Intensionality and Intentionality: Phenomenology, Logic, and Mind
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Intensionality and Intentionality: Phenomenology, Logic, and Mind DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Philosophy by Kyle Banick Dissertation Committee: Professor David W. Smith, Co-Chair Associate Professor Sean Walsh, Co-Chair Professor Annalisa Coliva 2017 © 2017 Kyle Banick DEDICATION To Mutti and Pops, for everlasting support. ii" " TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi CHAPTER 1: Epistemic Logic and the Halbach-Welch Rapprochement Strategy 1 The Halbach-Welch Approach 4 Epistemic Logic: Four Different Notions of Knowledge 9 Conclusion 24 CHAPTER 2: Hintikka’s Logic of Perception 31 Background Explication 34 Hintikka Semantics for “Sees” 52 The Validities and Invalidities of the Hintikka Semantics 60 Quantifiers and Direct Perception 67 Implications for Intentionality 79 Conclusion 87 CHAPTER 3: How to Be an Adverbialist about Phenomenal Intentionality 89 Introduction 89 Semantics of Adverbialism 92 The Nature of Phenomenally Conscious Intentional Events 106 Adverbial Realism and Phenomenal Intentionality 114 Appendix 1: Logic of Adverbs 124 Appendix 2: Proofs 127 BIBLIOGRAPHY 129 iii" " ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my two co-advisors, David Woodruff Smith and Sean Walsh. David showed me the way into phenomenology, and Sean into logic. Without the support and knowledge of these two, this dissertation would not exist: David as sage helped me to understand how to combine my disparate interests into a coherent field of research, and Sean taught me how to turn my wandering thoughts into words that would actually end up on the dissertation page rather than in the back files of a hard drive. Many thanks also to my other committee member, Annalisa Coliva, for her immediate willingness to serve on the committee even before settling into Irvine, and for her incisive perspective on issues in perception and self-knowledge that I would have otherwise overlooked. To Jeffrey Yoshimi for his sincere interest in the dissertation and for our telephone conversations relating to the modal logic of perception. To Aaron James, for an influential conversation in which he encouraged me to do more of the heavy lifting once the logic was done. To Martin Schwab, for early encouragement and for teaching me about Deleuze and Kierkegaard. To Ermanno Bencivenga, for being a transcendental idealist against the fashion. Thanks as well to the members of the California Phenomenology Circle—the fact that such a thing exists is reason enough to be optimistic. Thanks to my fellow graduate students, in particular: Matt Dworkin, Phil Walsh, Dan Siakel, Ethan Galebach (for getting me through set theory), Adam Fox, Simona Capisani, Megan Zane, Valentina Ricci, Adam Sanders, Dylan Popowicz, Kino Zhao, Greg Lauro, and Will Stafford. Last but not least, thanks to Alaska, who always kept me afloat, and to Katie, Caroline, Mark, and Melissa, for never even entertaining the thought that I wouldn’t make it. iv" " CURRICULUM VITAE Kyle Banick 2011 B.A. in Philosophy, Chapman University 2013-17 Teaching Assistant, Philosophy Department, University of California, Irvine 2015 M.A. in Philosophy, University of California, Irvine 2015 Instructor, Philosophy Department, University of California, Irvine 2016 Instructor, Philosophy Department, University of California, Irvine 2016 Lecturer, Philosophy Department, Chapman University 2017 Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY Phenomenology, Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Mind. v" " ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Intensionality and Intentionality: Phenomenology, Logic, and Mind By Kyle Banick Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy University of California, Irvine, 2017 Professor David W. Smith, Co-Chair Associate Professor Sean Walsh, Co-Chair Chapter 1 concerns issues in the construction of formal models of intensional notions. Intensional notions may be treated as modal operators or as predicates. Halbach and Welch (2009) have proposed a new formal technique to reduce the necessity predicate to an operator, demonstrating that the two methods are ultimately compatible. I show that the monotonicity constraint in the Halbach-Welch technique fails for almost all possible-worlds theories of knowledge. Since the monotonicity constraint is an important element of the proof of the Halbach-Welch rapprochement strategy in the case of necessity, the present results show that the most obvious way of emulating this strategy in the epistemic setting fail. In Chapter 2, I reconstruct and reconsider Hintikka’s (1969) innovative operator approach to the logic of perception. I use a modal operator and a method of many-sorted substitutional quantification to formalize the notion of perceptual reference. I assimilate Hintikka’s logic to present-day norms of formal logic and I explore Hintikka’s treatment of quantification in the context of his overarching thesis that the possible-worlds theory of intensionality eo ipso vi" " provides a theory of mental intentionality. My reconstruction makes us well-posed to consider what is true about Hintikka’s philosophical claims, but also to see some of their decisive limitations. In Chapter 3, I construct a framework for an adverbialist theory of phenomenal intentionality. I first pose the question: what is the logic of adverbial modification in the setting of phenomenal consciousness? I argue from tools in formal semantics that the logic is one of events, rather than a logic of intensionality. I then argue that the event adverbialist can offer elegant regimentations of crucial distinctions that give the event adverbialist purchase on phenomenal intentionality. This chapter is understood as the other side of the coin from chapter 2 above. There, I reconstruct an account of intentional reference; here, I give a novel account of a structure that determines the ways in which acts are directed toward their (putative) reference. vii" " Chapter 1 Epistemic Logic and the Halbach-Welch Rapprochement Strategy This chapter concerns the formal representation of intentional notions in intensional logic. An intensional notion can be treated as a modal operator or as a specialized predicate. Traditionally, this choice has been seen as a substantive one: Kaplan and Montague (1960) demonstrate that standard axiomatic treatments of intensional predicates are inconsistent, a phenomenon referred to as the knower’s paradox.1 On the other hand, operator approaches have well-defined semantics in the form of possible-worlds models. In a recent innovation, Halbach and Welch (2009) offer a formal procedure that reduces a necessity predicate to an operator, so that the choice between the two approaches is deflated: ‘necessity’, conceived as a predicate, can be reduced to ‘necessary truth’, conceived as an operator plus a truth predicate. This chapter concerns the question of whether this approach 1It is well known also that Quine (1966) saw great philosophical import in the choice between predicates and operators, although his metaphysical arguments will notbethetopicofthepresentpaper. 1 can provide a uniform treatment of intensional notions generally. Specifically, I argue that the scope of their reduction is likely to be restricted to necessity predicates, because my results in the epistemic setting indicate that a generalization of the technique to other intensional notions is not imminent. Ithusprovideevidencethat operator and predicate approaches are genuinely incompatible when the formal treatment of knowledge is at issue. This is because the proof that works in the case of necessity fails for virtually all prominent possible-worlds semantics for knowledge. The problem is technical: the monotonicity constraint in Halbach and Welch’s construction guarantees the existence of a fixed point at which to interpret the necessity predicate in the possible-worlds structures. However, I find that most possible-worlds notionsofknowledgelacktheproperty of monotonicity. In the absence of monotonicity, it is an openquestionwhethertherewill be any fixed points at which to interpret the knowledge predicate in the right way. Their reduction is motivated by the task of finding a solution to the quantification problem for operator approaches: despite the now widespread adoption of the operator approach, predicates offer a simpler way of treating the interaction of intensional notions with quanti- fiers. For example, the operator’s syntactical resources do not provide nice representations of propositions such as, ‘All the theorems of arithmetic are necessary’, ‘There are necessary propositions that are not a priori,’ ‘Kurt knows something nooneelseknows,’or‘Something is known a priori.’ This problem arises because operators apply to formulas and not to ob- jects. Hence, it is not well-formed to write, e.g., ‘∀xT hm(x) → !x’. By contrast, predicates handle these sentences straightforwardly (Halbach and Welch, 2009, pg. 71). Prima facie, the quantification problem bolsters the case for the incompatibility of operator and predicate approaches, since the predicate approach appears to have more expressive power; and such considerations would speak in favor of the predicate approach. Prior proposals for strengthening the operator approach against the quantification problem have either applied only to a limited range of cases, or have not been worked out in sufficient 2 detail (Halbach and Welch, 2009, pp. 75-76). Indeed, some previous philosophers have had the intuition