Necessary Intentionality: A Study in the Metaphysics of Aboutness
Ori Simchen
Abstract
Are words and thoughts necessarily about what they are about or are they only contingently so? This book defends the former alternative against the latter by articulating a requisite modal background and then bringing this background to bear on cognitive matters—notably the intentionality of cognitive episodes and states. The modal picture that emerges from the first two chapters is a strongly particularist approach whereby all possibilities reduce to possibilities for particular things, where the latter are determined by the natures of the particular things involved. The ensuing three chapter ... More
Are words and thoughts necessarily about what they are about or are they only contingently so? This book defends the former alternative against the latter by articulating a requisite modal background and then bringing this background to bear on cognitive matters—notably the intentionality of cognitive episodes and states. The modal picture that emerges from the first two chapters is a strongly particularist approach whereby all possibilities reduce to possibilities for particular things, where the latter are determined by the natures of the particular things involved. The ensuing three chapters are devoted to the aboutness of referring terms in language and thought. The approach espoused is, once again, strongly particularist in allotting explanatory priority to cognitive episodes and states regarding particular things. The emerging view is that a given use of a name to refer to a particular thing, or a given thought about the thing, could not be what it is without being about the thing it is actually about.
Keywords:
intentionality,
modality,
de re,
de dicto,
essence,
cognitive attitude
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199608515 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608515.001.0001 |
