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On the Indispensability of Intentionality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Harold Morick
Harold Morick*
Affiliation:
S.U.N.Y.Albany
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Extract

In the last two decades, there has been a great deal of interest in providing an intentional criterion of the psychological. Of the various ones proferred, it seems to me that the best was the earliest, which was Chisholm’s initial criterion in his 1955 essay “Sentences about Believing.” In this present paper I first single out a basic misconception pervading the recent literature on intentionality and suggest that a consequence of this misconception has been the futile attempt to use the notion of intentionality to provide a kind of definition of “mind”; that is, to use intentionality to provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the psychological. Secondly, I point out how intentionality as captured by my own criterion is indispensable in that it is an essential property of certain particulars (persons) which are basic to our conceptual scheme and apparently basic to any conceptual scheme whatsoever.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , September 1972 , pp. 127 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1972

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Footnotes

*

This work was supported by a SUNY Faculty Research Fellowship.

References

1 R. Chisholm, “Sentences about Believing”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1955-56).

2 F. Brentano, “The Distinction between Mental and Physical Phenomena”, from Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint (Vienna; 1874); reprinted in Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind ed. Morick (Glenview: 1970), pp. 119-120; Lycan, K.. “On Intentionality and the Psychological” American Philosophical Quarterly (1969), p. 310Google Scholar; Chisholm, R. “Intentionality” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, V. (New York, 1966), p. 203Google Scholar.

3 R. Chisholm, “Sentences about Believing”, loc. cit., p. 125.

4 Chisholm, R. “Editor’s Introduction” in Realism and the Background of Phenomenology (Glencoe: 1960), p. 4Google Scholar.

5 Morick, H. “Intentionality, Intensionality and the Psychological”, Analysis (December, 1971)Google Scholar.

6 Ryle has expressed this opinion to me. J. Kim has expressed his opinion in print in his “Materialism and the Criteria of the Mental”, Synthese (1971). p. 342.

7 See. e.g . P F. Strawson, Individuals (London 1959). Chapter 3 passim

8 See J. Shaffer, Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs: 1968), p. 25.

9 See, e.g., Sellars, W. “The Ideniity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem”, The Review of Metaphysics 1965), ss. 45-48Google Scholar, 52; W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: 1960), p. 221; P. Feyerabend, “Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem”, Review of Metaphysics (1963), ss. 4,5; R. Rorty, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories”, Review of Metaphysics (1965), ss. 3.6.

10 J. Dewey, “Experience and Nature” (La Salle, Ill.: 1925, 1958), p. 172.