Abstract
The ontology of (merely) intentional objects is a can of worms. If we can avoid ontological commitment to such entities, we should. In this paper, I offer a strategy for accomplishing that. This is to reject the traditional act-object account of intentionality in favor of an adverbial account. According to adverbialism about intentionality, having a dragon thought is not a matter of bearing the thinking-about relation to dragons, but of engaging in the activity of thinking dragon-wise.
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Notes
The term “ontoid” is a coinage of Cole Mitchell’s. It is meant to signal that “entity” is used in the broadest possible way, not only to cover individuals or particulars.
This is more or less how the distinction between ethics and meta-ethics works: ethics concerns which things are good or right, meta-ethics what is involved in something being good or right.
I am working here, and in the remainder, with a framework due to Williams (1953) which distinguishes four ontological categories: concrete particulars (e.g., Socrates), abstract universals (e.g., wisdom), abstract particulars (e.g., Socrates’ wisdom), and concrete universals (e.g., Socrateity).
This is not an analysis because the relevant notion of “object of” is an intentional notion, one which would itself need unpacking in a full analysis of “intentional object.”
Our conception of the nature of these putative entities might well have to change, but their existence would be guaranteed.
I first introduce the relevant account of intentionality in Kriegel (2007).
If the category of intentional objects is defined so that it includes merely intentional objects, as it sometimes is, then the claim in the text is that there is not such a category. I will not define the category in this way, however.
It should be noted, however, that those who take hallucinated trees to be non-existent physical concreta can very well accept that there are also non-existent abstracta. This may involve a dialectical duplication of efforts, but is certainly a coherent view.
I will not recite these here, except in this brief note. Ontologically, all three types of putative entity are unlovely, though non-existent concreta are probably worse than mental concreta and abstracta. Epistemologically, it is often said that mental concreta would throw a veil of appearances over the external world, but it should be noted that the same sort of criticism extends to the other views, which may (e.g.) throw a veil of abstracta over the world of concreta. Phenomenologically, the transparency of experience (Harman 1990) militates against the abstracta view, as well as (to a lesser degree) the mental concreta views, though probably not so much against the non-existent concreta view. See Kriegel (2007) for a little more detail on these problems.
At least this is one admissible interpretation of what disjunctivists claim.
“Object” in the relevant sense covers not only individual objects (particulars), but any kind of ontoid.
I am thinking of “representing” here as what various intentional acts have in common—thoughts, perceptions, desires, etc.
According to the existent-object view, necessarily, if a person represents x, then (i) the person bears a representation relation to x and (ii) x exists. According to the object view, representing x entails (i) but not (ii).
For more on adverbialism about intentionality (or “intentional adverbialism”), see Kriegel (2007).
It is not obvious that they do in the second sense either, but at least it is plausible. For argumentation in favor of such a phenomenal character, see Pitt (2004).
All the theories I have considered share the assumption that the constitutive structure of intentionality is one and the same in all relevant kinds of case. There may be a view that the act-object account is true of veridical intentionality while adverbialism is true of hallucinatory intentionality. Another view may be a sort of disjunctivism-of-the-object, according to which intentional objects are sometimes abstracta, sometimes mental concreta, and/or sometimes non-existent physical concreta. Crane’s (2001) view of intentional objects as schematic objects (that is, objects lacking a common ontological nature) is such a disjunctivism-of-the-object.
This claim bears directly on the plausibility of phenomenological adverbialism, since the latter cannot get off the ground if some non-derivatively intentional states/acts have no phenomenal character. If all underived intentional is phenomenal, then any act or state that has underived intentionality also has phenomenal character—which is imperative for phenomenological adverbialism.
This consideration carries over to the object view, which denies that when a two-place relation is instantiated, two instantiators must exist.
Thanks to John Cusbert for a conversation in which this idea came up.
I am using “he himself” as an indirect reflexive here, as Castañeda (1966) does in discussing essentially the same phenomenon. This is supposed to capture the effect of I-thoughts in oratio obliqua.
Perry’s own view is not quite adverbialist, however, since it takes belief to be a three-place relation, involving a state, a way, and a proposition.
It is also sometimes worried that since the compositionality of language is a pre-requisite for its learnability, the adverbial language which the adverbialist recommend we speak would not be learnable. This does not strike me as a major concern. Although the entire set of possible sentences in the adverbial language might be unlearnable, it seems that each individual sentence is learnable, and this is really all the adverbialist needs here.
In addition, there may also be a second response to Jackson’s argument: to paraphrase “I am thinking about green dragons and purple butterflies” as “I am thinking green-wise and dragon-wise and green-dragon-wise and purple-wise and butterfly-wise and purple-butterfly-wise.” This is extremely awkward and inelegant, but that is neither here nor there. What matters is that this new paraphrase is distinct from the corresponding paraphrase of “I am thinking about purple dragons and green butterflies” and yet licenses inferences via something similar to conjunction elimination.
It is implausible that neither is conservative—that would indict ordinary intentional talk with deep and pervasive inconsistency.
See Crane (2001) for a related point.
It should be noted that content adverbialism is compatible with phenomenological adverbialism. One could hold that the phenomenal character of a conscious state consists precisely in a relation the state bears to a content, construed (e.g.) as a set of properties (see Pautz 2007). This view is a version of both content adverbialism and phenomenological adverbialism. Even for this sort of view, however, a certain Euthyphro question arises: does an intentional act bear its relation to content in virtue of exhibiting its phenomenal character or does it exhibit its phenomenal character in virtue of bearing its relation to content? Four answers seem possible: “the former” (content depends on character), “the latter” (character depends on content), “neither” (content and character are strictly identical, so there can be no priority relations), and “both” (content and character are interdependent). Personally, I am unsympathetic to the introduction of contents, because I find abstracta suspect, but I guess if I did countenance content, I would also be tempted to hold the view that content depends on character.
Importantly, (unsuccessful-)attempting-to-have-a-thought cannot be construed as an intentional state, because then the same problem will arise, since unsuccessful attempts have no intentional object.
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Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Luca Moretti and Adam Pautz for very helpful comments on a previous draft. The paper has also benefited greatly from presentations in Auckland and Sydney. I am indebted to the audiences there, in particular Stuart Brock, Berit Brogaard, Mark Colyvan, John Cusbert, Dan Haggard, Fred Kroon, Ed Mares, Michaelis Michael, Tahua O’Leary, Graham Priest, Jonathan Schaffer, Amie Thomasson, and Alberto Voltolini.
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Kriegel, U. The dispensability of (merely) intentional objects. Philos Stud 141, 79–95 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9264-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9264-7