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An Outline of Searle, INTENTIONALITY a Basic Assmnption

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An Outline of Searle, INTENTIONALITY a Basic Assmnption an outline of Searle, INTENTIONALITY A basic assmnption: philosophy of language is a branch of philosophy of mind. "The capacity of speech acts to represent objects and states of af~rs in the world is an extension of the more biologically fundamental capacities of the mind to relate the organism to the world through belief and desire, and especially through action and perception." The Intentionalitv of sentences is derived: the Intentionalitv of mental states is not. ~ .. Chapter 1: the Intentionality of mental states Chapter 2: the Intentionality of perception Chapter 3: the Intentionality of action Chapter -t: Intentional causation Chapter 5: nonrepresentational mental capacities Chapter 6: relations between Intentionality of the mental and the Intentionality of the linguistic (from here, ''leftover problems":) Chapter 7: Intentionality and intensionality Chapters 8 and 9: indexical expressions, natural kind terms, de re/de dicto distinction, proper names J Chapter 10: the mind/body problem Chapter One: THE NATURE OF ll\l'fE.!'.T'fiONAL STATES I. Intentionality a..;; Directeclness Intentionalitv is that propertv of manv mental states :.md events by which thev :.u·e directed at or about obj~cts and states of affairs in the world. .. Not aU mental states and events <:U"e Intentional. Intentionality not the same as consciousness. II. Intentionality as Representation: the Speech Act ~fodel Intentional states represent objects and states of affairs in the same sense of "represent'' that speech acts represent objects :md states of affairs. (Infants and many animals also have Intentional states.) -t points of sitnihu·ity and connection between Intentional states and speech acts. 1. The distinction bet\veen propositional content and illocutionary force canies over to Intentional states. (Here Searle assumes object-assimilationism). A note re symbolism. F(p) Fmarks illocutionary force, p the propositional content. Likewise, in re Intentional states S(r) S \Vill mark the psychological mode and rthe representative content. 2. The notion of ''direction of fit" also applies to Intentional states. 3. In the performance of each illocutionary act with a propositional content, we express a ce11ain Intentional state with that propositional content. and that Intentional state is the sincerity condition of that type of speech act. These connections are internal: the speech act is necessatily :m expression of the corresponding intentional state. 2 "You can't say, 'I order you to stop smoking but I don't want you to stop smoking."' In general, the direction of fit of the illocutionarv act and of the sincerit'· condition is the ~- ., ., same. -+. The notion of conditions of satisfaction applies to bo1h. ("fitting') For every speech act that has a direction of fit the speech act will be satisfied if and only if the expressed psychological state is satisfied, and the conditions of satisfaction of speech ad and expressed psychological state are identicaL ) These-+ cmmections suggest a certain picture: every Intentional state consists of a represt:ntative content in a certain psychological mode. III. Some Applications ;mel Extensions of the Theory 1. This approach allows us to distinguish dearly between the logical properties of Intentional states and their ontological status. 2. An intentional object is just ~m object like any other; it has no peculiar ontological status at all. 3. It is at best misleading, and perhaps a simple mistance, to say that a belief is a 2-teml relation between a believer and a proposition. "the content of the statement or belief that deGaulle was French is the proposition that deGaulle \vas French. The statement is about deGauJle, and represents him as being French." -+. An Intentional state onlv detennines its conditions of satisfaction-- and thus onlv is the state that it is-- given its position in a Network of other Intentional states and and against a Background of practices and preintentional assumptions that are neither themsel res ~tentional states nor are they part of the conditions of satisfaction of Intentional states. (the background of preintenlional assumptions is more controversial) a consequence: Intentional states do not neatly individuate. How many beliefs do I ha,1e exactly? There is no definite answer to that question. 5. Response to the ''regress of homunculi" objection. (this section very interesting, but don't know that it's relevant to my project) 6. Relationship of Intentionality and intensionality ( ") l ..., "" .. IV. ~leaning \\11at is the relationship between the Intentionality of the mental and the Intentionality of the linguistic? How does the mind impose Intentionality of entities that are not inhinsically Intentional? There is a double level of Intentionality in the performance of the speech act. There is the Intentional state expressed, but secondlv there is the intention, in the ordinarv and not technical sense of that wont with which the utterance is made. It is the seco"itd Intentional state that bestows the Intentionality on the physical phenomena. Broadly: The mind ~--~==================~--~=================================- ~---~---------~--0·~=~----~r------------- 3 imposes Intentiona]itv on entities that are not intrinsicaliv Intentional hv intentionallv confening the conditions of satisfaction of the expresse~l psychologic~~ ~tate upon the external physical entity. (details in Chapter 6.) \'. Belief ~md Desire .:'..re these 2 the basic Intentional states? If all other fonns can be reduced to these 2. it will simplifv the analvsis. (perha1;s come back to details of tlris argmnent) Conclusion: not that al] forrns of intentionalitv reduce to belief or desire, but that a11 forms contain a belief or desire. and that in many ca~es the intentionalitY of the state is explained bv the belief or the desire. ~ ~ (I;roblem: such an ~malysis isn't fine-grained enough to make some subtle distinctions) Chapter Two: THE INTE~"TIONAUTY OF PERCEPfiON I. Yisual (and other sorts of perceptual) experience have Intentionality. The argument for this conclusion is that the visual experience has conditions of satisfaction in exactly the same sense that beliefs and desires have conditions of satisfaction. The conceptual app;.u·atus developed in Chap. 1 allows us to state several important similatities between the Intentionality of visual perception and belief. l. the content of the visual experience is always equivalent to a whole proposition. 2. visual perception. like belief, ahvays has a mind-to-world direction of fit. 3. visual experiences are charactetistically identified and described in tenns of their J intentional content. II. Having emphasized analogies between visual experiences and beliefs. will now look at disanalogies. The Tnteiitionality of a representation (beliefs & desires) is independent of whether it is realized in consciousness or not, but in genera] the intentionality of a perceptual experience is realized in quite specific phenomenal properties of conscious mental events. Visual experience has a kind of directness, immediacy and involuntatiness which is not shared bv a belief. \ViU cal(perceptual experiences "presentations." It is part of the conditions of satisfaction (in the sense of requirement) of the vislL.1.l experience that the visual experience must itself be caused by the rest of the conditions of satisfaction (in the sense of tlrings reqLtired) of that visual expetience. I.e .. the content of the visual expetience is self-referentiaL . ""11en I have a representation of an Intentional object in a belief or desire it \'.·ill ahvays be represented under some aspect or other, but in belief ~md desire aspect is not constrained in j the way that the aspect of visual perception is fixed by the sheer physical features of the situation. HI. There are a v~uiety of wavs in wlrich the Network and Background oflntentionalitv are related to the characte; of visti'al experience: ~ ~ • Different beliefs cause different visual expetiences with clifferent comlitions of satisfaction, even given the same optical stimuli. •The same beliefs coexist Vl'ith clifferent visual experiences with different conditions of satisfaction even though the content of the experiences is inconsistent with the content of the beliefs and is ovetTidden bv the beliefs. •the san1e beliefs plus different visual experiences yield the sanu; conditions of satisfaction of the visual expetiences. ; I r 4 IV. This account is a version of direct or naive realism. (argues against representative realism and phenomenalism) V. \\l1at are the tmth conditions of a sentence like X sees a yello\Y station \vagon. First we need to rephrase the statement perspicuously: X sees that there is a ·vellow station wagon in front of X. .. '-' The truth conditions are: 1. X has a visual experience which has a. certain conditions of satisfaction b. certain phenomenal propetties 2. The conditions of satisfaction are: th..'lt there is a yellow station wagon in front of:\: ;u\... l the fact that there is a yellow station wagon in front of X is causing the visual experience. 3. The phenomenal properties are such as to detemrim: that the conditions of satisfaction are as. desctibed in 2. That is. those conditions of satisfaction are ddennined by the expenence . .f. The form of the causal relation in the conditions of satisfaction is continuous <md regular Intentional causation. ~ 5. The conditions of satisfaction ~u·e in fact satisfied. That is, there actuallv is a station wagon causing (in the manner described in4) the visual experience (described
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