Towards Non-Being

Towards Non-Being

Author: Graham Priest

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-05-19

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0199262543

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Towards Non-Being presents an account of the semantics of intentional language - verbs such as 'believes', 'fears', 'seeks', 'imagines'. Graham Priest's account tackles problems concerning intentional states which are often brushed under the carpet in discussions of intentionality, such as their failure to be closed under deducibility. Drawing on the work of the late Richard Routley (Sylvan), it proceeds in terms of objects that may be either existent or non-existent, atworlds that may be either possible or impossible. Since Russell, non-existent objects have had a bad press in Western philosophy; Priest mounts a full-scale defence. In the process, he offers an account of both fictional and mathematical objects as non-existent.The book will be of central interest to anyone who is concerned with intentionality in the philosophy of mind or philosophy of language, the metaphysics of existence and identity, the philosophy or fiction, the philosophy of mathematics, or cognitive representation in AI.


Husserl and Intentionality

Husserl and Intentionality

Author: D.W Smith

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9401093830

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This book has roots in our respective doctoral dissertations, both completed in 1970 at Stanford under the tutelage of Professors Dagfmn F øllesdal, John D. Goheen, and Jaakko Hintikka. In the fall of 1970 we wrote a joint article that proved to be a prolegomenon to the present work, our 'Intentionality via Intensions', The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971). Professor Hintikka then suggested we write a joint book, and in the spring of 1971 we began writing the present work. The project was to last ten years as our conception of the project continued to grow at each stage. Our iritellectual debts follow the history of our project. During our dis sertation days at Stanford, we joined with fellow doctoral candidates John Lad and Michael Sukale and Professors Føllesdal, Goheen, and Hintikka in an informal seminar on phenomenology that met weekly from June of 1969 through March of 1970. During the summers of 1973 and 1974 we regrouped in another informal seminar on phenomenology, meeting weekly at Stanford and sometimes Berkeley, the regular participants being ourselves, Hubert Dreyfus, Dagfmn Føllesdal, Jane Lipsky McIntyre, Izchak Miller, and, in 1974, John Haugeland.


Intentions and Intentionality

Intentions and Intentionality

Author: Bertram F. Malle

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9780262632676

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Highlights the roles of intention and intentionality in social cognition.


Approaches to Intentionality

Approaches to Intentionality

Author: William Lyons

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 1995-11-16

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0191590789

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Professor Lyons in this book both explores others' approaches to intentionality and expounds his own. Part I gives a critical account of the five most comprehensive and prominent contemporary approaches to intentionality. These approaches can be summarised as the instrumentalist approach, derived from Carnap and Quine and culminating in the work of Daniel Dennett; the linguistic approach, derived from the work of Chomsky and exhibited most fully in the work of Jerry Fodor; the biological approach, developed by Ruth Garrett Millikan, Colin McGinn, and others; the information-processing approach which has been given a definitve form in the work of Fred Dretske; and the functional role approach of Brian Loar. In Part II, Professor Lyons sets out a multi-level, developmental approach to intentionality. Drawing upon work in neurophysiology and psychology, the author argues that intentionality is to be found, in different forms, at the levels of brain functioning, prelinguistic consciousness, language, and at the holistic level of `whole person performance' which is demarcated by our ordinary everyday talk about beliefs, desires, hopes, intentions, and the other `propositional attitudes'. Written in a direct, clear, and lively style, the extended survey of contemporary debate in Part I will be invaluable to the student of philosophy of mind or cognitive science as well as to the scholars and graduate students who will find an original new theory to contend with in Part II.


Intensional Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality

Intensional Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality

Author: Edward Zalta

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1988-06-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0262519526

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In this book, Edward N. Zalta tackles the issues that arise in connection with intensional logic and intentional states. In this book, Edward N. Zalta tackles the issues that arise in connection with intensional logic - a formal system for representing and explaining the apparent failures of certain important principles of inference - and intentional states - mental states such as beliefs, hopes, and desires, that are directed toward the world. His theory not only offers a unified explanation of the various kinds of inferential failures associated with intensional logic, but also unifies the study of intensional contexts and intentional states by grounding the explanation of both phenomena in a single theory. Zalta shows that an axiomatized realm of abstract entities, when added to the metaphysical structure of the world, can be used to identify and individuate the contents of directed mental states. These special abstract entities can be viewed as the objectified contents of mental files and they play a crucial role in the analysis of the truth conditions of the sentences involved in the inference failures. The intentional logic Zalta develops, unlike others, can analyze a wide variety of failures involving the principles of substitutivity, existential generalization, and strong extensionality. A Bradford Book.


Intentionality Deconstructed

Intentionality Deconstructed

Author: Amir Horowitz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-03-28

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 0198896484

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Intentionality Deconstructed argues for the view that no concrete entity - mental, linguistic, or any other - can possess intentional content. Nothing can be about anything. The concept of intentionality is flawed, and so content ascriptions cannot be "absolutely" true or false - they lack truth conditions. Nonetheless, content ascriptions have truth conditions and can be true (or possess a related epistemic merit) relative to practices of content ascription, so that different practices may imply different (not real but practice-dependent) intentional objects for the same token mental state. The suggested view does not deny the existence of those mental states standardly considered intentional, notably the so-called propositional attitudes; it affirms it. That is, support is provided for the existence of those states with the properties usually attributed to them, but absent intentional properties. Specifically, it is argued that the so-called propositional attitudes possess logico-syntactic properties, whose postulation plays an important role in addressing the challenge of reconciling intentional anti-realism with beliefs being true or having alternative epistemic merits, the argument from the predictive and explanatory success of content ascription for intentional realism, and the cognitive suicide objection to views that deny intentionality. As part of the rejection of this final objection, intentional anti-realism is presented as a radical view, which claims "Nothing can possess intentional content" but not that nothing can possess intentional content, and it is argued that this is a legitimate characteristic of radical philosophy. In spite of rejecting the "claim that" talk, intentional anti-realism gives clear sense to its dispute with its rivals as well as to its own superiority. Various arguments for intentional anti-realism are presented. One argument rejects all possible accounts of intentionality, namely primitivism, intrinsic reductionism - the prominent example of which is the phenomenal intentionality thesis - and extrinsic reductionism (that is, reductive naturalistic accounts). According to another argument, since intentional properties are shown to be dispensable for all possibly relevant purposes, and no sound arguments support the claim that they ever are instantiated, the application of Ockham's razor shows that no such properties ever are instantiated, and another step shows that neither can they be.


Rational Belief

Rational Belief

Author: Robert Audi

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0190221836

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This book is a wide-ranging treatment of central topics in epistemology. It provides conceptions of belief and knowledge, offers a theory of how they are grounded in our experience and in the social context of testimony, and connects them with the will and with action, moral responsibility, and intellectual virtue.


The Intentional Stance

The Intentional Stance

Author: Daniel C. Dennett

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1989-03-06

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780262540537

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How are we able to understand and anticipate each other in everyday life, in our daily interactions? Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, asserts Daniel Dennett in this first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality that he has been developing for almost twenty years. We adopt a stance, he argues, a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people—or other entities—we are hoping to understand and predict. These principles of radical interpretation have far-reaching implications for the metaphysical and scientific status of the processes referred to by the everday terms of folk psychology and their corresponding terms in cognitive science.While Dennett's philosophical stance has been steadfast over the years, his views have undergone successive enrichments, refinements, and extensions. The Intentional Stance brings together both previously published and original material: four of the book's ten chapters—its first and the final three—appear here for the first time and push the theory into surprising new territory. The remaining six were published earlier in the 1980s but were not easily accessible; each is followed by a reflection—an essay reconsidering and extending the claims of the earlier work. These reflections and the new chapters represent the vanguard of Dennett's thought. They reveal fresh lines of inquiry into fundamental issues in psychology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory as well as traditional issues in the philosophy of mind. A Bradford Book.


Intentional Behaviorism

Intentional Behaviorism

Author: Gordon Foxall

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2020-04-10

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0128145854

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Intentional behaviorism is a philosophy of psychology that seeks to ascertain the place and nature of cognitive explanation of behavior by empirically determining the scope of an extensional account of behavior based on the limitations of a behavioral approach to explanation. This book draws on an empirical program of research in economic psychology to establish a route to a reliable and justifiable intentional explanation of behavior. Since the cognitive revolution in psychology, intentional explanations of behavior have become the norm, and as the methodology that provides the normal science component of psychology, cognitivism is sometimes accepted relatively uncritically. However, there is a lack of understanding of the role of psychological research in determining the place and shape of intentionality. This book explicates the philosophy of psychology that the author has devised and applied in his work on economic psychology and behavioral economics. Given the provenance of intentional behaviorism, economic and consumer psychology forms the primary application basis for the book. This book provides a theoretical background to understanding how and why consumers make the choices they do. The book integrates behavioral economics, consumer psychology, and decision-making research to explore intentional behaviorism, which is proposed as a philosophical framework for consumer psychology, viewing economic behavior in the contexts of modern human consumers in affluent marketing-oriented societies. Integrates research in behavioral economics, decision-making, cognitive psychology, and consumer psychology. Offers readers an interdisciplinary look at intentionality and intentional explanations. Proposes a theory of intentional behaviorism to explain economic behavior, consumer choice, and other decision-making. Examines the methodologies of philosophers of mind such as Dennett and Searle.