Immateriality and Intentionality

A paper by Gerald Casey.

The Intentionality Delusion

This is a Vallicella post about Rosenberg's denial of intentionality. You have to wonder how he avoids that conclusion that, since no statements are about anything, his own statements are also not about anything. But I suppose it is consistent naturalism.

A paper by Dallas Willard on intentionality

Bonjour on the Argument from Intentionality

A major philosopher defends what he thinks is a decisive objection to physicalism.

Dennett on original intentionality

A redated post. This was the closest I could come up with to AMC's request. Though he may be thinking of a Menuge paper.

This is a well-known Dennett paper on the issue of original intentionality. He seems to be arguing:

1. If naturalism is true, then humans cannot possess original intentionality.
2. Naturalism is true.
3. Therefore human beings cannot possess original intentionality.

It wasn't me, but an atheist fellow graduate student at University of Illinois at Urbana who suggested that the argument could be turned around into an argument for theism against naturalism.

1. If naturalism is true, then humans cannot possess original intentionality.
2. Human beings do possess original intentionality.
3. Therefore, naturalism is false.

If intentionality is irreducible, then materialism is false

"If intentionality is irreducible, then materialism is false. For such an irreducible characteristic has no place in physics as we now perceive physics. The materialist is committed to giving some reductive account of intentionality of the mental. Such an account is not all that easy to give.”




David Armstrong, "Naturalism, Materialism, and First Philosophy," in

Contemporary Materialism: A Reader, ed . Paul K. Moser and J. D. Trout (New York:

Routledge, 1995), p. 57.

HT: Pat Parks

What happens when a mind shows up

This discussion, from Joel Steinmetz, is interesting.

DI2 post on Hasker on intentionality

Does functionalism solve the problem of intentionality, even though it may have trouble with qualia? William Hasker says no.

A Key Passage from Hasker

In this passage from Hasker, which I feature of DI2, Hasker describes propositional mental states, and he maintains, that there are propositional states which we are conscious of when we have them, and that there is something it is like to have them.

This is an important concept. The idea that there is "something it is like" to, say, find a winning combination against Reppert in chess, is critical. When I play against a computer, and the computer finds a winning combination against me, the thing "functions as if" it has found the winning line against me, but there is nothing it is like to find that combination. Fritz wins all the time but never experiences the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat.

My conviction is that the intentionality Fritz possesses is a second-rate, derived, kind of intentionality, which is not to be confused with the intentionality that comes from my conscious perception of what is going on on the chessboard. Therefore, in my view, the problem of propostional attitudes "inherits" all the "hard" problems related to consciousness. When I am talking about intentionality, this is first and foremost what I have in mind, and acccounts of intentionality that leave this out are drastically incomplete.