. 304–23. 1967.
- Dreyfus, Georges. "Is Perception Intentional? (A Preliminary Exploration of Intentionality in Indian Philosophy)." 2006.
- Fodor, J. "The Language of Thought". Harvard University Press. 1980. ISBN 0674510305
- Sajama, Seppo & Kamppinen, Matti. Historical Introduction to Phenomenology. New York, NY: Croom Helm, 1987. ISBN 0709944438
- Stich, Stephen. "Relativism, Rationality, and the Limits of Intentional Description". Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 65, pp. 211–35. 1984.
- Williford, Kenneth. "The Intentionality of Consciousness and Consciousness of Intentionality. In G. Forrai and G. Kampis, eds., Intentionality: Past and Future. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 143–156. 2005. ISBN 9042018178
External links
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: