Necessary Intentionality

Some things in the world--intentional items such as words, thoughts, portraits, and passport photos--are about things, whereas other things in the world--sticks, stones, and fireflies--are not about anything. Necessary Intentionality is a study of aboutness, or intentionality, with a focus on the following question: are intentional items typically about whatever they are about as a matter of necessity, or is their aboutness, rather, a matter of mere contingency? Consider, for example, a particular name referring to a particular person, or a specific belief with respect to some particular thing that it is such and so. Is it possible for the name not to have referred to the person and for the belief not to have been about the thing? Ori Simchen defends a negative answer to such questions. That the name refers to the person is necessary for the name and that the belief is about the thing is necessary for the belief. Simchen articulates his overall position in two main stages. In the first stage he fleshes out a requisite modal metaphysical background. In the second stage he brings the modal metaphysics to bear on cognition, specifically the aboutness of cognitive states and episodes. Simchen presents a productivist approach, which takes aboutness to be determined by the conditions of production of intentional items, rather than an interpretationist approach that takes aboutness to be determined by conditions of consumption of such items.

Introductory volume, presenting the major philosophical doctrines of phenomenology.

Towards Non-Being presents an account of the semantics of intentional language - verbs such as 'believes', 'fears', 'seeks', 'imagines'. Graham Priest's account tackles problems concerning intentional states which are often brushed under the carpet in discussions of intentionality, such as their failure to be closed under deducibility. Drawing on the work of the late Richard Routley (Sylvan), it proceeds in terms of objects that may be either existent or non-existent, atworlds that may be either possible or impossible. Since Russell, non-existent objects have had a bad press in Western philosophy; Priest mounts a full-scale defence. In the process, he offers an account of both fictional and mathematical objects as non-existent.The book will be of central interest to anyone who is concerned with intentionality in the philosophy of mind or philosophy of language, the metaphysics of existence and identity, the philosophy or fiction, the philosophy of mathematics, or cognitive representation in AI.

Intentionality Deconstructed argues for the view that no concrete entity - mental, linguistic, or any other - can possess intentional content. Nothing can be about anything. The concept of intentionality is flawed, and so content ascriptions cannot be "absolutely" true or false - they lack truth conditions. Nonetheless, content ascriptions have truth conditions and can be true (or possess a related epistemic merit) relative to practices of content ascription, so that different practices may imply different (not real but practice-dependent) intentional objects for the same token mental state. The suggested view does not deny the existence of those mental states standardly considered intentional, notably the so-called propositional attitudes; it affirms it. That is, support is provided for the existence of those states with the properties usually attributed to them, but absent intentional properties. Specifically, it is argued that the so-called propositional attitudes possess logico-syntactic properties, whose postulation plays an important role in addressing the challenge of reconciling intentional anti-realism with beliefs being true or having alternative epistemic merits, the argument from the predictive and explanatory success of content ascription for intentional realism, and the cognitive suicide objection to views that deny intentionality. As part of the rejection of this final objection, intentional anti-realism is presented as a radical view, which claims "Nothing can possess intentional content" but not that nothing can possess intentional content, and it is argued that this is a legitimate characteristic of radical philosophy. In spite of rejecting the "claim that" talk, intentional anti-realism gives clear sense to its dispute with its rivals as well as to its own superiority. Various arguments for intentional anti-realism are presented. One argument rejects all possible accounts of intentionality, namely primitivism, intrinsic reductionism - the prominent example of which is the phenomenal intentionality thesis - and extrinsic reductionism (that is, reductive naturalistic accounts). According to another argument, since intentional properties are shown to be dispensable for all possibly relevant purposes, and no sound arguments support the claim that they ever are instantiated, the application of Ockham's razor shows that no such properties ever are instantiated, and another step shows that neither can they be.

Intentionality provides the philosophical foundations for Searle's earlier works, Speech Acts and Expression and Meaning.

Intentionality is one of the central problems of modern philosophy. How can a thought, action or belief be about something? Sachs draws on the work of Wilfrid Sellars, C I Lewis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to build a new theory of intentionality that solves many of the problems faced by traditional conceptions.

§ 1. Remarks on the Current Status of the Problematic. The literature treating the relationship between the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger has not been kind to Husserl. Heidegger's "devastating" phenomenologically ontological critique of traditional epistemology and ontology, advanced under the rubric of "fundamental ontology" in Being and Time, has almost been universallyl received, despite the paucity of its references to Husserl, as sounding the death knell for Husserl's original formulation of phenomenology. The recent publication of Heidegger's lectures from the period surrounding his composition of Being and Time, lectures that contain detailed references and critical analyses of Husserl's phenomenology, and which, in the words of one respected commentator, Rudolf Bernet, "offer at long last, insight into the principal sources of fundamental ontology,"2 will, if 3 the conclusions reached by the same commentator are any indication, serve only to reinforce the perception of Heidegger's phenomenological /I superiority" over Husserl. This is not to suggest that the tendency toward Heidegger partisan ship in the literature treating the relationship of his phenomenology to Husserl's has its basis in extra-philosophical or extra-phenome nological concerns and considerations. Rather, it is to draw attention to the undeniable 'fact' that Heidegger's reformulation of Husserl's phenomenology has cast a "spell" over all subsequent discussions of the basic problems and issues involved in what has become known as their "controversy.

Why does anything happen? What is the best account of natural necessity? In this book, William A. Bauer presents and defends a comprehensive account of the internal structure of causal powers that incorporates physical intentionality and information. Bauer explores new lines of thought concerning the theory of pure powers (powerful properties devoid of any qualitative nature), the place of mind in the physical world, and the role of information in explaining fundamental processes. He raises probing questions about physical modality and fundamental properties, and explores the possibility that physical reality and the mind are unified through intentionality. His book will be valuable for researchers and students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind.

This book has roots in our respective doctoral dissertations, both completed in 1970 at Stanford under the tutelage of Professors Dagfmn F øllesdal, John D. Goheen, and Jaakko Hintikka. In the fall of 1970 we wrote a joint article that proved to be a prolegomenon to the present work, our 'Intentionality via Intensions', The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971). Professor Hintikka then suggested we write a joint book, and in the spring of 1971 we began writing the present work. The project was to last ten years as our conception of the project continued to grow at each stage. Our iritellectual debts follow the history of our project. During our dis sertation days at Stanford, we joined with fellow doctoral candidates John Lad and Michael Sukale and Professors Føllesdal, Goheen, and Hintikka in an informal seminar on phenomenology that met weekly from June of 1969 through March of 1970. During the summers of 1973 and 1974 we regrouped in another informal seminar on phenomenology, meeting weekly at Stanford and sometimes Berkeley, the regular participants being ourselves, Hubert Dreyfus, Dagfmn Føllesdal, Jane Lipsky McIntyre, Izchak Miller, and, in 1974, John Haugeland.