Abstract

My purposes in this dissertation are to defend Chisholm's direct attribution theory as a theory of reference and intentionality and to propose a revised version of that theory with respect to the problems of perception and epistemic justification in perceptual knowledge. The direct attribution theory of reference has a remarkable merit that it can solve some theoretical difficulties with other theories of reference and explain comprehensively our intentional acts. Although I accept Chisholm's viewpoint on reference and intentionality, however, I disagree in part with his analysis of perception which is based on adverbialism and with his internalistic version of epistemic justification theory. In the case of the analysis of perception, first of all, adverbialism plays no substantial role in explaining our perceptual mechanism and only makes us implicated in the polemics related with the awkward usage of adverbialistic locutions. Moreover there is no room in Chisholm's theory of perception for generalizing various experimental data of cognitive psychology. In the case of epistemic justification, his internalistic theory incurs some troubles in explaining our epistemic acts. Thus my major concern is with how to elaborate his epistemological theory to overcome such difficulties