Abstract
Our purpose in this chapter is to introduce briefly some of the main topics with which we shall be concerned throughout the rest of the book. These topics fall into two major categories: (1) metaphysical and ontological problems concerning the intentionality of acts of consciousness and the status of the objects toward which intentional phenomena are directed; and (2) logical and semantic problems concerning the behavior of linguistic expressions in intensional contexts, specifically, in sentences attributing intentional phenomena to persons. Here we shall concentrate on describing in as theory-neutral a way as we can the characteristics of mental phenomena that constitute their intentionality and the characteristics of act-sentences that constitute their intensionality, and we shall suggest ways in which intentionality and intensionality are related. It will be the task of subsequent chapters to develop a theoretical framework within which these characteristics of acts and act-sentences can be systematically explained and understood.
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Notes
Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. by Linda L. McAlister, trans, by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister (Humanities Press, New York, 1973), p. 88. Brentano’s Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt was originally published in 1874; Book II, with the addition of some notes and supplementary essays, was reissued in 1911 under the title, Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomena; and a second edition of Psychologie, including several more essays by Brentano, was published in 1924 under the editorship of Oskar Kraus. The English edition is a translation of Kraus’ 1924 edition.
The expressions ‘Erlebnis’ and ‘Erfahrung’ occur frequently in Husserl’s writings, and both are rather naturally translated as ‘experience’. Husserl does not use them as synonyms, however. ‘Erlebnis’ seems to have several uses in Husserl: see J. N. Mohanty, The Concept of Intentionality (Warren H. Green, St. Louis, 1972), pp. 60–64. In the usage that is relevant to our discussion ‘Erlebnis’ is a quite generic term, covering any mental process or event whatsoever, and might better be translated as ‘event of consciousness’. ‘Erfahrung’ is used more narrowly for “empirical” acts, specifically, perceptions, whose objects are transcendent entities and in which the occurrence of sensory data (“hyle”) is an essential ingredient; one might prefer to reserve ‘experience’ as a translation of it. Nonetheless, we shall translate both expressions as ‘experience’, indicating in every case which of the German expressions Husserl has used.
See D. C. Dennett, Content and Consciousness (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1969), pp. 24–25. Cf. D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind ( Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1968 ), pp. 229–31.
Izchak Miller suggested the term ‘experiential’ for this sense of perceptual verbs. David Carr also distinguishes the phenomenological component of perception from its objective component in his ‘Intentionality’, in Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding, ed. by Edo Pivčević (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975), pp. 30–32.
Jaakko Hintikka’s work on perception as a propositional attitude provides an extremely important and interesting account of these differences. Hintikka analyzes direct- object perception sentences in terms of propositional perception sentences of a special kind, thus achieving a reduction of most non-propositional forms of perception to propositional forms. See his ‘On the Logic of Perception’, in Perception and Personal Identity, ed. by Norman S. Care and Robert H. Grimm (The Press of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, 1969), reprinted in Hintikka’s Models for Modalities (D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1969), pp. 151–83; and ‘Objects of Knowledge and Belief: Acquaintances and Public Figures’, Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), reprinted in Hintikka, The Intentions of Intentionality and Other New Models for Modalities (D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1975 ), pp. 43–58.
Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth ( George Allen & Unwin, London, 1940 ), p. 210.
Roderick M. Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study ( Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1957 ), pp. 169–70.
For a short discussion of the distinction see Peter Geach, Logic Matters (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972), pp. 148–49. The distinction we shall draw is closely related to (and perhaps underlies) Keith Donnellan’s distinction between “referential” and “attributive” uses of definite descriptions: see his ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, Philosophical Review 75 (1966), 281–304. For its relation to the distinction between “de re” and “de dicto” sentences of propositional attitude, see Section 3.5 below.
See Russell (Note 8 above), pp. 324–28; and Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, 2nd ed. (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1956), pp. 46–48. The whole of Chapters I and III of Meaning and Necessity is directly related to our current discussion.
Chisholm has attempted to enunciate additional logical characteristics of intentional contexts, over and above their intensionality, that would distinguish them not only from extensional contexts but from the non-intentional modalities as well. See his Perceiving (Note 10 above), Ch. 11; ‘Intentionality’, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Paul Edwards (Macmillan & The Free Press, New York, 1967), IV, pp. 203–204; ‘Brentano on Descriptive Psychology and the Intentional’, in Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. by Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum (The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1967), pp. 21–23; ‘Notes on the Logic of Believing’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 24 (1963-64), 195-201, reprinted in Intentionality, Mind, and Language, ed. by Ausonio Marras (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1972); and ‘On Some Psychological Concepts and the “Logic” of Intentionality’, in Intentionality, Minds, and Perception, ed. by Hector-Neri Castañeda (Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1967), pp. 11–35. Chisholm’s criteria of intentionality have been the subject of much discussion: see, for example, the essays in Marras, Part I; also the symposium by J. O. Urmson and L. Jonathan Cohen on ‘Criteria of Intensionality’, Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 42 (1968), 107–42; and Mohanty (Note 3 above), pp. 25–35.
Cf. Romane Clark’s distinction between “Scribe” and “Agent” attributions of proportional attitude, in his Comments’ (on Hintikka’s ‘On the Logic of Perception’), in Care and Grimm (Note 6 above), pp. 176–77; cf. also Charles Taylor’s comments on “intentional description” in his The Explanation of Behaviour ( Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1964 ), pp. 58–59.
See Carnap (Note 16 above), pp. 133–36; Russell, ‘On Denoting’, Mind 14 (1905), reprinted in Russell’s Logic and Knowledge, ed. by Robert C. Marsh (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Capricorn Books, New York, 1971), pp. 47–48; and Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1960 ), pp. 141–51.
These points are carefully made in Dagfinn Føllesdal, ‘Quine on Modality’, Synthese 19 (1968), 152–53; reprinted in Words and Objections, ed. by Donald Davidson and Jaakko Hintikka (D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1975 ).
See, for example, Quine, ‘Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes’, Journal of Philosophy 53 (1956), 177–87, reprinted in Quine’s The Ways of Paradox (Random House, New York, 1966), also reprinted in Linsky (Note 19 above); David Kaplan, ‘Quantifying In’, Synthese 19 (1968), 178–214, reprinted in Davidson and Hintikka (Note 24 above) and also in Linsky; and Hintikka, ‘Quine on Quantifying In: A Dialogue’, in The Intentions of Intentionality (Note 6 above), pp. 102–36.
See Georg H. von Wright, An Essay in Modal Logic (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1951), pp. 6–35; and A. N. Prior, Formal Logic, 2nd ed. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1962), pp. 209–15. For some of the history of the distinction, see William Kneale, ‘Modality de Dicto and de Re’ in Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. by Ernest Nagel et al. (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1962 ), pp. 622–33.
Quine, ‘Reference and Modality’, in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (Harper & Row, New York, 1961), p. 148, reprinted in Linsky (Note 19 above).
For other discussions of the relations between problems of intensionality and prob-lems of intentionality see the symposium by Kneale and Prior on ‘Intentionality and Intensionality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 42 (1968), 73–106; Carr (Note 5 above), pp. 17–36; and J. L. Mackie, ‘Problems of Intentionality’, in Pivčević (Note 5 above), pp. 37–50. See also Prior, Objects of Thought, ed. by Peter Geach and Anthony Kenny (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971), esp. Chs. 4, 8, and 9.
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Smith, D.W., McIntyre, R. (1984). Intentionality and Intensionality. In: Husserl and Intentionality. Synthese Library, vol 154. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9383-5_1
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