The purpose of the paper is twofold. It first aims at clarifying and developing an important tension within enactivism concerning the relations between intentionality and content, once representationalism has been abandoned. In which sense(s) do enactivists (still) say that intentionality is contentful and not contentful? Secondly, it puts this tension in perspective with two paradigmatic ways of defining the relations between intentional states and their objects: Husserl’s theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations, and Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics.

I argue that the social dimension of alienation, as discussed by Williams and Railton, has been underappreciated. The lesson typically drawn from their exchange is that moral theory poses a threat to the internal integrity of the agent, but there is a parallel risk that moral theory will implicitly construe agents as constitutively alienated from one another. I argue that a satisfying account of agency will need to make room for what I call ‘genuine ethical contact’ with others, both as (...) concrete objects in the world external to ourselves and as subjects who can recognize us reciprocally. (shrink)

In a recent article Sachs suggests that the concept of somatic intentionality is the key to understanding how the conceptual order is externally constrained by something outside itself which is nonetheless fully intentional in nature. Sachs claims that his proposal fares better than Sellars’ view on the issue of how our experience can so much as be about objective reality. In this paper, I shall argue that this is not the case because Sellars’ view is in crucial respects misdescribed. Sachs (...) suggests that Sellars’ view is problematic because 1) conceptual intentionality cannot objectively constrain the conceptual order due to its essential discursive form, and 2) a non-intentional consciousness cannot provide an objective worldly constraint on conceptual intentionality because it is not world-directed. However neither of these points succeeds in capturing Sellars’ actual position. Further I will suggest the deepest problem which phenomenological views of a Merleau-Pontyan stripe face in the.. (shrink)

Christia (2015) argues that my criticism of Sellars -- that for Sellars, all intentionality is what I call "discursive intentionality" -- relies on a misunderstanding of Sellarsian intuitions (see Sachs 2014). Here I respond to Christias by pointing that that while is correct that Sellars has a distinction between full-blown linguistic intentionality and perceptual takings, Sellars's theory of perceptual takings cannot do justice to the figure/ground structure of embodied perception stressed by Merleau-Ponty.

This paper examines a lasting tension in pragmatism between broadly functionalist outlooks on meaning and a primacy placed on what can be revealed by direct experiential or practical encounters. Both the inferentialist and experiential emphases can be traced back to Peirce’s original pragmatic maxim. Here the tension is examined first in William James’s insightful views on intentionality and experience, followed by a diagnosis of the problem as it has arisen in neo­pragmatist debates concerning the nature of perceptual knowledge in Rorty (...) and Brandom and their critics. In the end the paper sketches the general form of a resolution of the tension that is consistent with both of these core emphases in the pragmatist tradition. (shrink)

The notion of “intentionality” is much invoked in various foundational theories of meaning, being very often equated with “meaning”, “content” and “reference”. In this paper, I propose and develop a basic distinction between two concepts and, more fundamentally, properties of intentionality: intentionality-T and intentionality-C. Representationalism is then defined as the position according to which intentionality-T can be reduced to intentionality-C, in the form of representational states. Nonrepresentationalism is rejecting this reduction, and argues that intentionality-T is more fundamental than intentionality-C. Non-representationalism (...) allows for a new layered view of the relations between cognitive intentionality and linguistic intentionality; this view is presented at the end of the paper. (shrink)