'Writing with admirable lucidity and disposing a wide knowledge of technical questions in philosophy as well as of legal theory and constitutional history, Bassham competently distinguishes the quite distinct ideas that go, or could go, under the name of originalism.' |s CANADIAN PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWS.

As its title suggests, this is a book about constitutional interpretation. More specifically it is an articulation and defense of that particular method of constitutional interpretation, known as originalism, which looks to the original intent of the constitution’s framers as a benchmark against which interpretation is to be made. Professor Whittington believes “that originalism is the method most consistent with the judicial effort to interpret the written constitutional text and that an originalist jurisprudence facilitates the realization of a political (...) system grounded on popular sovereignty”. I think it is fair to say that in the current legal, political, and philosophical climate, originalist theories are pretty much on the defensive, which makes Whittington’s book all the more timely and valuable. (shrink)

In this chapter I look closely at the intentionality of consciousness from a naturalistic perspective. I begin with a consideration of Gurwitsch's suggestive ideas about the role of acts of consciousness in constituting both the objects and the subjects of consciousness. I turn next to a discussion of how these ideas relate to my own empirical approach to intentional relations seen from a developmental perspective. This is followed by a discussion of some recent ideas in philosophical cognitive science on (...) the intentionality of consciousness, both with respect to the objects and the subjects of consciousness. I show that these recent trends tend to naturalize intentionality and consciousness in directions compatible with the descriptive aspects of Gurwitsch's constitutive phenomenology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Intentions and Related States of Mind Intention's Functions and Constitution Intentions and Reasons References Further reading.

Abstract In the contemporary literature on self-knowledge discussion is framed by and large by two competing models of self-knowledge: the observational (or perceptual) model and the constitutive model. On the observational model self-knowledge is the result of ?cognitively viewing? one's mental states. Constitutive theories of self-knowledge, on the other hand, hold that self-knowledge is constitutive of intentional states. That is, self-ascription is a necessary condition for being in a particular mental state. Akeel Bilgrami is a defender of the constitutive (...) model. I argue that the constitutive model gives rise to a regress problem. This paper will focus on that problem as well as its application to Bilgrami's version of the constitutive model. (shrink)

Shared agency is a distinctive kind of sociality that involves interdependent planning, practical reasoning, and action between participants. Philosophical reflection suggests that agents engage in this form of sociality when a special structure of interrelated psychological attitudes exists between them, a set of attitudes that constitutes a collective intention. I defend a new way to understand collective intention as a combination of individual conditional intentions. Revising an initial statement of the conditional intention account in response to several challenges leads to (...) a specification of the properties these intentions need to have in order to be genuine commitments. I then show how a structure of conditional intentions with these properties settles a collection of agents on engaging in social interactions that display all the features typically associated with shared agency. (shrink)

Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable data - is (...) sketched. The underlying assumptions of this approach can be seen to ally it directly with theorizing in evolutionary biology, which has recently come under attack from Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, who castigate it as the Their arguments, which are strongly analogous to B. F, Skinner's arguments against point to certain pitfalls that attend the careless exercise of such thinking (and rival varieties of thinking as well), but do not constitute a fundamental objection to either adaptationist theorizing or its cousin, intentional system theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A Third-Person-Based or Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account of mental content implies that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s mental content are precisely captured by the judgments of a second-person or an interpreter. Alex Byrne, Bill Child, and others have discussed attributing such a view to Donald Davidson. This account significantly departs from a First-Person-Based or First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account, such as Crispin Wright’s, according to which, as an a priori matter, facts about intentional content are constituted by (...) the judgments of the subject herself, formed under certain optimal or cognitively ideal conditions. I will argue for two claims: (1) Attributing a Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account to Davidson is unjustified; Davidson’s view is much closer to a non-reductionist First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account. (2) Third-Personal accounts rest on a misconstrual of the role of an interpreter in the First-Personal accounts; the notion of an interpreter still plays an essential role in the latter ones. (shrink)

Trust constitutes a fundamental strategy to deal with risks and uncertainty in complex societies. In line with the vast literature stressing the importance of trust in doctor–patient relationships, trust is therefore regularly suggested as a way of dealing with the risks of medical artificial intelligence (AI). Yet, this approach has come under charge from different angles. At least two lines of thought can be distinguished: (1) that trusting AI is conceptually confused, that is, that we cannot trust AI; and (2) (...) that it is also dangerous, that is, that we should not trust AI—particularly if the stakes are as high as they routinely are in medicine. In this paper, we aim to defend a notion of trust in the context of medical AI against both charges. To do so, we highlight the technically mediated intentions manifest in AI systems, rendering trust a conceptually plausible stance for dealing with them. Based on literature from human–robot interactions, psychology and sociology, we then propose a novel model to analyse notions of trust, distinguishing between three aspects: reliability, competence, and intentions. We discuss each aspect and make suggestions regarding how medical AI may become worthy of our trust. (shrink)

Newcomers to the philosophy of mind are sometimes resistant to the idea that pain is a mental state. If asked to defend their view, they might say something like this: pain is a physical state, it is a state of the body. A pain in one’s leg feels to be in the leg, not ‘in the mind’. After all, sometimes people distinguish pain which is ‘all in the mind’ from a genuine pain, sometimes because the second is ‘physical’ while the (...) first is not. And we also occasionally distinguish mental pain (which is normally understood as some kind of emotional distress) from the ‘physical pain’ one feels in one’s body. So what can be meant by saying that pain is a mental state? Of course, it only takes a little reflection shows that this naive view is mistaken. Pain is a state of consciousness, or an event in consciousness, and whether or not all states of mind are conscious, it is indisputable that only minds, or states of mind, are conscious.2 But does the naive view tell us anything about the concept of pain, or the concept of mind? I think it does. In this paper, I shall give reasons for thinking that consciousness is a form of intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’. I shall claim that the consciousness involved in bodily sensations like pain is constituted by the mind’s direction upon the part or region of the body where the sensation feels to be. Given this, it is less surprising that the naive view of pain says what it does: the apparent ‘physicality’ of pain is a consequence of confusing the object of the intentional state—the part of the body in which the pain is felt—with the state of being in pain. (shrink)

Wright’s judgement-dependent account of intention is an attempt to show that truths about a subject’s intentions can be viewed as constituted by the subject’s own best judgements about those intentions. The judgements are considered to be best if they are formed under certain cognitively optimal conditions, which mainly include the subject’s conceptual competence, attentiveness to the questions about what the intentions are, and lack of any material self-deception. Offering a substantive, non-trivial specification of the no-self-deception condition is one of the (...) main problems for Wright. His solution is to view it as a positive presumption, which is violated only if there is strong evidence to the effect that the subject is self-deceived. In this paper, I will argue that the concern about self-deception in Wright’s account is misplaced and generally unmotivated. (shrink)

Moods are sometimes claimed to constitute an exception to the rule that mental phenomena are intentional (in the sense of representing something). In reaction, some philosophers have argued that moods are in fact intentional, but exhibit a special and unusual kind of intentionality: they represent the world as a whole, or everything indiscriminately, rather than some more specific object(s). In this paper, I present a problem for extant versions of this idea, then propose a revision that solves the (...) problem but also entrains an important change in our understanding of the nature of moods – and indeed of the nature of mind. What emerges is an intentionalist account that emphasizes the role of attitude rather than content in determining the character of moods. (shrink)

Recently philosophers have proposed a wide variety of interventions referred to as ‘moral enhancements’. Some of these interventions are concerned with helping individuals make more informed decisions; others, however, are designed to compel people to act as the intervener sees fit. Somewhere between these two extremes lie interventions designed to direct an agent's attention either towards morally relevant issues – hat-hanging – or away from temptations to do wrong – hat-hiding. I argue that these interventions fail to constitute genuine moral (...) enhancement because, although they may result in more desirable outcomes – more altruism, more law-following, and/or less self-destructive behavior, they ignore a person's intentions, and often what makes an action right or wrong is the intent behind it. (shrink)

Memories are mental states with a number of interesting features. One of those features seems to be their having an intentional object. After all, we commonly say that memories are about things, and that a subject represents the world in a certain way by virtue of remembering something. It is unclear, however, what sorts of entities constitute the intentional objects of memory. In particular, it is not clear whether those are mind-independent entities in the world or whether they (...) are mental entities of some kind. The purpose of this chapter is to map the different positions on this issue, and to highlight the virtues and difficulties for each of the options. In Section 2, I will specify the question of what the intentional objects of memory are by clarifying the relevant notions of memory and intentional object. In Section 3, I will motivate the significance of identifying the intentional objects of memory by exploring the relations between, on the one hand, the intentionality of memory and, on the other hand, the phenomenology and the epistemology of memory. In Section 4, I will consider two natural candidates for being the intentional objects of memory, namely, worldly entities and mental entities, and I will raise some concerns for each of the two candidates. A promising alternative will emerge, in Section 5, as preserving the virtues of the two original candidates while avoiding their difficulties. The alternative will concern a certain combination of worldly and mental entities; a combination that involves both causal and truth-making relations. I will conclude by sketching how the alternative candidate can shed some light on the phenomenological and epistemological issues raised in the third section. (shrink)

In the past few years, a number of philosophers ; Horgan and Tienson 2002; Pitt 2004) have maintained the following three theses: there is a distinctive sort of phenomenology characteristic of conscious thought, as opposed to other sorts of conscious mental states; different conscious thoughts have different phenomenologies; and thoughts with the same phenomenology have the same intentional content. The last of these three claims is open to at least two different interpretations. It might mean that the phenomenology of (...) a thought expresses its intentional content, where intentional content is understood as propositional, and propositions are understood as mind-and language-independent abstract entities. And it might mean that the phenomenology of a thought is its intentional content—that is, that the phenomenology of a thought, like the phenomenology of a sensation, constitutes its content. The second sort of view is a kind of psychologism. Psychologistic views hold that one or another sort of thing—numbers, sentences, propositions, etc.—that we can think or know about is in fact a kind of mental thing. Since Frege, psychologism has been in bad repute among analytic philosophers. It is widely held that Frege showed that such views are untenable, since, among other things, they subjectivize what is in fact objective, and, hence, relativize such things as consistency and truth to the peculiarities of human psychology. The purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences of the thesis that intentional mental content is phenomenological and to try to reach a conclusion about whether it yields a tenable view of mind, thought and meaning. I believe the thesis is not so obviously wrong as it will strike many philosophers of mind and language. In fact, it can be defended against the standard objections to psychologism, and it can provide the basis for a novel and interesting account of mentality. (shrink)

This book develops a novel theory of intentionality. It argues that intentionality is an internal essential relation of constitution between an intentional state and an object or between such a state and a possible state of affairs as subsisting. The author's main claim is that intentionality is a fundamentally modal property, hence a non (scientifically) natural property in that it does not supervene, either locally or globally, on its nonmodal physical basis. This is the property, primarily for an (...) intentional mental state, to be constituted by the entities it is about. In the case of intentionality of reference, such constituents are objects, in the sense of individuals; in the case of intentionality of content, such constituents are possible states of affairs as subsisting. Constitution is meant in a mereologically literal sense: those constituents are essential parts of the relevant states. As a result, the theory claims not only that intentionality is relational, but also that is an internal, essential relation holding between an intentional state and its object or proposition-like content. Intentionality as Constitution will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper argues that a class of popular views of collective intention, which I call “quasi-psychologism”, faces a problem explaining common intuitions about collective action. Views in this class hold that collective intentions are realized in or constituted by individual, mental, participatory intentions. I argue that this metaphysical commitment entails persistence conditions that are in tension with a purported obligation to notify co-actors before leaving a collective action attested to by participants in experimental research about the interpersonal normativity of collective (...) action. I then explore the possibilities open to quasi-psychologists for responding to this research. (shrink)

How should we punish criminal offenders? One prima facie attractive punishment is administering a mandatory neurointervention—interventions that exert a physical, chemical or biological effect on the brain in order to diminish the likelihood of some forms of criminal offending. While testosterone-lowering drugs have long been used in European and US jurisdictions on sex offenders, it has been suggested that advances in neuroscience raise the possibility of treating a broader range of offenders in the future. Neurointerventions could be a cheaper, and (...) more effective method of punishment. They could also be more humane. Nevertheless, in this paper we provide an argument against the use of mandatory neurointerventions on offenders. We argue that neurointerventions inflict a significant harm on an offender that render them a morally objectionable form of punishment in a respect that incarceration is not. Namely, it constitutes an objectionable interference with the offender’s mental states. However, it might be thought that incarceration also involves an equally objectionable interference with the offender’s mental states. We show that even if it were the case that the offender is harmed to the same extent in the same respect, it does not follow that the harms are morally equivalent. We argue that if one holds that intended harm is more difficult to justify than harm that is unintended but merely foreseen, this means neurointerventions could be morally objectionable in a significant respect that incarceration is not. (shrink)

A striking thesis lies at the core of Davidson's philosophy: when we attribute intentional content to another creature's mental states and speech acts, we must treat the creature as largely conforming to our own rational norms. I will discuss how this thesis informs Davidson's treatment of rationality and intentionality. After reviewing some historical background, I present basic aspects of Davidson's position. I then examine various worries about the position. I conclude by highlighting some key Davidsonian insights into rationality.

The aim of the present volume is to discuss the notion of constitution from the perspectives of history of political thought. Its scholarly intention is to go beyond the approach concentrating on the formal understanding of constitution and bring forward more complex historical and philosophic-political interpretations. Our point of departure was the need to revive the somehow neglected distinction between the idea of constitution as an act of conscious law-giving activity and the notion of constitution conceived (...) as the set of fundamental political rules derived from the very nature of political regime and its historical development. (shrink)

Based on a puzzling pattern in our judgements about intentional action, Knobe [. “Intentional Action and Side-Effects in Ordinary Language.” Analysis 63: 190–194] has claimed that these judgements are shaped by our moral judgements and evaluations. However, this claim goes directly against a key conceptual intuition about intentional action – the “frame-of-mind condition”, according to which judgements about intentional action are about the agent’s frame-of-mind and not about the moral value of his action. To preserve this (...) intuition Hindriks [. “Intentional Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry.” The Philosophical Quarterly 58: 630–641;. “Normativity in Action: How to Explain the Knobe Effect and its Relatives.” Mind & Language 29: 51–72] has proposed an alternate account of the Knobe Effect. According to his “Normative Reason account of Intentional Action”, a side-effect counts as intentional only when the agent thought it constituted a normative reason not to act but did not care. In... (shrink)

Intention was seen traditionally as a philosophical concept, before being debated more recently from psychological and social perspectives. Today the cognitive sciences approach intention empirically, at the level of its underlying mechanisms. This naturalization of intention makes it more concrete and graspable by empirical sciences. This volume offers an interdisciplinary integration of current research on intentional processes naturalized through action, drawing on the theoretical and empirical approaches of cognitive neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Each chapter integrates several disciplinary perspectives. (...) Taken together, the chapters show that the reunification of the different dimensions of intentional processes may constitute an adequate basis for a general model of intentional processes and their links to action. This can be applied at various levels, from neuronal activity to self-constitution, from the expression of intentional actions at the individual level to their expression in social contexts, and to the recognition of intention in actions executed by others.ContributorsColin Allen, Mireille Bonnard, Vittorio Gallese, Jozina B. de Graaf, Franck Grammont, Patrick Haggard, Marco Iacoboni, Dorothée Legrand, Pierre Livet, Albert Ogien, Jean Pailhous, Jean-Luc Petit, Jean-Michel Roy, Jessica A. Sommerville, Manos Tsakiris, Amanda L. Woodward. (shrink)

What’s the relationship between (i) intending to do something, (ii) believing that you are going to do this, and (iii) its being the case that you are going to do the thing in question? I propose a position on which all three categories, correctly understood, amount in the fundamental case to the very same thing. The belief that constitutes future-directed intention, when strong, likewise constitutes one as having a real tendency to act in the intended way.

Buchanan (2014) argues for a Gricean solution to well-known counterexamples to direct reference theories of content. Peet (2016) develops a way to change the counterexample so that it seems to speak against Buchanan’s own proposal. I argue that both theorists fail to notice a significant distinction between the kinds of cases at issue. Those appearing to count against direct reference theory must be described such that speakers have false beliefs about the identity of the object to which they intend to (...) refer, beliefs that appear relevant to the determination of what constitutes communicative success. This suggests, further, that cases of this sort do not provide a basis for robust generalizations about singular reference. (shrink)

Most philosophical defences of the state’s right to exclude immigrants derive their strength from the normative importance of self-determination. If nation-states are taken to be the political institutions of a people, then the state’s right to exclude is the people’s right to exclude – and a denial of this right constitutes an abridgement of self-determination. In this paper, I argue that this view of self-determination does not cohere with a group-agency view of nation-states. On the group-agency view that I defend, (...) a nation-state is the kind of group-agent that does not supervene on the intentionality of member/citizens. If we think that a nation-state is an intentional group-agent in its own right, then we should think that self-determination resides with the institutions of the state rather than with the citizens. If nation-states do not supervene on the intentionality of citizens, then it is unclear why citizens might have the right to control membership in the state as a feature of self-determination. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the nature of intentions and how it is discussed in a variety of fields, including neuroscience, philosophy, law, and several branches of psychology. It should be noted that the term is not understood in the same way in all fields; the chapter will focus on an account of intentions similar to that held by neuroscience, specifically the concept of occurrent intentions as commanding attitudes toward plans. A number of psychologists assume that intentions are conscious in nature—that an (...) intention appears in one’s consciousness preceding an action. Several questions arise from this assumption, and these questions are addressed here. The chapter argues that plans, including simple representations of prospective “basic” actions and complex strategies for achieving remote goals, constitute the representational content of intentions. (shrink)

To what extent can an agent be held responsible for what he does? According to Aristotle, we are answerable for our voluntary actions, the “voluntary” being “[1] that of which the origin is in oneself, [2] when one knows the particular factors that constitute the location of action.” This question, which was of paramount importance for Anscombe, led her to focus on the second, epistemic condition of responsibility. This chapter suggests that in fact, a large part of her philosophy of (...) action can be read as an effort to build a complex and subtle answer to the question what kind of knowledge an agent must have of his own action in order for him to be accountable for it (and/or for all or some of its consequences). In Intention, Anscombe shows that for his action to be intentional under some description, an agent must have a practical knowledge of it under this very description; that is why ignorance can sometimes be put forward as a ground for exoneration. But ignorance can also be blameworthy, when the agent could and should have known what he is ignorant of. Elucidating the possibility of voluntary ignorance brings into light a fundamental obligation to know which takes its meaning from, and has its roots in, Anscombe’s Thomist background. (shrink)

Constitutional interpretation is problematic because it can be difficult to distinguish legitimate interpretation from illegitimate change. The distinction depends largely on what a constitution is. A constitution, like any other law, necessarily has a meaning, which pre-exists judicial interpretation: it is not a set of meaningless marks on paper. Any plausible constitutional theory must offer an account of the nature of that meaning. In doing so, it must address two main questions. The first is whether the meaning of (...) the constitution is given solely by its words, or also by additional evidence of underlying intentions, purposes or values. The second question is whether, in either case, its meaning is determined by the original meanings, intentions, purposes or values of the founding generation, or by contemporary meanings, intentions, purposes or values. This question divides so-called 'originalists' from 'non-originalists'. This article discusses all these alternatives, and the main arguments for and against them. It is subtitled 'Originalism' because it defends a moderate version of that position; however, it is argued that this is equivalent to a moderate version of non-originalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the United States, constitutional and statutory law reinforce the right of all children to receive an education, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. In a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiment and law enforcement, however, partnerships among school districts, local law enforcement, and the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security subject undocumented and unaccompanied minor students to indefensible levels of risk for detention and deportation. We identify three stances that U.S. schools may take in the face of a (...) potential ‘school-to-deportation pipeline.’ Schools that engage in intentional collaboration actively increase detention and deportation by referring students to immigration officials for criminal, non-criminal, and even non-disciplinary activity. Schools that engage in predictable complicity may not intend to subject their undocumented and unaccompanied minor students to detention or deportation, but still put students at risk by involving police in school policies. We argue that U.S. schools should instead engage in proactive protection of immigrant students and families, including actively resisting federal policies when necessary. (shrink)

This review article examines Richard Ekins’ attempt to defend the concept of legislative intention from influential criticism, and to demonstrate its indispensable and central role in statutory interpretation. He rejects accounts of legislative intention in terms of the aggregation of the intentions of individual legislators, and instead, draws on recent philosophical work on the nature of group agency to propose a unitary model, in which the relevant intention is that of the legislature itself, although it is supported by the ‘interlocking’ (...) of the intentions of all its members. The legislature has two relevant intentions: a secondary or standing intention to operate by way of agreed procedures to develop and enact particular proposals for legislation to enhance the welfare of the community; and primary intentions that consist of the content of those proposals once the legislature has enacted them. Ekins restricts the evidence that is relevant and admissible in order to determine the content of such proposals; because they must be ‘open’ to all legislators, and transparent to the community, the evidence must be publicly available. This article summarizes the main theses of the book, and subjects them to critical examination. It concludes that the book adds considerable depth, rigour and theoretical insight to our understanding of these issues. But it also suggests that his argument is vulnerable to criticism at a few points, at least one of which is crucial. The argument needs a better account of what it is that constitutes the content of particular proposals when they are put to the legislature for enactment. (shrink)

In the last years of his life, Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr., defied illness to continue his work on the philosophy of law. This book is a monument to MacCallum’s effort, containing fourteen of his essays, five of them published here for the first time. Two of those previously published are widely admired and reprinted: “Legislative Intent,” certainly one of the best papers ever published on its topic, and “Negative and Positive Freedom,” which offered a new way of looking at a (...) distinction that had been canonical for the last two centuries. To complete MacCallum’s unfinished pieces, Marcus G. Singer and Rex Martin painstakingly consulted MacCallum’s notes for planned revisions. MacCallum discusses legal reasoning, the application of rules, the interpretation of statutes and constitutional provisions, and the relation of these matters to morality and justice. In the last decade of his working life, he became greatly concerned with the interrelated themes of integrity, autonomy, conscience, and violence. He wished to relate competition to morality and justice to adversarial systems of law. These themes are woven together in Legislative Intent and constitute the main subject of some of the essays. MacCallum was engaged in a constant search for truth and understanding, and in his life and work lived up to Emerson’s vision of the “American Scholar” as a “human being thinking.” These essays are informed by the author’s deep curiosity, penetrating intelligence, wide knowledge, and outstanding character. They will be treasured wherever these characteristics and true philosophy are treasured. (shrink)

The lively debate over the constitutional foundations of judicial review has been marred by a formalism which obscures its point and value.ed from genuine issues of substance, the rival positions offer inadequate accounts of the legitimacy of judicial review; constitutional theory must regain its connection with questions of political principle and moral value. Although the critics of ultra vires have rightly emphasized the foundational role of the common law, they have misconceived its nature and implications. On the one hand, they (...) have invited the charge of judicial supremacism by marginalizing the role of legislative intent; on the other, their affirmation of absolute parliamentary sovereignty (within the context of this debate) undermines the critique of ultra vires. In substance, therefore, the rival camps occupy essentially the same ground, equally trapped by a formalism that entrenches a stark confrontation between parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. A conception of shared sovereignty, or interdependent sovereignties, provides a better foundation for judicial review. (shrink)

In this essay, we will discuss what Husserl mean when he says that immanent objects are “constituted” by inner temporality. Our discussion will amount to a study of how sensations and intentions come to be in out subjectivity, and how we are conscious of them; Husserl’s opinion on these points will be taken from his Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness.

This paper is about the question: what is it for a mental state to mean (or present) something as an intentional object? This issue is addressed from a broad perspective, against the background of Brentano’s philosophical programme in Psychology from an empirical standpoint, and the controversy between the proponents of a non-canonical interpretation of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, and the so-called orthodox interpretation advocated namely by R. Chisholm. My investigation is divided into six parts. In the first section, I (...) explain the meaning and function of the notion of phenomenon in light of Brentano’s philosophical programme, and I briefly elucidate the notion of physical phenomenon which, in Brentano’s Psychology, constitutes the primary object of consciousness. In the next two sections, I look at two aspects of Brentano’s criticism of the identity thesis that he attributes to British empiricism, namely the psychological aspect, which concerns the identification of the two classes of phenomena, and the metaphysical aspect relating to the relationship between physical phenomena and the reality of an extramental world. Once this double distinction will be established, I will turn to the relation of intentional objects to presentations and put forward the hypothesis that intentional objects are conceptually dependent upon presentations and that this dependence rests, in turn, upon the content of the mental phenomena. The next step concerns Brentano’s theory of primary and secondary objects, and one of the main non-orthodox arguments against the canonical interpretation, namely that the latter conflates primary and secondary objects. In this context, I examine a second hypothesis: that the secondary object, or intentional correlate of an act, is an intentional content, which is distinct both from the intentional object and from the reality to which it relates, and I maintain that the intentional content has the function of mediating the mental acts’ relation to their objects. Finally, I shall examine some objections against the hypothesis of intentional content in Brentano’s Psychology, and I will conclude with a brief commentary on the bearing of this investigation with regard to the interpretation of the genesis of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, before and after the reistic turn of his philosophy. (shrink)

This essay delves into the essentialities of object-giving sources within the formulation of epistemic objectivity. It explores the relationship between objectivity and intentional states, particularly in the context of immediate and transcendent experiences. A key focus of this paradigm is the examination of inferences and how they are held in X’s intentional processes. These claims about inferences contribute to the perception of objectivity by highlighting the epistemological transitions of things that occur in the constitutive ideation. Additionally, the activity (...) within X’s episteme leads to significant articulations that reflect a structural realism of experiences. The essay also introduces a convention of the experiential-intentional process so that the causality manipulations could be avoided by the precents of sources of ideation. In this instance, the central niche is occupied by transcendental reflections of intentionality, which are fundamentally founded on experiences and objectivity, and they possess a distinct rhetorical quality. They manifest as acts, propositional forms, and constituents, all of which contribute to the understanding and justification of objectivity. To establish such a framework that upholds objectivity, certain prerequisites must be met. Firstly, the framework must possess justificational resources that prevent causality manipulations. Secondly, pre-reflective sources should not inter-define causality in epistemic circumstances, although this does not exclude the emergence of causal relations, and thus this approach offers a correlational explanation. Lastly, transcendental reflections should remain compatible with the experiential-intentional process, allowing for the accommodation of subjectivity in the justification of objectivity. (shrink)

The power to exercise control is a crucial feature of agency. Necessarily, if S cannot exercise some degree of control over anything - any state of affairs, event, process, object, or whatever - S is not an agent. If S is not an agent, S cannot act intentionally, responsibly, or rationally, nor can S possess or exercise free will. In my dissertation I reflect on the nature of control, and on the roles consciousness plays in its exercise. I first consider (...) the fragmented state of philosophical and empirical work on control. I argue that a mature philosophy of agency stands in need of a detailed personal-level account of control, and I begin by explicating a notion I call intentional control. On this explication, an agent J exercises intentional control in service of an intention X to the degree that behavior of J's for which X plays a (non-deviant) causal role approximates the representational content of X. With this explication in hand, I offer analyses of theoretically salient points along a degreed spectrum (covering, e.g., the exercise of minimal, successful, and perfect intentional control). Next, I develop an account of the degrees of intentional control's possession. This involves elucidation of ingredients of intentional control, i.e. those features of agents and environments that constitute an agent's causal potency and skill. It turns out that an agent's possession of control regarding an intention is intimately tied to her ability to repeatedly execute that intention across some specified (hypothetical) set of scenarios. Finally, I discuss a number of potentially fruitful applications of the account. In chapter three I confront a strong intuition, persistent in both philosophy and cognitive science, that consciousness is somehow intimately involved in the exercise of control. In this connection recent empirical work indicates the causal powers of consciousness remain poorly understood. I argue that Functional Agnosticism - the view that any claim regarding a function of consciousness for behavior is currently underdetermined by the data - is the wisest position on the causal powers of consciousness. Recognition of this unsatisfying state of affairs motivates reflection on what might enable progress beyond it. I argue that establishing a causal function for consciousness is facilitated by clarity on several issues. First, what is the sense of consciousness at issue? I isolate state consciousness, discuss the potential relevance of various types of conscious states, and distinguish between ambitious and modest approaches to the causal powers of state consciousness. In short, ambitious approaches seek to understand the causal contributions of a conscious mental state in virtue of the fact that the state is conscious; modest approaches seek to understand the causal contributions of conscious mental states, full stop. I argue that for various theoretical purposes, both approaches can be useful. Second, what is the sense of control at issue? I argue that for many important theoretical purposes, intentional control is the relevant sense. Finally, I illustrate the usefulness of clarity on these issues by examining recent work on the roles of conscious and unconscious vision for action. This work suggests that some important subset of our overt action is controlled by non-conscious processes. I apply insights developed earlier, noting common mistakes made in this literature, and highlighting important empirical possibilities these mistakes obscure. In later chapters I develop a novel account of conscious control. In chapter four I develop a central part of the account, which involves a view on the intentional structure of conscious trying. The leading view entails that conscious trying possesses a descriptive (or thetic) structure. Based on relevant empirical work concerning deafferented and paralyzed patients, I argue for the view that conscious trying is (at least) partially constituted by directive (or telic) structure. Finally, I argue that the exercise of conscious control is best understood as an exercise of intentional control for which the experience of trying plays a constitutive role. After presenting arguments for this view and defending the view against objections, I discuss the importance of conscious control for a mature philosophy of mind and agency. (shrink)

In a recent IPQ article, Christopher Kaczor gave a promising argument in which he strove to reconcile the common belief that obstetric craniotomy (the crushing of nearlyborn fetuses’ heads) is immoral with his clear and intuitively attractive account of intention. One of Kaczor’s crucial assumptions is that intentional mutilation is morally impermissible. In this article I argue that Kaczor’s analysis has three potential problems: (1) the mutilating features of craniotomy do not appear to meet Kaczor’s criteria for being intended, (...) so his account doesn’t show craniotomy to be impermissible; (2) some commonly-accepted acts, including voluntary sterilization, are acts of intentional mutilation according to Kaczor’s definition and are thus forbidden on his account; and (3) some acts that intuitively seem to constitute intentional mutilation do not meet Kaczor’s definition of “mutilation” and are not ruled out by his account. I suggest slight modifications to Kaczor’s account that might address these difficulties. (shrink)

In a recent IPQ article, Christopher Kaczor gave a promising argument in which he strove to reconcile the common belief that obstetric craniotomy is immoral with his clear and intuitively attractive account of intention. One of Kaczor’s crucial assumptions is that intentional mutilation is morally impermissible. In this article I argue that Kaczor’s analysis has three potential problems: the mutilating features of craniotomy do not appear to meet Kaczor’s criteria for being intended, so his account doesn’t show craniotomy to (...) be impermissible; some commonly-accepted acts, including voluntary sterilization, are acts of intentional mutilation according to Kaczor’s definition and are thus forbidden on his account; and some acts that intuitively seem to constitute intentional mutilation do not meet Kaczor’s definition of “mutilation” and are not ruled out by his account. I suggest slight modifications to Kaczor’s account that might address these difficulties. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer a preliminary explication of the role of and the relation between mental states, action, and blame in Medhātithi’s commentary on the most influential juridical text of the Sanskrit world – the jurisprudential text attributed to Manu. In defining what it means to act and what constitutes engaging in intentional and unintentional action, this paper makes three claims. First, enjoined actions (e.g., sacrifices) require particular mental states to be performed. Notwithstanding the role of mental states (...) in enjoined actions, actions lacking the corresponding mental states can be blameworthy. In fact, unintentional actions (including also actions done intentionally, but under a description that foregoes what renders the conduct sanctionable) can indeed constitute blameworthy conduct. Second, although unintentional action still meets the threshold for constituting blameworthy conduct, mental states generally play an important role regarding the degree of blame assignable to a person. Third, there are several possible rules that make sense of the seemingly inconsistent use and impact of intention throughout Manu’s Code of Laws as Medhātithi’s commentary shows. The paper also sheds light on the relation between intentions and desires according to Medhātithi. (shrink)