The Sources of Intentionality

What do thoughts, hopes, paintings, words, desires, photographs, traffic signs, and perceptions have in common? They are all about something, are directed, are contentful - in a way chairs and trees, for example, are not. This book inquires into the source of this power of directedness that some items exhibit while others do not. An approach to this issue prevalent in the philosophy of the past half-century seeks to explain the power of directedness in terms of certain items' ability to reliably track things in their environment. A very different approach, with a venerable history and enjoying a recent resurgence, seeks to explain the power of directedness rather in terms of an intrinsic ability of conscious experience to direct itself. This book attempts a synthesis of both approaches, developing an account of the sources of such directedness that grounds it both in reliable tracking and in conscious experience.Contents ; Introduction ; 1. The Experiential Origins of Intentionality ; 1.1. The Concept of Intentionality and Anchoring Instances ; 1.1.1. An Anchoring-Instance Model of Natural Kind Concept Formation ; 1.1.2. Application to the Concept of Intentionality ; 1.2. Experiential Intentionality the Anchor ; 1.2.1. An Asymmetry of Ascription ; 1.2.2. Explaining the Asymmetry ; 1.2.3. Objections and Replies ; 1.3. 'Experiential Intentionality' ; 1.3.1. Definition ; 1.3.2. Existence ; 1.3.3. Scope ; 2. The Nature of Experiential Intentionality: I. A Higher-Order Tracking Theory ; 2.1. A Tracking Account of Experiential Intentionality? ; 2.1.1. Background: Tracking Theories of Mental Representation ; 2.1.2. Representationalist Theories of Conscious Experience ; 2.1.3. Experiential Tracking ; 2.2. The HOT Argument ; 2.2.1. Background: Higher-Order Theories of Conscious Experience ; 2.2.2. Higher-Order Theory and the Tracking Account of Experiential Intentionality ; 2.3. Experiential Intentionality and Higher-Order Tracking ; 2.4. Objections and Replies ; 2.4.1. 'Intentionality,' 'Representation,' 'Tracking' ; 2.4.2. What do We Want a Theory of Intentionality for? ; 3. The Nature of Experiential Intentionality: II. An Adverbial Theory ; 3.1. Background: Intentional Inexistence and Intentional Indifference ; 3.2. The Argument from Intentional Indifference ; 3.2.1. The Argument ; 3.2.2. Responses ; 3.2.3. Brains in Vats ; 3.3. The Argument from Intentional Inexistence ; 3.3.1. The Argument ; 3.3.2. Responses ; 3.4. Experiential Intentionality as Adverbial Modification ; 3.5. Objections to Adverbialism ; 4. The Nature of Non-Experiential Intentionality: An Interpretivist Theory ; 4.1. Potentialism ; 4.2. Inferentialism ; 4.3. Eliminativism ; 4.4. Interpretivism ; 4.4.1. Interpretivism about Non-Experiential Intentionality ; 4.4.2. Interpretivism Developed ; 4.4.3. Objections and Replies ; 5. Toward a General Theory of Intentionality ; 5.1. Adverbialism plus Interpretivism ; 5.2. Higher-Order Tracking Theory plus Interpretivism ; References