Online research in philosophy

In philosophy the term intentionality refers to the feature possessed by mental states of beingabout things others than themselves. A serious question has been how to explain the intentionality of mental states. This paper starts with linguistic representations, and explores how an organism might use linguistic symbols to represent other things. Two research projects of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, one explicity teaching twopan troglodytes to use lexigrams intentionally, and the other exploring the ability of several members ofpan paniscus to learn lexigram use and comprehension of English speech spontaneously when raised in an appropriate environment, are examined to explore the acquisition process. Although it is controversial whether intentionality of mental states or linguistic symbols is primary, it is argued that the intentionality of linguistic symbols is primary and that studying how organisms learn to use linguistic symbols provides an avenue to understanding how intentionality is acquired by cognitive systems.

Intentionality, as Brentano originally introduced the term in modern philosophy, was meant to provide a distinctive characteristic definitively separating the mental from the physical.(1) Mental states have an intrinsic relationship to an object, to that which they are "about." Physical entities just are what they are, they cannot, by their very essence, refer to anything, they have no "outreach", as one might put it. Mental states have, as it were, an incomplete essence, they cannot exist at all unless they are completed by something other than themselves, their object. Brentano's position is opposed to all theories which represent the mental as only extrinsically related to the world, that is, to all theories in which mental states are themselves self-sufficient for their own existence and only secondarily relate to the world by means of something external to their nature, e.g., neurological causation, divine intervention, or pre-established harmony. In these later cases, any mental act whatsoever could be related to any object, or indeed to none, for the relation is external to the nature of the act, it is superimposed on it by outside forces. Brentano's point is that a mental act has, by its very essence, an Intentional object without which it would not be a mental act. It would therefore appear that since causality is an external relationship which could in principle relate any two things regardless of their nature, the Intentional relation between an act and its object cannot be a causal relation.

I question Brentano's thesis that all and only mental phenomena are intentional. The common gloss on intentionality in terms of directedness does not justify the claim that intentionality is sufficient for mentality. One response to this problem is to lay down further requirements for intentionality. For example, it may be said that we have intentionality only where we have such phenomena as failure of substitution or existential presupposition. I consider a variety of such requirements for intentionality. I argue they either fail to exclude all non-mental phenomena or are so demanding that they ground new, serious challenges to the claim that qualitative states of mind are intentional.

The apparent incompatibility of mental states with physical explanations has long been a concern of philosophers of psychology. This incompatibility is thought to arise from the intentionality of mental states. But, Brentano notwithstanding, intentionality is an ordinary feature of higher order behavior patterns in the classical literature of ethology.

Chapter THE NATURE OF INTENTIONAL STATES I. INTENTIONALITY AS DIRECTEDNESS As a preliminary formulation we might say: Intentionality is that property of ...

Exploring intentionality from an externalist per- spective, I distinguish three kinds of intentionality in the case of seeing, which I call transparent, translucent, and opaque respec- tively. I then extend the distinction from seeing to knowing, and then to believing. Having explicated the three-fold distinction, I then critically explore some important consequences that follow from granting that (i) there are transparent and translucent in- tentional states and (ii) these intentional states are mental states. These consequences include: ?rst, that existential opacity is neither the mark of intentionality nor of the mental; second, that Sellars has not shown that all intentionality is non-relational; third, that a key Quinean argument for semantic indeterminacy rests on a false premise; fourth, that perceptual experience is intentional on Alston.

In my article I evaluate Searle's account of mental causation, in particular his account of the causal efficacy of unconscious intentional states. I argue that top-down causation and overdetermination are unsolved problems in Searle's philosophy of mind, despite his assurances to the contrary. I also argue that there are conflicting claims involved in his account of mental causation and his account of the unconscious. As a result, it becomes impossible to understand how unconscious intentional states can be causally efficacious. My conclusion will be that if Searle's conception of unconscious intentionality is to play a genuine role in the causal explanation of human action, it needs to be rethought.

Phenomenologists such as Merleau?Ponty have argued that the ordinary teleological relation between an embodied agent and the world is neither ?subjective? nor ?cognitive?, i.e. that it is not normally mediated by a chain of explicit cognition occurring within a distinct mental subject. Yet, while this seems true from a first?person, phenomenological perspective, I argue that teleological forms of explanation require the ascription of Intentional states. Intentional states, however, are usually regarded as subjective, cognitive states. In order to reconcile the phenomenology with the logic of teleology, I introduce the notion of ?body?intentionality?. I maintain that we can use a modified version of Jonathan Bennett's concept of a teleological law to specify third?person empirical criteria for a pre?cognitive, pre?subjective kind of Intentionality. I also argue that this notion of body?intentionality provides us with at least a partial solution to the mind?body problem that avoids the inadequacies of the computational theory of mind.