Results for 'Millikan, Biosemantics, Intentionality, Content'

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  1. Ruth Garrett Millikan: O cómo la biosemántica revolucionó la filosofía de la mente.Erika Torres - 2022 - In Aurora Georgina Bustos Arellano & Jocelyn Martínez (eds.), Las filósofas que nos formaron. Injusticias, retos y propuestas en la filosofía. Nuevo Leon, Mexico: Centro de Estudios Humanísticos, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. pp. 24-40.
    In this chapter I will present, in a general way, Millikan's biosemantic theory of the phenomenon of intentionality. For this purpose, the text will take the following path. First, I will present the problem of intentionality and an overview of the dominant theories of intentional content during the twentieth century and part of the twenty-first century. Then, I will present a general version of Millikan's biosemantic theory, appearing in 1984, which will allow us to see what the relevance and (...)
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  2. Strategic Content: Representations of Epistemic Modality in Biosemantics.Gunnar Björnsson - 2018 - Theoria 84 (3):259-277.
    A central idea in Ruth Millikan’s biosemantics is that a representation’s content is restricted to conditions required for the normal success of actions that it has as its function to guide. This paper raises and responds to a problem for this idea. The problem is that the success requirement seems to block us from saying that epistemic modal judgments represent our epistemic circumstances. For the normal success of actions guided by these judgments seems to depend on what is actually (...)
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  3. Teleosemantics and Indeterminacy.Manolo Martínez - 2013 - Dialectica 67 (4):427-453.
    In the first part of the paper, I present a framework for the description and evaluation of teleosemantic theories of intentionality, and use it to argue that several different objections to these theories (the various indeterminacy and adequacy problems) are, in a certain precise sense, manifestations of the same underlying issue. I then use the framework to show that Millikan's biosemantics, her own recent declarations to the contrary notwithtanding, presents indeterminacy. In the second part, I develop a novel teleosemantic proposal (...)
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  4. Mental Representations and Millikan’s Theory of Intentional Content: Does Biology Chase Causality?Robert D. Rupert - 1999 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (1):113-140.
    In her landmark book, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Millikan1984),1 Ruth Garrett Millikan utilizes the idea of a biological function to solve philosophical problems associated with the phenomena of language, thought, and meaning. Language and thought are activities of biological organisms, according to Millikan, and we should treat them as such when trying to answer related philosophical questions. Of special interest is Millikan’s treatment of intentionality. Here Millikan employs the notion of a biological function to explain what it is (...)
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  5. Intentionality and partial belief.Weng Hong Tang - 2014 - Synthese 191 (7).
    Suppose we wish to provide a naturalistic account of intentionality. Like several other philosophers, we focus on the intentionality of belief, hoping that we may later supplement our account to accommodate other intentional states like desires and fears. Now suppose that we also take partial beliefs or credences seriously. In cashing out our favoured theory of intentionality, we may for the sake of simplicity talk as if belief is merely binary or all-or-nothing. But we should be able to supplement or (...)
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  6. Spatial Content and Motoric Significance.Robert Briscoe - 2014 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 1 (2):199-216.
    According to “actionism” (Noë 2010), perception constitutively depends on implicit knowledge of the way sensory stimulations vary as a consequence of the perceiver’s self-movement. My aim in this contribution is to develop an alternative conception of the role of action in perception present in the work of Gareth Evans using resources provided by Ruth Millikan’s biosemantic theory of mental representation.
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  7. Teleosemantics and productivity.Manolo Martinez - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 26 (1):47-68.
    There has been much discussion of so-called teleosemantic approaches to the naturalization of content. Such discussion, though, has been largely confined to simple, innate mental states with contents such as ?There is a fly here.? Even assuming we can solve the issues that crop up at this stage, an account of the content of human mental states will not get too far without an account of productivity: the ability to entertain indefinitely many thoughts. The best-known teleosemantic theory, Millikan's (...)
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  8. What Does a Bee Know? A Teleosemantic Framework for Cognitive Ethologist.Petar Nurkić & Umeljić Ivan - 2022 - Theoria: Beograd 65 (4):33-59.
    Naturalistic epistemology is usually associated with Quine’s turn from an a priori and traditional to a descriptive understanding of knowledge. In this paper, however, we will look at theories developed from Quine’s ideas - Millikan’s teleosemantics and Kornblith’s cognitive ethology. We will answer three questions: (i) Can a bee know?; (ii) What can a bee know?; and (iii) Does the bee know? First, we will answer the question of animal cognitive capacities using Kornblith’s understanding of the epistemic environment and the (...)
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  9. Consciousness and Mind.Carolyn Dicey Jennings - forthcoming - In Marcus Rossberg (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
    Some of the oldest and deepest questions in philosophy fall under the umbrella of consciousness and mind: What is the mind and how is it related to the body? What provides our thoughts with content? How is consciousness related to the natural world? Do we have distinctive causal powers? Analytic philosophers have made significant progress on these and related problems in the last century. Given the high volume of work on such topics, this chapter is necessarily selective. It offers (...)
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  10. Shannon + Friston = Content: Intentionality in predictive signaling systems.Carrie Figdor - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2793-2816.
    What is the content of a mental state? This question poses the problem of intentionality: to explain how mental states can be about other things, where being about them is understood as representing them. A framework that integrates predictive coding and signaling systems theories of cognitive processing offers a new perspective on intentionality. On this view, at least some mental states are evaluations, which differ in function, operation, and normativity from representations. A complete naturalistic theory of intentionality must account (...)
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  11. On the Use and Abuse of Teleology for Life: Intentionality, Naturalism, and Meaning Rationalism in Husserl and Millikan.Jacob Rump - 2018 - Humana Mente 11 (34).
    Both Millikan’s brand of naturalistic analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology have held on to teleological notions, despite their being out of favor in mainstream Western philosophy for most of the twentieth century. Both traditions have recognized the need for teleology in order to adequately account for intentionality, the need to adequately account for intentionality in order to adequately account for meaning, and the need for an adequate theory of meaning in order to precisely and consistently describe the world and life. (...)
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  12. Some reflections on Husserlian intentionality, intentionalism, and non-propositional contents.Corijn van Mazijk - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (4):499-517.
    This paper discusses Husserl’s theory of intentionality and compares it to contemporary debates about intentionalism. I first show to what extent such a comparison could be meaningful. I then outline the structure of intentionality as found in Ideas I. My main claims are that – in contrast with intentionalism – intentionality for Husserl covers just a region of conscious contents; that it is essentially a relation between act-processes and presented content; and that the side of act-processes contains non-representational contents. (...)
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  13. How to do things with nonwords: pragmatics, biosemantics, and origins of language in animal communication.Dorit Bar-On - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (6):1-25.
    Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution of language have advocated adopting a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach, according to which “a more productive framework” for primate communication research should be “pragmatics, the field of linguistics that examines the role of context in shaping the meaning of linguistic utterances”. After distinguishing two different conceptions of pragmatics that advocates of the pragmatics-first approach have implicitly relied on, I argue that neither conception adequately serves the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the origins of human (...)
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  14. Is Intentionality a Relation? A Dialogue.David Bourget & Angela Mendelovici - forthcoming - Argumenta.
    This dialogue explores the question of whether intentionality—the “ofness”, “aboutness”, or “directedness” of mental states—is a relation. We explore three views: the Naive View, on which intentionality is a relation to ordinary, everyday objects, facts, and other such items; the Abstract Contents View, on which intentionality is a relation to mind-independent abstract entities that are our contents; and the Aspect View, on which intentionality is a matter of having intentional states with particular (non-relational) aspects that are our contents. We consider (...)
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  15. Phenomenal intentionality without compromise.Katalin Farkas - 2008 - The Monist 91 (2):273-93.
    In recent years, several philosophers have defended the idea of phenomenal intentionality : the intrinsic directedness of certain conscious mental events which is inseparable from these events’ phenomenal character. On this conception, phenomenology is usually conceived as narrow, that is, as supervening on the internal states of subjects, and hence phenomenal intentionality is a form of narrow intentionality. However, defenders of this idea usually maintain that there is another kind of, externalistic intentionality, which depends on factors external to the subject. (...)
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  16. Phenomenal Intentionality and the Perception/Cognition Divide.Uriah Kriegel - 2019 - In Arthur Sullivan (ed.), Sensations, Thoughts, and Language: Essays in Honor of Brian Loar. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 167-183.
    One of Brian Loar’s most central contributions to contemporary philosophy of mind is the notion of phenomenal intentionality: a kind of intentional directedness fully grounded in phenomenal character. Proponents of phenomenal intentionality typically also endorse the idea of cognitive phenomenology: a sui generis phenomenal character of cognitive states such as thoughts and judgments that grounds these states’ intentional directedness. This combination creates a challenge, though: namely, how to account for the manifest phenomenological difference between perception and cognition. In this paper, (...)
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  17. Intrinsically Semantic Content and the Intentionality of Propositional Attitudes.Sudan A. Turner - 2004 - Dissertation, University of Washington
    ABSTRACT -/- A propositional attitude (PA) is a belief, desire, fear, etc., that x is the case. This dissertation addresses the question of the semantic content of a specific kind of PA-instance: an instance of a belief of the form all Fs are Gs. The belief that all bachelors are sports fans has this form, while the belief that Spain is a country in Eastern Europe do not. Unlike a state of viewing the color of an orange, a belief-instance (...)
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  18. Phenomenal Intentionality and the Problem of Representation.Walter Ott - 2016 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (1):131--145.
    According to the phenomenal intentionality research program, a state’s intentional content is fixed by its phenomenal character. Defenders of this view have little to say about just how this grounding is accomplished. I argue that without a robust account of representation, the research program promises too little. Unfortunately, most of the well-developed accounts of representation – asymmetric dependence, teleosemantics, and the like – ground representation in external relations such as causation. Such accounts are inconsistent with the core of the (...)
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  19. Norms of intentionality: norms that don’t guide.Benjamin W. Jarvis - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 157 (1):1-25.
    More than ever, it is in vogue to argue that no norms either play a role in or directly follow from the theory of mental content. In this paper, I present an intuitive theory of intentionality (including a theory of mental content) on which norms are constitutive of the intentional properties of attitude and content in order to show that this trend is misguided. Although this theory of intentionality—the teleological theory of intentional representation—does involve a commitment to (...)
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  20. Millikan and Her Critics, edited by Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury, and Kenneth Williford. [REVIEW]Marc Artiga - 2015 - Mind 124 (494):679-683.
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  21. Collective Intentionality.Marija Jankovic & Kirk Ludwig - 2016 - In Lee C. McIntyre & Alexander Rosenberg (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science. New York: Routledge. pp. 214-227.
    In this chapter, we focus on collective action and intention, and their relation to conventions, status functions, norms, institutions, and shared attitudes more generally. Collective action and shared intention play a foundational role in our understanding of the social. -/- The three central questions in the study of collective intentionality are: -/- (1) What is the ontology of collective intentionality? In particular, are groups per se intentional agents, as opposed to just their individual members? (2) What is the psychology of (...)
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  22. Adaptation and its Analogues: Biological Categories for Biosemantics.Hajo Greif - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 90:298-307.
    “Teleosemantic” or “biosemantic” theories form a strong naturalistic programme in the philosophy of mind and language. They seek to explain the nature of mind and language by recourse to a natural history of “proper functions” as selected-for effects of language- and thought-producing mechanisms. However, they remain vague with respect to the nature of the proposed analogy between selected-for effects on the biological level and phenomena that are not strictly biological, such as reproducible linguistic and cultural forms. This essay critically explores (...)
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  23. Non-propositional intentionality: an introduction.Alex Grzankowski & M. Montague - 2018 - In Alex Grzankowski & Michelle Montague (eds.), Non-Propositional Intentionality. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    Book synopsis: Our mental lives are entwined with the world. There are worldly things that we have beliefs about and things in the world we desire to have happen. We find some things fearsome and others likable. The puzzle of intentionality — how it is that our minds make contact with the world — is one of the oldest and most vexed issues facing philosophers. Many contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists have been attracted to the idea that our minds represent (...)
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  24. Consciousness and Intentionality.Angela Mendelovici & David Bourget - 2020 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 560-585.
    Philosophers traditionally recognize two main features of mental states: intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. To a first approximation, intentionality is the aboutness of mental states, and phenomenal consciousness is the felt, experiential, qualitative, or "what it's like" aspect of mental states. In the past few decades, these features have been widely assumed to be distinct and independent. But several philosophers have recently challenged this assumption, arguing that intentionality and consciousness are importantly related. This article overviews the key views on the relationship (...)
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  25. Intentionality and Normativity.Michael J. Pendlebury - 1998 - South African Journal of Philosophy 17 (2):142-151.
    The intentionality of virtually all thought that is distinctive of human beings is linguistically based and constitutively normative. As Robert Brandom claims in Making It Explicit, this normativity is best understood as having roots in social practice. But Brandom is wrong to insist that all intentionality is normative (thus denying intentionality to nonhuman, nonlinguistic animals). For even the simple social practices that ground the most primate norms presuppose robust nonnormative intentionality. Furthermore, Brandom’s appeal to perception to supplement his informal semantics (...)
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  26. Intentionality and Sensory Consciousness in Kant.Tim Jankowiak - 2016 - Journal of Philosophical Research 41:623-649.
    According to “intentionalist” interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism, Kant’s empirical objects are to be understood as mere intentional objects. This interpretation requires a corresponding account of intentionality and intentional objects. This paper defends an account of how the intentionalist should understand the intentional structures at work in the sensory consciousness of physical bodies. First a relational conception of intentionality (articulated in terms of an object’s presence to consciousness) is distinguished from a non-relational conception (articulated in terms of representational content). (...)
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  27. Intentionality and phenomenology.Robert A. Wilson - 2003 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (4):413-431.
    This paper is a critique of some ideas about narrow content owing to Horgan and Tienson and Brian Loar.
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  28. The problem of intentionality and intentional objects critical analysis of the proposal by Searle and Crane.Ilaria Canavotto - 2013 - Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 105 (1):17-40.
    Intentionality is traditionally defined as the property of a mental state to be directed at something presented in a particular way. The fact that we can think about objects which do not exist makes this definition problematic: what kind of things are those objects? The aim of this paper is to analyse the definition of intentionality as a relation in theories which do not admit non-existent special entities. In particular, I consider John R. Searle and Tim Crane’s theories of intentionality (...)
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  29. (1 other version)The Contents of Perception and the Contents of Emotion.Bill Wringe - 2014 - Noûs 48 (1):275-297.
    Several philosophers think there are important analogies between emotions and perceptual states. Furthermore, considerations about the rational assessibility of emotions have led philosophers—in some cases, the very same philosophers—to think that the content of emotions must be propositional content. If one finds it plausible that perceptual states have propositional contents, then there is no obvious tension between these views. However, this view of perception has recently been attacked by philosophers who hold that the content of perception is (...)
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  30. Irrational Intentionality.Benjamin L. S. Nelson - manuscript
    There at least three ways of thinking about rationality: instrumental, substantive, and intentional. By far, the instrumental account is most influential. This essay proposes that intentional rationality can provide substantive accounts with room to breathe, and in a way that is facially distinct from instrumental accounts. I suggest that the intentionality of a judgment is made up of what it is about and the orientation through which it is judged, while irrationality is the subversion of a strict supporting connection between (...)
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  31. Intentionality: Past and Future (Value Inquiry Book Series, Volume 173).Gabor Forrai (ed.) - 2005 - New York: Rodopi NY.
    The present volume has grown out of a conference organized jointly by the History of Philosophy Department of the University of Miskolc and the History and Philosophy of Science Department of Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), which took place in June 2002. The aim of the conference was to explore the various angles from which intentionality can be studied, how it is related to other philosophical issues, and how it figures in the works of major philosophers in the past. It also (...)
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  32. Reply to Philip Woodward’s Review of The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality.Angela Mendelovici - 2019 - Philosophical Psychology 32 (8):1261-1267.
    Philip Woodward's review of The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality (PBI) raises objections to the specific version of the phenomenal intentionality theory proposed in PBI, especially to identity PIT, representationalism, the picture of derived mental representation, some tentative proposals regarding intentional structure, and the matching theory of truth and reference. In this reply, I argue that the version of PIT defended in PBI can withstand these objections.
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  33. On Ur-intentionality.Ludovic Soutif & Carlos Mario Márquez Sosa - 2021 - Revista de Filosofia Moderna E Contemporânea 9 (2):79-99.
    Starting from Brentano’s classical characterization of intentionality, we review the radical enactivist proposal about basic cognition and show that the underlying assumption that stripping teleosemantics of its representationalist commitments results in no explanatory loss is unwarranted. Significant features of basic cognition are lost, or so we argue, with the RECtification of teleosemantics that are retrieved by means of an alternative dubbed metaphysically non-committal content-ascriptivism.
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  34. Revisiting the Intentionality All-Stars.Walter Veit - 2022 - Review of Analytic Philosophy 2 (1):31-54.
    Eliminativism is a position most readily associated with the eliminative materialism of the Churchlands, denying that there are such things as propositional states. This position has created much controversy, despite the fact that intentionality has long been seen as perhaps the core problem for naturalistic philosophy. There is a more radical interpretation of eliminativism, however, denying not only mental states, such as beliefs and desires, but also intentionality (i.e., aboutness) on a global level. This position traces its contemporary origin back (...)
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  35. (1 other version)The Intentionality of Sensation and the Problem of Classification of Philosophical Sciences in Brentano’s empirical Psychology.Tănăsescu Ion - 2017 - Axiomathes 27 (3):243-263.
    In the well-known intentionality quote of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano characterises the mental phenomena through the following features: (i) the intentional inexistence of an object, (ii) the relation to a content, and (iii) the direction toward an object. The text argues that this characterisation is not general because the direction toward an object does not apply to the mental phenomena of sensation. The second part of the paper analyses the consequences that ensue from here for the (...)
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  36. “Assertion” and intentionality.Jason Stanley - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 151 (1):87-113.
    Robert Stalnaker argues that his causal-pragmatic account of the problem of intentionality commits him to a coarse-grained conception of the contents of mental states, where propositions are represented as sets of possible worlds. Stalnaker also accepts the "direct reference" theory of names, according to which co-referring names have the same content. Stalnaker's view of content is thus threatened by Frege's Puzzle. Stalnaker's classic paper "Assertion" is intended to provide a response to this threat. In this paper, I evaluate (...)
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  37. Rethinking Phenomenal Intentionality.Christopher Stratman - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
    My dissertation puts forward a critique of the phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT). According to standard accounts of PIT, all genuine intentionality is either identical to or partly grounded in phenomenal consciousness. I argue that it is a conceptually significant mistake to construe conscious experiences in terms of token mental states that instantiate phenomenal properties. This mistake is predicated on ignoring an important difference in the temporal character—what I call the “temporal shape”—between states and properties as opposed to conscious experiences. States (...)
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  38. Sense Experience, Concepts and Content, Objections to Davidson and McDowell.Michael Ayers - 2004 - In Ralph Schumacher (ed.), Perception and Reality: From Descartes to the Present. Mentis.
    Philosophers debate whether all, some or none of the represcntational content of our sensory experience is conccptual, but the technical term "concept" has different uses. It is commonly linked more or less closely with the notions of judgdment and reasoning, but that leaves open the possibility that these terms share a systematic ambiguity or indeterminacy. Donald Davidson, however, holds an unequivocal and consistent, if paradoxical view that there are strictly speaking no psychological states with representational or intentional content (...)
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  39. Constructing a Naturalistic Theory of Intentionality.J. H. van Hateren - 2021 - Philosophia 49 (1):473-493.
    A naturalistic theory of intentionality is proposed that differs from previous evolutionary and tracking theories. Full-blown intentionality is constructed through a series of evolvable refinements. A first, minimal version of intentionality originates from a conjectured internal process that estimates an organism’s own fitness and that continually modifies the organism. This process produces the directedness of intentionality. The internal estimator can be parsed into intentional components that point to components of the process that produces fitness. It is argued that such intentional (...)
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  40. Brentano's Mature Theory of Intentionality.Uriah Kriegel - 2016 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 4 (2):1-15.
    The notion of intentionality is what Franz Brentano is best known for. But disagreements and misunderstandings still surround his account of its nature. In this paper, I argue that Brentano’s mature account of the nature of intentionality construes it, not as a two-place relation between a subject and an object, nor as a three-place relation between a subject’s act, its object, and a ‘content,’ but as an altogether non-relational, intrinsic property of subjects. I will argue that the view is (...)
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  41. Does Phenomenology Ground Mental Content?Adam Pautz - 2013 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program. , US: Oxford University Press. pp. 194-234.
    I develop several new arguments against claims about "cognitive phenomenology" and its alleged role in grounding thought content. My arguments concern "absent cognitive qualia cases", "altered cognitive qualia cases", and "disembodied cognitive qualia cases". However, at the end, I sketch a positive theory of the role of phenomenology in grounding content, drawing on David Lewis's work on intentionality. I suggest that within Lewis's theory the subject's total evidence plays the central role in fixing mental content and ruling (...)
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  42. Character (Alone) Doesn't Count: Phenomenal Character and Narrow Intentional Content.Preston J. Werner - 2015 - American Philosophical Quarterly 52 (3):261-272.
    Proponents of phenomenal intentionality share a commitment that, for at least some paradigmatically intentional states, phenomenal character constitutively determines narrow intentional content. If this is correct, then any two states with the same phenomenal character will have the same narrow intentional content. Using a twin-earth style case, I argue that two different people can be in intrinsically identical phenomenological states without sharing narrow intentional contents. After describing and defending the case, I conclude by considering a few objections that (...)
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  43. A structuralist theory of phenomenal intentionality.Ben White - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper argues for a theory of phenomenal intentionality (herein referred to as ‘Structuralism’), according to which perceptual experiences only possess intentional content when their phenomenal components are appropriately related to one another. This paper responds to the objections (i) that Structuralism cannot explain why some experiences have content while others do not, or (ii) why contentful experiences have the specific contents that they have. Against (i), I argue that to possess content, an experience must present itself (...)
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  44. A continuum of intentionality: linking the biogenic and anthropogenic approaches to cognition.Matthew Sims - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (6):1-31.
    Biogenic approaches investigate cognition from the standpoint of evolutionary function, asking what cognition does for a living system and then looking for common principles and exhibitions of cognitive strategies in a vast array of living systems—non-neural to neural. One worry which arises for the biogenic approach is that it is overly permissive in terms of what it construes as cognition. In this paper I critically engage with a recent instance of this way of criticising biogenic approaches in order to clarify (...)
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  45. Relational vs Adverbial Conceptions of Phenomenal Intentionality.David Bourget - 2019 - In Arthur Sullivan (ed.), Sensations, Thoughts, and Language: Essays in Honor of Brian Loar. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 137-166.
    This paper asks whether phenomenal intentionality (intentionality that arises from phenomenal consciousness alone) has a relational structure of the sort envisaged in Russell’s theory of acquaintance. I put forward three arguments in favor of a relation view: one phenomenological, one linguistic, and one based on the view’s ability to account for the truth conditions of phenomenally intentional states. I then consider several objections to the relation view. The chief objection to the relation view takes the form of a dilemma between (...)
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  46. Consciousness meets Lewisian interpretation theory: A multistage account of intentionality.Adam Pautz - 2021 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind, Vol. 1. OUP.
    In “Radical Interpretation” (1974), David Lewis asked: by what constraints, and to what extent, do the non-intentional, physical facts about Karl determine the intentional facts about him? There are two popular approaches: the reductive externalist program and the phenomenal intentionality program. I argue against both approaches. Then I sketch an alternative multistage account incorporating ideas from both camps. If we start with Karl's conscious experiences, we can appeal to Lewisian ideas to explain his other intentional states. This account develops the (...)
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  47. The Normativity of Intentionality.Julie Yoo - 2004 - In Johann Marek & Maria Reicher (eds.), Papers of the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium: Experience and Analysis.
    Davidson has been instrumental in dampening the prospect of reductively explaining the mind. The core of his arguments turn upon his insistence that contentful mental states, the bread and butter of folk psychology, have a “normative element.” In spite of its pivotal role, as well as its intrinsic interest, the concept is very poorly developed and understood. This paper attempts to discern four different strands of the normativity of intentionality and to spark a long overdue systematic examination of a fascinating (...)
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  48. Kolors Without Colors, Representation Without Intentionality.Angela Mendelovici & David Bourget - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (2):476-483.
    Over the past few decades, the dominant approach to explaining intentionality has been a naturalistic approach, one appealing only to non-mental ingredients condoned by the natural sciences. Karen Neander’s A Mark of the Mental (2017) is the latest installment in the naturalist project, proposing a detailed and systematic theory of intentionality that combines aspects of several naturalistic approaches, invoking causal relations, teleological functions, and relations of second-order similarity. In this paper, we consider the case of perceptual representations of colors, which (...)
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  49. Introspection, Intentionality, and the Transparency of Experience.Tim Crane - 2000 - Philosophical Topics 28 (2):49-67.
    Some philosophers have argued recently that introspective evidence provides direct support for an intentionalist theory of visual experience. An intentionalist theory of visual experience treats experience as an intentional state, a state with an intentional content. (I shall use the word ’state’ in a general way, for any kind of mental phenomenon, and here I shall not distinguish states proper from events, though the distinction is important.) Intentionalist theories characteristically say that the phenomenal character of an experience, what it (...)
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  50. Representationalism and the Intentionality of Moods.Anthony Hatzimoysis - 2017 - Philosophia 45 (4):1515-1526.
    It seems hard to comprehend how, during mood experience, the ‘inner’ meets the ‘outer’. The objective of this paper is to show that a currently popular attempt at providing a neat solution to that problem fails. The attempt comes under the heading of representationalism, according to which the phenomenal aspects of mood are exhausted by its representational content. I examine three accounts of intentionality developed within the representationalist camp, and I show that they incur phenomenological and metaphysical costs.
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