Comments on: Intentionality is Dead

By: nogre

nogre — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:58:52 +0000

I agree that my response – the idea of commitment – may be seen as having a moral component, but this is not my specific problem with intentionality. My problem is that I don’t think we benefit from the concept, word, or anything else about intentionality, or if we have, then the benefit is long past.

As for regarding all or some mental phenomena as intentional, I think this is a major problem either way: if all mental phenomena are intentional, then it is trivial; if only some mental phenomena are intentional, then it admittedly misses important aspects of the mental landscape.

It is a good point that intentionality lacks a moral aspect to it. The only way to connect intentionality to morality would be in some ad hoc manner, and this makes it look like our mental landscape has two distinct spheres: the intentional and the moral. By using commitment I believe that we can achieve everything that intentionality did (by using the internal structure of commitment) and have some sort of a foundation for ethics as well. Two birds with one stone.

By: Billie Pritchett

Billie Pritchett — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:11:46 +0000

Hmm. Well, I don’t understand exactly what the problem is. You write as though intentionality should have some sort of moral component. But if we just take intentionality to be that class of mental phenomena of intending, thinking, seeing, fearing, etc., there should be no beef.

And regarding your initial post, not all mental phenomena are intentional: anxiety, for example, ‘fear in the face of nothing,’ is precisely the emotion it is because it is nonintentional.

By: nogre

nogre — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:42:20 +0000

Switching to ‘representation’ doesn’t do it for me because it solves none of the other problems I initially wrote about. ‘Capacity’ = ‘Power’, and ‘To Represent’ = ‘To Be About’. I’m sure someone can think up some technical differences, but I haven’t found any significant ones.

I specifically dislike aboutness because it seems like a word cooked up to make it sound like we know we are talking about.

By: Billie Pritchett

Billie Pritchett — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:02:22 +0000

Nogre:

Aboutness/Intentionality would be the mental capacity to represent objects and states of affairs. One need not reiterate the word ‘about’ in the definition of aboutness.

Enigman:

Sound post.

By: nogre

nogre — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:49:50 +0000

I find ‘aboutness’ just as bad if not worse than intentionality because it is a neologism designed to sound like it means something but does no more than intentionality. Intentionality is defined in terms of the word ‘about’ anyway (the power of the mind to be about things) and using ‘aboutness’ instead of intentionality (Aboutness is the power of the mind to be about things) reveals exactly how little is gained by using the word.

By: Enigman

Enigman — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:51:46 +0000

Hi Noah, I find ‘intentionality’ a difficult word, why not ‘aboutness’? Beliefs are about their subject-matter, so beliefs have aboutness. But often feelings, for example, are not about anything, and conversely word-tokens are about their word-meanings; this ‘Noah’ is about you, all by itself, much as the sky was blue before eyes evolved. Still, that is derivative on some minds existing… Perhaps ‘intentionality’ was so important because it seemed a likely joint at which to carve up mind reductionistically. Can you say the same for commitment? Are planets committed to the Sun? Is my computer committed to this keyboard? (Despite my writing style, I like this new pov on the problem btw)